asanwal

TradeVibes tried this many years ago (their assets were ultimately acquired by VentureBeat) so as a side project for fun, maybe. As a viable business, not so much.

The problems with this type of "exchange" are as follows:

- There is little data and liquidity to "price" these companies. SecondMarket and the other markets like that had this issue as well. Everyone is interested in Facebook and Groupon when private. After that, nobody knows or cares. And the interest is based on popularity - not on fundamentals of companies.

- The audience for this type of thing is relatively small - startup enthusiasts, startups themselves and maybe VCs. It's not like Hollywood where virtually anyone has an opinion.

The problem is most networking is rudderless. The "networker" often doesn't have a plan or agenda and isn't thinking about what's in it for the other person.

Also, networking is an activity vs. progress trap, i.e., networking can feel like you did something useful (yay - new LinkeIn connection) even if that networking doesn't have any clear or discernible benefit to your startup. There are a lot of folks "playing business" vs. actually running a business in startup land and those folks are often networkers extraordinaire as it makes them feel like they are doing something to advance their cause.

Also found the list interesting and thought there was an opportunity to dive into those companies to look for commonalities in their business model, strategy, technology stack, UI/UX, etc etc.

While there is no secret formula or nor was one expected, several hundred words to say $1B companies require hard work, have awesome teams and founders and take some time to build felt more than a bit underwhelming.

The article starts with some interesting data but instead of analyzing the data to identify tangible, shared characteristics of $1B exits, it devolves into a generalized, vacuous argument that boils down to (1) be in it for the long-haul, (2) work with visionary/tenacious teams (whatever that means) and (3) have founders with strong product sensibilities.

In short, this doesn't really provide useful guidance on how to build a $1B consumer tech company.

CB (http://www.cbinsights.com) - New York, NY

NSF-backed tech firm assessing the health of private companies using public data. Hiring full stack developer, inside sales, machine learning, and tech industry analyst.

Jobs here - http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/

We're a startup and have hired 2 (and soon to be 3) folks on H1B visas. These were folks who got their Masters degrees here, who are brilliant and who'd have otherwise left.

While I don't dispute that there are holes in the program and abuse that happens, it has enabled us to find some folks for our team who have put us as a company on a different trajectory.

Disclaimer: data point of one.

CB Insights - New York, NY (Full-time, intern, H1B)

NSF backed data company recently recognized as one of NYC's top emerging enterprise companies. We are generating revenues/profits, have taken no dilutive external financing, are solving hard problems, and have a great team.

Hiring page here - http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/

Looking for - inside sales (not yet posted on page) - full stack developer - product adoption manager - tech industry analyst - machine learning engineer

Reach out directly to me (email in profile) or to careers@cbinsights.com

Our firm (CB Insights) put out the report that this article references so some additional color on this.

Unfortunately, there is no data to support PG's assertion above (or refute it) about most acquisitions are HR acquisitions so I won't try to address that part of his comment.

The power law is real. Only 0.35% of private tech company acquisitions in 2012 were > $1B (8 of 2277). And more than 50% were less than $50M and more than 80% were less than $200M (of those with disclosed values).

If you really like graphs, the full report is here - http://www.cbinsights.com/reports/Private%20Tech%20Company%2...

CB Insights (New York, NY) Full-time, Intern, H1B

- Tech industry analyst - Full stack developer - Machine learning engineer - Product adoption manager

Full descriptions here - http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/

We were recently recognized as one of NYCs enterprise tech startups to watch. Backed by National Science Foundation. Profitable and growing.

By not focusing on sales a lot earlier (and focusing on the product only), we left a lot of money on the table.

Sorry but this guesstimate is a bit absurd. If the majority of ad clicks were ineffective or for wrong reasons, Google's $231 billion market cap would be tough to justify.

Odd post given that this is a problem that some minuscule % of startups (consumer oriented, LA-based, clueless founder) even ever have to think about.

Or perhaps it's a subtle dig at the new #DominateFund started by Ben parr and a few YC alums. http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/11/20/ben-parr-t...

A key ingredient in this transition and being successful in it is trusting in your team.

We've gone from 3 to 10 in last year and realizing everything might not happen my way but will still be done well required some mental adjustment for me. But the ability to do this was purely a function of trust in the people on the team and their instincts, judgement, skills, etc. (note: the mental adjustment remains a work in progress. Maker tendencies are not easy to lose)

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"Business guys" are people who can make business happen, i.e. make sales, strike partnerships, raise financing, etc.

What is described in this article are neither "business guys" or founders but hapless/clueless "idea people" - of which the startup community attracts a lot since it's much better to say "I'm working on a tech startup" than to say "I'm unemployed".

As a general rule of business, avoiding clueless, unmotivated, wind-bag'ish people is a good rule - "business guys" or otherwise.

Antii - we sell data on emerging private companies and their investors/acquirers. If you have any structured data about financing events/exits, would love to discuss (email in profile).

We are at www.cbinsights.com

Unrelated: Our team have been big fans of what you guys have been doing for a while. Class act btw on this shut down notice.

This is a cop out when it comes to explaining failure. It wasn't a management, technology, vision, etc problem which are all attributable to decisions made but instead we ran out of cash (something mgmt has less control over by implication).

When companies succeed, it was management prowess. When they fail, it's exogenous "headwinds". It's commonly seen in big and small cos.

What's more interesting is that based on this statement, the company's biz model actually seems to be raising financing. Very 1999-2000 of them.

Btw, this is not to imply that capitalization is unimportant but if you are running out of money and need more, you either convince someone to give it to you or you make some hard resource allocation decisions and reduce your short-term plans so you can live to fight another day. Failure to do so is simply a management failure (no matter the nice spin).

With this comment, I lost any faith in this idea as it's clear this is not about both sides deriving value in the process. In your scheme, startup "founders" or really wantrapreneurs get to try out half-baked ideas by giving away worthless equity to folks that are ultimately being duped while idea guys ultimately talk about their MVP and pivots and other bs that people who fancy themselves as startup founders think they should talk about.

On a related note, the "founders" participating in sites like these give a bad name to business people with legitimate biz building skills.

Interesting idea but think there will be a huge adverse selection problem here. Any startup giving out equity for tasks but which as no cash to pay may not be all that valuable to have equity in.

And I wonder if the same can be said of the job seekers who use this. Really great people get paid for their work and perhaps get equity as well.

Part of me hopes I'm wrong about this as it is an interesting idea.

The always fashionable predictions of a bubble.

The fatal flaws in this article are many (including those highlighted by others):

- The idea that one metric can predict a correction

- On top of that, the metric of funding/day is simplistic and utterly useless. A couple of mega green tech, life science or semiconductor fundings (or absence of) will skew this metric in a totally different direction. We track this stuff and 2012 hasn't been a great year for those areas of VC which often see big rounds

- Deal activity (the # of financings) in a period has to be considered in any discussion of a correction

- SF as the single market used is problematic. Is it representative of VC? The Valley or stats for the valley, Massachusetts and NY would be better to use

Shameless plug - Check out CB Insights (www.cbinsights.com). Our trends tab has some free cuts of the financing and M&A markets which may be interesting.

Nothing gets a team motivated like aspiring to be the #3 player in a market, right? Pragmatic perhaps but this messaging would seem to be pretty demotivating.

Not ideal but open to it for the right person. Drop me a line (email in profile) and we can take it from there.

Where can people with Data Journalist skills be found? We're trying to hire what we're calling a Data Editor (similar I believe) where the role is about using our data to tell compelling data-driven stories. It requires the ability to analyze and ask questions of our data (in MS Excel at a minimum) to ultimately develop short data-driven narratives of their findings.

While we've found folks who are amazing at the data analysis part or the writing part, never have the two met. Either we're looking for a unicorn or simply not looking in the right places? Any recs on where to look?

Perhaps, but we're optimizing our journalist/blogger relationships for the long-term, i.e., when they have a question on X topic, they will call us first. Sure - they might not write about everything we offer them, but we want everything we send them to be seen as credible, interesting, and sometimes contrarian. I'm not sure a few extra press hits will be worth the hit to credibility of taking a short cut.

I agree with J45, but if you really want to get press, here are some strategies that we used early on.

1. Do searches on Google News for topics or companies you compete with. See who has covered them and create a spreadsheet with their names, contact info, etc -- This tells you they might be interested in what you have

2. Reach out and personalize -- Show them you've seen and taken time to understand their perspective on the industry or competitor. In a nice way, suggest an angle that you feel is more interesting or which often gets overlooked which hopefully dovetails with your product and piques their interest. This helps the blogger/journalist think about the storyline and whether readers would find it interesting quickly and not your X, Y, Z feature which only you care about.

3. The angle should ideally be something you have unique insight into. It might be directly related to your product or just something you have data on because of your product.

4. Use data as possible. There are lots of unsubstantiated claims out there so journalists/data appreciate useful facts supported by data. Warning: Don't make data/facts up or don't try to draw inane trends from 2 data points as smart journalists/bloggers will see through that. Yes, hack doesn't mean being dishonest. You're trying to build a relationship based on trust so don't be short-term greedy and try to kickstart things on a lie.

There are some downsides to this. The biggest being that your data might get featured and not your company. This may not be what you want. But, at the same time, you may become a resource for the journalist which means mentions over time, they may come back to you for additional data and you get mentions. This has happened for us. We're a data company so we might not be apples to apples for you, but we're a go to resource for journos/bloggers and see mentions 1-2 per week in a slow week in major media because of early legwork we did (note: our press page is hopelessly outdated so don't judge us based on that)

Hope this helps. Good luck.

ChubbyBrain (www.chubbybrain.com) makes $500-$700/month via good old Google ads and some Amazon affiliate links. It's not our core business, but it covers happy hour for the team and some misc expenses so we happily take it.

I completely understand that it is fashionable to predict startup bubbles (people have been doing it every year in this current cycle since 2008), but the arguments in this post are flimsy and essentially boil down to "it's a bubble cuz it feels like one to me."

There will always be crappy companies being built and 3rd tier investors throwing money at them, but I've yet to hear a solid data-driven case for why this is a bubble. Sure - consumer web, ad-supported may not be a great place to be, but that's a very narrow view of tech as it ignores SaaS, b2b, enterprise focused companies.

This strikes me as a strategy to build an impressive sounding company vs. actually building an impressive company.

Namedropping, attending parties, hiring non-clued employees, etc all seem like very non-core activities that people trying to build real businesses would not engage in a whole lot (if at all). Those sound like activities that the increasing class of "wantrapreneurial" folks engage in.

If by namedropping you mean talking about actual customers you have then I definitely agree.

I think you're overstating the importance of investors. With the exception of a few firms (Sequoia, Accel, Union Square and maybe 10 others) whose mere name probably brings you some advantage, most VCs are not all that special (look at the returns data for proof).

If you're partnered with a middle-of-the-road VC, the reality is that not all their children (portfolio companies) are equal in their own eyes. Investors are generally aiming for "return the fund exits" and of their own admission, of 10 investments, it might be 1 company that does this.

Given they are in it for a financial return and they have limited time to allocate to companies, they will as self-interest dictates spend more time with the winners in their portfolio vs. duds.

Your celebrity analogy is a good one except it breaks down because investors have to be promiscuous. You are not the only special snowflake in their world that they'll take to parties and if anything, they're going to want to show up at the party with their "trophy portfolio company" -- not some broken or even doing ok company.

There is immense survivorship bias in the ecosystem. Those doing well get even more attention while the others shrivel up and go away. The thing is those companies that die get little attention as founders and investors generally don't want to advertise failures.

CB Insights - NYC (www.cbinsights.com)

Data Journalist - looking for someone to lead our data-driven content efforts. If you like Excel pivot tables, are an emerging company/technology junkie and are a decent writer, we'd love to talk.

Also looking for a php developer to help us build amazing applications on top of our private comany and investor data.

We are National Science Foundation-backed but have taken no investment otherwise. We have real customers and are profitable.

Email me at asanwal@cbinsights.com if interested.