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BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011
- RealGeek 15y agoWonder how many of them are dropouts?
- pg 15y agoCongratulations to Tutorspree, WePay, Bump, Greplin, Hipmunk, and Disqus!
- akharris 15y agoThanks PG!
- billclerico 15y agoPG - thanks for giving two young guys from the east coast with a crappy prototype a chance!
- earbitscom 15y agoThis slideshow looks like a YC photo album. Congrats, Paul.
- pclark 15y ago6 out of 20 of the entrepreneurs were funded by YC. How incredible is that?
- il 15y agoAnd many listed doing YC as the best funding decision they ever made.
- dh 15y agoHow sad that they only listed companies that got funding. It is not a good culture to look at funding as success, how about growth, revenue or even profit.
- pclark 15y agoraising funding is a reasonable indicator of being in vaguely the right direction of success (defined by your metrics) at an early stage, do you not think?
- pg 15y agoIt's true that funding is only a step toward success. I'm constantly reminding founders of that. But as of now, at least, it is empirically a necessary one. Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like (by revenues, market cap, number of users), and you'll find the number that didn't take outside funding is zero or near it. It's an interesting phenomenon that all the biggest successes take outside funding. Perhaps the reason is that the better you are, the better terms you can get money on, and for any given startup, there are terms so good you'd be stupid not to take money at them.
- rimantas 15y agoWhat about making a list of unsucessfull startups? I bet there be a lot of them with funding too. I am with 37signals on this one — funding only teaches you to spend money. Even if funding is the first step to success it is still wrong to pronounce startups most sucessfull based only on that. How about waiting till they start to to make money?
- tlrobinson 15y ago
- imjk 15y agoAnyone else see this as a thinly veiled advertisement for the venture capital syndicate. How could the two most important categories on the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011 be "Funding" and "Wisest Funding Decision?" Everyone's answer seems to be, "Yeah, the best thing we ever did was take $X MM from X venture capital."
- LostInTheWoods2 15y agoI don't understand the age discrimination. Is there a "Best Old Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011"?
- spydertennis 15y agoThe younger you are the less time you've had to achieve something. Therefore it's more impressive when you do.
- robertk 15y agoFirst statement is true. Second statement is false.
- spydertennis 15y agoExplanation?
- sosuke 15y agoIf you setup the list I've no doubt that people would love to see it.
- stevenj 15y agoReally cool to see several YC companies listed. I really wish I could invest in YC. I bet YC will (still) be a notable player in the industry 20 years from now.
- edw519 15y agoCongratulations, Jason Baptiste! I made a point of meeting Jason when we lived in Miami at the same time. I had to meet this guy who made so many great comments here at Hacker News. Glad to see you've moved on to bigger and better things. It was only a matter of time. Looking forward to hearing great things about Onswipe.
- brianbreslin 15y agoEd do you still live in Miami? Ditto on congrats to jason
- jasonlbaptiste 15y agoEd, thank you, it means a lot :). Hope to see you again before my next time in Miami.
- PHB 15y agothem locks need more jell, bro
- pitdesi 15y agoFor those who commented on the age discrimination, Businessweek has this list of overall most promising startups: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepreneurs/ http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepren...
- iamelgringo 15y agoJust realizing how small the startup community really is. I've had drinks with a quarter of the people on that list at Hackers & Founders over the last 3 years. Cheers, mates. Next round's on you. :)
- rishi 15y agoSolid list and congrats to everyone on it. I'm not a fan of how much emphasis BusinessWeek puts on the funding amount. It really is the only data point they write about. Would like to see revenue or users... or something else.
- tlb 15y agoFunding events are usually announced publicly, while revenue isn't. Revenue is also hard to compare between product, service, and advertising-supported companies.
- run4yourlives 15y agoAs an "outsider", the only thing I really take from this - besides seeing the prominence of YC startups - is that there certainly is a shit ton of money chasing unproven ideas. I mean, all of these products seem on the surface to be viable entities. I suppose that alone is better than what was happening ten years ago. However the issue I have is that the degree they need to succeed just to be a positive return is sometimes bordering on the outlandish. Groupon - a BILLION dollars? Seriously? It's news if an entire industry is worth this much, let alone a single company. Maybe I'm just not getting it, but a lot of this stuff seems to be overvalued in the extreme.
- dxbydt 15y agoValuation is not revenue is not profitability. Say your dicey tech stock has a beta of 2 & the S&P500 is expected to make 5% this year. CAPM says you'll have an expected return on capital assets of 10% given the zero risk-free rates we have now. That 10% figure in turn drives a valuation model where you plugin rosy growth probabilities & factor in the exploding populations in the emerging markets & do the all important scenario-analysis on what if just 0.1% of those folks bought my product. That spits out numbers that'll make your head spin. I've seen $1 iphone apps valued at $100 million simply cause that's how the valuation model is set up. Financial math is simply legalized delusion :)
- pg 15y agoWhether Groupon is overvalued depends on its price to earnings ratio. What is its current P/E ratio?
- southpolesteve 15y agoI disagree. P/E is just one way of valuing a company. Regardless of their current valuation, my personal opinion is that Groupon faces serious issues regarding the long term sustainability of their business model. They have dominated an ecosystem that will eventually balance itself. I am skeptical that they can maintain their current valuation through that process.
- 15y ago
- truthseeker 15y agoI installed Bump on my iPhone but used it just once. Any one knows how Bump is doing in terms of traction and usage?
- lurker19 15y agoIt's not.
- spencerfry 15y agoI've got so many friends that shoulda made this list, but fly under the radar.
- kongqiu 15y agoI'm probably not the only one who'd be interested in an alternative list...
- juiceandjuice 15y agoWow, not one of those has any roots whatsoever in science or engineering, except maybe Meraki. Is this just media selection bias, or is Silicon Valley really just turning into Marketing Valley?
- tyler 15y agoGreplin has to do huge scale information retrieval. This probably counts as engineering. (See: SIGIR)
- kmfrk 15y agoQuora's on the list. Go figure. :)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pg 15y agoWhat do you mean by roots in science or engineering?
- juiceandjuice 15y agoI suppose the meaning of "tech" is somewhat subjective, but to me it seems like most of the companies mentioned purely provide a platform or a service to consumers or businesses, largely with the motivation of selling a consumer something. I guess I hoped there would be some cool startup working on non-linear optics that I've never heard of, or some bioinformatics startup changing the way we do medicine. Research spin-offs, I guess. I understand there's a lot more intellectual overhead in some of these things, and maybe they just aren't as glamorous or something, but I was hoping to see something along those lines.
- pg 15y agoHistorically, few successful software startups have been research spinoffs. That's not a recent trend. Even Google wasn't really. In biotech, yes, but there the founders are older.
- bugsy 15y agoGot halfway through the list and gave up. So no one builds products anymore.
- delinka 15y agoI really wish the mainstream media (oh, and US automobile manufacturers) would use the same calendar that we mere mortals use.
- sahillavingia 15y agoWhere's Mark Zuckerberg?
- rms 15y agoHe's transcended lists like this.