asanwal

We maintain a real-time list of unicorns and regularly have companies reach out requesting to be added.

They're interested enough that they provide paperwork to prove the valuation when we are unable to independently verify.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies

I appreciate this sentiment but if companies want to be regarded as unicorns when things are going well, it seems fair to give them a cute'sy but ridiculous name, unicorpse, when they're on their way down.

Many startups actively seek out the unicorn label as it helps them with getting press, recruiting employees, etc. Being a unicorn is shorthand to folks that this company might be big and successful. Unicorpse is shorthand for this company is dying. That seems fair.

Thanks. It's mostly for fun but given the # of responses we've received, it'll be interesting to see if the wisdom of crowds holds.

New York, NY CB Insights (www.cbinsights.com) Full-time

We're revenue-funded (bootstrapped) and aiming to double our headcount in the next 6 months (to 75).

- Full-stack devs

- Testing

- Industry analysts

- Sales & customer success

All jobs here - www.cbinsights.com/jobs

This is a great post by Sarah. Lyft needs to raise a lot of money as this market is still in land grab mode and Icahn and other Wall Street billionaires are one way to get there.

The other fact to consider is that Lyft doesn't have many options besides these folks among the usual suspects in tech investing. Most of the common tech investors are already in bed with Uber or have competitive bets elsewhere.

Lyft's last round from Rakuten and Fortress highlighted this. A look at Lyft's recent funding highlights their need to look in new places for $.

https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/lyft-rakuten-fortress/

The inevitable bubble chatter will pick up steam again. There are many reasons to believe we're in a bubble and in our view, stronger reasons to believe we're not.

Here are several in support of a bubble.

1. There were 9x as many $100 million private financing rounds as there were $100 million public offerings. People are starting to call these private IPOs which is a bit of an oxymoron but the point around private market money being plentiful and even providing some liquidity to founders and early investors is happening even in some private transactions.

2. In the first 3.5 months of this year, there were 16 new companies that raised money at a billion dollar valuation or higher. There were 15 in all of 2013.

3. All sorts of new money is flowing into the market, i.e. private equity, hedge funds, mutual funds, corporations and sovereign wealth funds.

Why we are NOT in a bubble.

1. All of the US unicorns combined are worth less than Facebook

2. They collectively are worth 3.5% of the Nasdaq 100. Of course, notable tech companies like Twitter are also on NYSE so the % is overstated.

3. The public markets have not lost their mind. In fact, they're fairly hostile to new issuances which despite VC bellyaching is a good thing for VCs and in maintaing the current climate. When retail investors get burned on tech, the bubble will quickly pop. But right now, that's not the case as just calling yourself tech doesn't guarantee a high valuation. The market, while still far from perfect, treats companies with crappy or suspect fundamentals with skepticism (see Box).

4. There is no mechanism that will force a quick contraction. A bubble is typified by rapid expansion and contraction of asset values. The expansion part is happening for sure.

5. But there is not scorecard to provide the contraction. When companies are publicly traded, you have that daily scorecard to force it, but right now, it's private money going in and the beauty of the private markets is you can bury your dead very quietly. In essence, the opacity of the private markets enables investors to point to any failing investment or investor and just say "they were dumb money, we are different". And so there is no event that will pop it.

Notes:

A. I'm the CEO of CB Insights. We track private company financings and exits.

B. A crazy exogenous factor like a disease pandemic, terrorism, a China meltdown, war, etc are not considered in the above. If I could predict those with any certainty, I'd be doing that.

C. I gave a presentation at the Quebec Venture Capital and Private Equity conference this past week on this topic "Bubbles, Unicorn and Our Crazy Private Markets". It may be of interest if you're interested in the data behind some of the above bullets.

https://www.cbinsights.com/reports/tech-bubble-unicorns.pdf

Yes - the rush of private equity, hedge fund, mutual fund and sovereign wealth fund money has been massive. These unusual suspects have quickly become almost 1/3 of the investment $ into private fast-growth companies.

The full 121 page report referenced in the Yahoo article is available here for download.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research-venture-capital-q1-2015

note: CEO of CB Insights

Exactly. There is not a biz (even a "lifestyle one"). Small highly fragmented market with high churn and low price is not a good recipe to build a business.

Plus, Fred is grossly underestimating the effort required. Just tracking & taxonomizing transactions is hard to do at scale.

I'm a co-founder of CB Insights. We do everything (and more) Fred outlines but our price point is more institutionally oriented.

CB Insights - New York

www.cbinsights.com/jobs

Many positions including: - Tech industry analyst - Full stack dev - QA

We're bootstrapped, growing to 50 people this year and working on some hard problems. Beating up on industry dinosaurs all day, every day.

Supporters of the startup visa should emphasize how it will attract expats instead of immigrants. Amirite?

Twitter just bought Periscope which is a Meerkat competitor for just under $100 million.

Meerkat was being talked about as this year's breakout SxSW startup so choking off access right before shows Twitter isn't messing around.

It's an interesting question Pete. Not sure a brand premium makes the valuation multiples 25x vs 10x, but it might result in some of the divergence between the two.

Will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Note: CEO of CB Insights who did this analysis. Thanks for reading.

The analysis is based on this compilation of 101 startup failure post-mortems

https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/

The investor who has really done well with YC investments is actually Sequoia Capital. Have early-stage stakes in most of YCs "unicorns"

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/y-combinator-unicorns/

Yeah - our competitors don't seem to like us. Go figure :)

Note: CEO of CB Insights

Ha.

Our master plan is to get a Sequoia Capital portfolio company to copy us. Mu ha ha ha.

Anand, CEO of CB Insights here. Surprised to see this here again (prior discussion - http://cbi.vc/1DhMQT3), but if any questions, feel free to ask. I'm at a conference but will try to reply during breaks.

If you're really bored :) and want to read more on this, Connie Loizos of StrictlyVC dove in a bit more (http://cbi.vc/1vk4lLY)

I didn't post the original link. Honestly, I'd love for them to be stopped but this is the internet after all :)

I, like you, am curious if YC condones this type of copying esp since the CEO admitted it on Twitter.

But it's shitty and our team does a lot of hard work so I do hate to see it copied. That said, we've seen plenty of unoriginal folks do similar stuff in the past, and they've all failed as they focus on us while we focus on customers.

The CEO copied us. And admitted it. You seem to think that copying blatantly is fine. We'll agree to disagree.

The CEO of this company admits they used our design as "reference" to get something out the door quickly.

Here's his tweets that admit this: http://cbi.vc/1u9KQu9

To be honest, I don't care :)

And copying our work was good enough to get them into YC so guess mission accomplished. Hopefully YC doesn't condone this type of behavior.

When the CEO and 11 other employees sign up for someone else's service to copy it, it seems originality might be in short supply.

I know imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but Techlist's analytics capabilities have an uncanny resemblance to CB Insights.

In addition, 12 folks from their team have signed up for our free trial since September including the CEO, head of product, designer, product manager and a senior ruby developer.

Take a look at their heatmap. The color scheme to even the text underneath is exactly the same.

Here is our heatmap which we launched 2 years ago: http://cbi.vc/1AsvNy3

Their industry graphs are also the same. Here is ours: http://cbi.vc/1Asw0kR

On the bright side, this is a bit of an ego boost, and we're flattered that these guys liked CB Insights so much that they wanted one just like it for themselves.

Note: I'm the CEO of CB Insights.

CB Insights (www.cbinsights.com/jobs) - New York, NY - fulltime

We're a revenue funded (aka bootstrapped) SaaS company growing from 25 to 50 this year and are hiring across our engineering, research and biz dev teams.

CB Insights uses data & algorithms to help clients understand the health of private companies, the momentum of emerging industries and the strategy of their competitors.

All our jobs are listed here - www.cbinsights.com/jobs

Our clients who are excited about a data company (yes - really) say nice things about us here - www.cbinsights.com/customer-love

Some open positions:

Full Stack Developer (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/full-stack-developer)

QA Engineer (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/qa-engineer)

Inside Sales (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/inside-sales-associate)

Tech Industry Analyst (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/tech-industry-analyst) - Think Nate Silver for tech.

Director of Research - (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/director-research)

We're a happy, helpful and humble group of smart folks working on moving us to a more probability-driven business world vs pundit-driven. We work on hard problems that real clients pay for (we're not reliant on outside capital) and that will upend big incumbent dinosaurs.

If interested, ping me at anand@cbinsights.com.

P.S. Our Pitch & Demo Day provides a good view into our overall culture, team and focus on experimentation. https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/pitch-demo-culture/

$2M just to get started?

If that is what one needs to just seed a company, then entrepreneurship has just become another career path with little risk (still get a decent salary) with a call option on some upside attached.

The reality is that capital is not a requirement for success although we do tend to celebrate it needlessly (1)

There are real tech companies out there (many mentioned in the indie.vc post) that built a solid initial product, sold it, got customer feedback, made improvements, and sold some more. They didn't have the luxury of $2 million or necessarily even $100k.

If you're selling the shoot-for-the-moon, billion dollar IPO, "change the world" dream from day 1, $100k may be immaterial, but I know of many solid tech companies (ours included) that are growing quickly (we're doubling headcount in 2015 from 25 to 50) who grew the old-fashioned way -- by funding out of revenue and who started with no outside capital at all.

(1) Best article about the myth of VC - http://recode.net/2014/09/11/the-myth-of-venture-capital/

LP expectations are set by VCs.

Reality is most VCs don't generate spectacular IRR (or any IRR at all) outside of the top 5%.

Revenue-based financing to tech companies is one model that is quite interesting.

There are lots of tech companies that are real companies that generate revenue, cash flow, etc who've not taken outside capital. They're just not in TechCrunch.

But for these tech companies, traditional banks are not good funding sources. They don't understand these cos (no hard assets)

The Venture Industrial Complex as I've heard some describe it makes you think that tech companies require outside capital and are either 10x or bust. That's b.s.

The company I co-founded is 25 strong (growing to 50 this year) and is a real company. It's possible. Don't believe the hype.

BTW, I think this Indie.vc experiment is an indication of where the world of tech investment is going.

CB Insights (www.cbinsights.com/jobs) - New York, NY - fulltime

We're a revenue funded (aka bootstrapped) SaaS company growing from 25 to 50 this year and are hiring across our engineering, research and biz dev teams.

CB Insights uses data & algorithms to help clients understand the health of private companies, the momentum of emerging industries and the strategy of their competitors.

All our jobs are listed here - www.cbinsights.com/jobs

Our clients who are excited about a data company (yes - really) say nice things about us here - www.cbinsights.com/customer-love

Some open positions:

Full Stack Developer (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/full-stack-developer)

QA Engineer (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/qa-engineer)

Inside Sales (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/inside-sales-associate)

Tech Industry Analyst (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/tech-industry-analyst) - Think Nate Silver for tech.

Director of Research - (https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/director-research)

We're a happy, helpful and humble group of smart folks working on moving us to a more probability-driven business world vs pundit-driven. We work on hard problems that real clients pay for (we're not reliant on outside capital) and that will upend big incumbent dinosaurs.

If interested, ping me at anand@cbinsights.com.

P.S. Our Pitch & Demo Day provides a good view into our overall culture, team and focus on experimentation.

https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/pitch-demo-culture/

Totally unrelated but wanted to say that I love your comments on HN. Always insightful and straight to the point.

Know your anonymous on HN but would love to hear your thoughts on emerging startup tech company funding models and which, if any, you like? Revenue-based financing as one example.

Ping me at asanwal(at)cbinsights(dot)com if interested and we can set up time to chat.

Thanks again for all the great contrarian (for HN) comments.

Ok. What makes it worth $50k? Know someone in this space but it's not clear what they'd actually get of value.

What are revenues? MRR/ARR?