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A billion dollar software tech company is founded every three months in the U.S.
- andycroll 14y agoGithub?
- lominming 14y agoCan't believe I missed that. Added!
- rbn 14y agoTumblr was valued at $800Million last year. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204831304576594524134179668.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020483130457659...
- adjohn 14y agonicira?
- netvarun 14y agoA couple more to add: Splunk (Founded 2004), Workday (Founded Mar 2005)
- lominming 14y agoAdded!
- SparrowOS 14y agoGod says... of Israel. 18:7 At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; 18:8 If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. 18:9 And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; 18:10 If it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them. 18:11 Now therefore go to, speak to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a device against you: return ye now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good. 18:12 And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoFunny to think that based on those numbers Google could buy them all and still keep around 54 B.
- btilly 14y agoAnd yet, if Google did so it would destroy the value that they have, and would lose loads of money on the transaction.
- ig1 14y agoIt's missing so many companies it's hard to know where to begin. The list probably represents only a fraction of billion dollar software companies founded over the last decade. It's heavily skewed towards both American and b2c companies. Missing ones include: Vancl, Youku, Renren, Wonga, Bazaarvoice, Conduit, Klarna, nicira, Homeaway, Workday, Changyou, ServiceNow, Splunk, Ocado, Giant, Guidewire, DealerTrack, SuccessFactors, SourceFire, ArcSight, Popcap, Yandex, Betfair, ZipCar, Baidu, ExactTarget, etc.
- lominming 14y agoGreat list. I added a bunch of them. I should clarify that in the context of the quote, he was mostly talking about mostly software tech companies founded (or for the most part operated) in US. Hence, I did not include the China and Russia companies. I also classify ZipCar as not really a software tech company.
- yannski 14y agoWell, then why do you count Vente Privée or Rovio ? ;-)
- jon-wood 14y agoI think its a common mistake to write off companies which have a physical aspect as "not software companies". The company I work for delivers food to people, but we're very much a software company in that we couldn't possibly compete with the huge players in this market without smart software which lets us run it with the minimum of people. I'm fairly sure ZipCar are the same - there are many car hire organisations, but not that many which can get by without having to rent premises and huge numbers of people to look after car keys and signing in and out.
- jklio 14y agoAre you serious about Quora? I'm going to go with no.[1] With the text blurring and desperate requests for Facebook signin details Quora is basically expertsexchange for SV insiders now. Given the text blurring is a form of cloaking (showing one thing to the search engine, nothing to people who come in from a search) I think search engines should viciously rank them down too. And I don't care if there is some "easy" way to get around the blur (like the "scroll down" for expertsexchange or whatever it was), it's not obvious and it just pollutes the search results. Get rid of it. That said, as was mentioned elsewhere on HN recently, Stackoverflow needs a place for more meta questions to be moved rather than deleted as you can occasionally get a useful one that isn't just rehashing things we've seen 1000 times. [1]http://www.quora.com/Programming-Languages/In-laymans-terms-what-are-the-major-programming-languages-and-what-are-they-used-for# http://www.quora.com/Programming-Languages/In-laymans-terms-...
- Jabbles 14y agoWhen I click on that link there's a "Close" button next to the sign-in button.
- nitrogen 14y agoTry scrolling down past the first answer. Subsequent answers have a blur effect applied to them.
- majani 14y agoYou're right, it is cloaking. Is Google invested in Quora in any way that might compromise their judgement?
- jklio 14y agoI just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though. So it's not cloaking, it's just bad and annoying.
- mochizuki 14y agoLooking at this and thinking about how many companies created each year that are worth even a million dollars that aren't close to being on this, that must be an optimistic number. With a more intricate list this could provide some neat data. Most successful time of year to start your company, synchronous business tactics used by those companies, I'm sure there's more.
- kirillzubovsky 14y agoSo glad to see Scoutie.com made it on the list :) Thanks for putting it together. Encouraging!
- MojoJolo 14y agoWow. Every 3 months! I was thinking what 2011 and 2012 companies might be included in that list in the future? Also, I noticed that most if not all of these companies are Silicon Valley startups. Maybe the frequency of billion dollar companies will increase if the list includes companies world wide.
- pranavk 14y agoI personally feel its easy for a startup to start in West rather than starting in East. There are some problems in Eastern countries like India, China due to which not many of the startups are able to get converted into a really big one. They are still like slaves. While the quantity of startups getting successful is really high in western countries. Don't argue that its because of intelligence, perhaps I think they are even better in this. Yes perhaps its leadership.
- panacea 14y agoAbility to market in the the most affluent markets, more likely. When I say 'market' I mean top down know-your-customers and investors and partners intimately. Leverage the local connections etc. Yes perhaps its local.
- gtr32x 14y agoSince you started in 1998, you should add in VMware as well.
- lominming 14y agoAdded!
- supersaiyan 14y agoRelative to how many funded?
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y ago3673 companies in the US raised VC money in 2011: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/vc-investing-soars-22-percent-to-28-4b-in-2011-internet-sector-reaches-highest-levels-in-a-decade/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/vc-investing-soars-22-perce... 997 of these where Internet companies.
- tcgv 14y agoIt would be nice to know how much those companies are worth today.
- yurylifshits 14y agoIs there any evidence that Skillshare (on the list) is close to 1B valuation? Really surprised for that one.
- lominming 14y agoIt was just my personal attempt to highlight potential companies that may grow to a billion down the road. I maybe totally wrong.
- panacea 14y agoI just checked. I've been given cookies by most of those companies.
- confluence 14y agoPeople underestimate Quora. They underestimate both Quora and Google+ like they did with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube before them. What people don't seem to get about both Quora and Google+ is that they are networks not based around the people you just randomly happen to know - but instead around the people and things that you are actually interested in. There's a huge difference between the two. They are interest-based social networks and are essentially pulling niche, technical, specific forums, specific blogs, and just general chatter into one mainstream and real time feed - away from the pseudonym driven, trolling, harsh, fractured, and separate niche areas that we currently have in many areas (Yes I know both Twitter/YouTube began like this - but they have slowly become things you put on your business card/real business use and are based upon). Quora should not be underestimated as a SV centric bubbletastic startup - although it often appears that way. But then again, so did Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and even YouTube. Quora is where you go to hang out with people who actually share your interests (and not just a zip code), talk about the things that you really care about (not about who was the most drunk on the weekend) and just generally talk shop about the world, with the added benefit of a centralized repository where content bubbles up everyday (kind of like YouTube's subscriptions feature). No more refreshing pages :D. Quora is like the Hacker News for everything else that doesn't already have its own Hacker News with really, really, freaking good UI, addictive game mechanics and really good content filtering. Quora should not be underestimated. And neither should Google+.
- dageshi 14y agoOr Reddit? Which is the hackernews for everything else?
- confluence 14y agoStill uses pseudonyms. Sounds like a small difference. It isn't. Facebook existed before, on millions of forums, blogs, websites and various accounts. But what changed everything was using real names. It was the real names and social proof that changed everything from something a bunch of nerds used (like IRC/various chat services/various forums) - to something everyone needed to be on and used daily. Reddit/HN will remain non-mainstream for the foreseeable future.
- yakshay 14y agoOr a company is estimated at a billion every 3 months. How many billion dollar software companies does we really have?
- rshlo 14y agoGreat and inspiring list. But I think there should be a difference between companies that crossed the $1B worth in the open stock market, and companies that got this value by external purchase.
- curiousdannii 14y agoWould love to see this paired with a similar list showing operating profit. Or to put it another way, how many billion dollar software companies are there whose value hasn't been created substantially by the markets alone?
- netcan 14y agoThink of this as a list of companies that investors or acquirers are/were willing to pay $1b+ for. If you want companies that have justified their valuation based on past profits, you will need to go to older dates. eg 1998: OpenTable, Google, Rackspace, PayPal.
- wikwocket 14y agoThis certainly interesting, but also interesting would be a dash of perspective: How many companies (in total) are founded every 3 months?
- erichocean 14y ago600,000 companies are founded each month in the US.
- itry 14y agoDoes the same number of billion dollar companies die every 3 months?
- netcan 14y agoReally awesome post. Thanks for compiling this. You need to keep the date in mind when reading this though. More recent years will over-represent fast growers, underrepresent slow growers and include more speculative valuations (ie some companies will eventually exist the list). Give 2010 another few years and it could be a completely different list. The 1998 list OTOH will probably stay pretty much the same.
- fedxc 14y agoSo the key to success is to launch your company exactly 3 month after a successful one! :)
- pranavk 14y agoha ha ha !!!
- maxplanck 14y agoIt feels like this list is somewhat invalid, given the fact the all companies values are being measured at different points during their lives.
- jobigoud 14y agoHmm, where are the porn companies ?
- olalonde 14y agoThere is no porn company worth more than a billion dollars.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoAnd yet they are a safer bet compared to your usual Startup. The demand will exist forever and the revenue model is pretty obvious (adult ads/products).
- josefresco 14y agoWould love to see the median value of said companies now. 2002 might have been the only sane year.
- wolfparade 14y agohomeaway is a publicly traded company. no need for an asterix. ticker: AWAY
- macspoofing 14y agoI don't know about some of those "billion dollar" valuations. But point taken, US is able to churn out very successful tech companies. We're doing something right.
- recursive 14y agoI've never been to quora before today. I've always understood it to be a general purpose Q&A site. Given all the chatter in this thread about it, I decided to go there to see what it's about. I found this page for navigating the subject material: https://www.quora.com/directory/ https://www.quora.com/directory/ Is it just me, or is this a rather opaque view of the content? For example, the "B" section for topics doesn't have "bicycles", but it does have "Bizplay - Black Magic Design". I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.