4 ms·
That's really cool. What do the size of the circles represent? Is it the same value as shown on the Y axis or something else? And what do the colors of the ci
by tocomment 14y ago
That's really cool. What do the size of the circles represent? Is it the same value as shown on the Y axis or something else?
And what do the colors of the circles mean?
- jashkenas 14y agoThe size of the circles is also the I.P.O. value -- the same value shown on the Y axis. In the first few steps, it's not terribly useful. But once you switch to the logarithmic scale, it's nice to keep a reference to the true (read, "linear") relative value.
- sp332 14y agoActually that's misleading. If the radius of the circles go up linearly, the area/size of the circle goes up exponentially. So on the logarithmic scale, the height changes with the log of the value but the size goes up exponentially! Edit: nevermind this, it's wrong.
- arscan 14y agoIt looks like they scale it based on area, not radius... just by eyeballing it. Polynomial (not exponential) growth btw.
- jashkenas 14y agoNope. As @arscan says, in this as in most bubble charts, the value determines the circle's area, not the radius. Otherwise it certainly would be misleading.
- seanalltogether 14y agoI feel like Page 5 doesn't really represent the information it's trying to convey, which is how well these companies did 3 years later.
- arscan 14y agoYeah, that information is really represented in the transition between the pages. So I just ended up clicking back and forth between 4 and 5 to get a feel for those kinds of patterns (like an animated weather map).
- andrewcooke 14y agoyes, i think it would have been better if the y scale was ratio of current to ipo valuation.
- jgeralnik 14y agoIt looks like the size of the circle is the same as the value on the Y axis. The advantage of having higher values have bigger circles is that you can make all the crowded companies at the bottom of the Y axis can have smaller circles.