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The Billion Dollar Startup Club
- krschultz 12y agoNice graphic, but someone needs to update the valuation on Fab. I am sure they are not worth 1.3 billion anymore.
- curiously 12y agoI suspect some of the other companies listed on their will follow suit...
- dsugarman 12y agothat's their valuation until someone pays a different price for a share or they go out of business.
- adventured 12y agoThat is not how their value would be accounted for from any actual accounting or tax standard that has ever existed in the US. Using your premise, feel free to try arguing with the IRS that your billion dollar company is worth only $100 based on you having sold one share for a penny.
- Mvandenbergh 12y agoThe value of wealth 'at rest' isn't too important from a tax point of view in the US (except for real property) since there isn't a wealth tax in the US. Transactions are taxed, and if you sold a share for a penny the cap gains you paid would be based on that price. (Of course, the IRS would be suspicious of that kind of economically implausible transaction)
- mxfh 12y agoAlso it's visually misleading, the area of these segments doesn't matter, it's only the radius in a linear fashion. Assuming the perceived value is most commonly interpreted as area: the larger numbers look even bigger than they are by a magnitude since the area scales with r²/2 (circular sector area) while the actual value r is only growing linearly. Simplified calculation (no doughnut, no offset): linear area a 11 => 60 units b 46 => 1058 units difference in value b/a x4.2 => x17.6
- jacques_chester 12y agoThere's a whole chapter on mathematically troublesome graphics in How To Lie With Statistics.
- dkhenry 12y agoSo is that the total list ? Is it possible that there is a company valued over 1b that they could have missed. I am seeing lots tech companies, but not much non tech companies.
- fekberg 12y ago> Note: This chart only includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and have at least one venture-capital firm as an investor.
- pkaye 12y agoThe word "tech" has lost all its meaning now... basically if you do anything online your are considered a tech company.
- lugg 12y agoIt hasn't lost its meaning so much as its managed to find its way into everything.
- misiti3780 12y agowe work is not a tech company
- necubi 12y agoThere are definitely companies missing (I have personal knowledge of a few). In particular, it will underreport for profitable B2B companies that haven't raised in a while or at anywhere near their present valuation.
- davidu 12y agoThis is not a complete list.
- bhaumik 12y agoThat's a really interesting way to display that trend. I'd love to hear about the thought process that led to using that semi-circle visual. Any WSJ designers/devs lurking HN? Also, has anyone seen something like this used with other data sets? When we built our own infographic to highlight "The Rise of Coding Bootcamps" there was much debate on the best way to visualize this information. While I'm happy with the result[1], there's definitely much room for improvement. [1]http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic
- didgeoridoo 12y agoAs a frequent critic of arbitrary & misleading data visualizations... I love it. It's a nice, compact way of showing off the data: - it shows a 40x+ range without transformations that might muddle the story - it captures the long, flat tail (partly an artifact of the artificial $1B floor), which compacts nicely - the "focus" of the data is on the top quartile, which is permitted to dominate the visual
- curiouslurker 12y agoWhy do companies with documented shady ethics like JustFab continue to excel?
- rhizome 12y agoCapitalism doesn't discourage dirty tricks.
- dikaiosune 12y agoUnless they're illegal and you get caught and you fail to defend yourself and you lose any business due to the bad publicity.
- ukigumo 12y agoThat doesn't seem to be the case. Think Uber for instance.
- adventured 12y agoYes it does. One very large factor in people trading with other people is reputation. Whether we're talking 1910 or 2015. See: eBay (or a dozen other obvious examples). Maybe you're smarter when it comes to business than, say, Warren Buffett. His theory is that having a good reputation is immensely important in business. Businesses suffer or die all the time in the free market due to poor reputations. You see those consequences at a small town level, and you see it at a very large level. To easily test your theory: try setting up a business in a small town. Proceed to cheat or otherwise perform dirty tricks on all of your customers. See what happens.
- jsprogrammer 12y agoFree markets don't really exist. Market information and capital is highly siloed and almost exclusively used for advantage by market incumbents.
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- martingordon 12y agoI'm getting flashbacks of the Kevin Rose $60 million BusinessWeek cover.
- puranjay 12y agoTo be fair to BusinessWeek, Rose did get a $200 million offer from Google. That $60 million wasn't wrong; Rose was. To be even more fair, Digg collapsed because it made mistakes, but the field it pioneered - crowd-curated news - is now a multi-billion dollar business.
- eliteposter 12y agoDomo (Domo.com) should also be listed.
- zkhalique 12y agoOK explain this: http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/?co=Fab http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/?co=Fab Versus this: http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-valuation-to-a-15-million-fire-sale/ http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-valua... Who is right?
- adamnemecek 12y agoWSJ's table lists the valuation date to be June 1, 2013. The Quartz article is from Nov 2014. So you do the math.
- zkhalique 12y agoWell their label shouldn't say "valuations as of Feb 2015" then
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- skosuri 12y agoCan someone explain to me how Theranos is worth $9 billion? Everytime I hear about them, their "technology" sounds so sketchy that it's hard to think it is not a scam. Is there so much promise behind closed doors that I'm just missing something that's worth that much?
- bdcs 12y agoSupposedly you can go to Walgreens and get a test from Theranos.
- gmarx 12y agoThe Walgreens on University ave., yes
- tanzam75 12y agoI can believe that their technology works. I've been hearing about this sort of stuff for ten years before I first heard of Theranos. Search for "lab on a chip." There are grad students working on this sort of stuff at every major research university. However, the $9 billion valuation feels bubblish. Consider that Quest and Labcorp are both $10 billion companies, and Theranos is talking about driving down the price of testing. They need a lot of elasticity in this market to make the numbers work out.
- coralreef 12y agoBlood testing is ideally (and realistically) something EVERYONE should have access to, and should probably be done yearly. The potential market is anyone who receives health care.
- eitally 12y agoAnd for any non-Americans around here, a [reasonably] complete blood panel in the US will carry a ~$1000 price tag, which insurance may or may not cover.
- jsprogrammer 12y agoThanks for horribly breaking my back button WSJ/Murdoch.
- coke12 12y agoNote the valuations for Snapchat[1] and Pinterest[2] may have both roughly doubled today, or at least soon will. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat-said-to-seek-up-to-19-billion-value-in-funding-round http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat-s... [2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion-valuation-with-new-funding-1424311549 http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion-valua...
- lettergram 12y agoIt's always difficult for me to view Chinese companies as a fair competitor. The Chinese government plays favorites, and startups (more or less) have to have connections and be supported by the party. If they aren't supported, they wont be around very long. Point being, it seems mildly disconcerting to me that Chinese companies are compared to U.S. counterparts.
- portman 12y agoDoes anyone know why this exclusion exists? Excluded from this list are companies that were majority-controlled by an institutional investment firm at one point. I presume this is why Supercell ($3B valuation) is not included, because they were at one point 51% owned by Softbank. But I can't understand why that matters.
- shpx 12y agoKabam is worth a billion? Their business model is buy good underground games, then squeeze every last cent out by making it pay2win. There is no good on this earth.
- rasz_pl 12y agoI especially enjoy all those 'valued at' companies with no product, no tech demo, but promises and ideas.
- parag_c_mehta 12y agoCan you guys seriously redefine what startup means ? Eg. Flipkart started ~8 years ago, employs 15,000+ employees. What/How can it be called a startup ? If acquisition of funds is the only definition of startup then all companies are startups as at some point they all needed to raise funds.
- andrewtbham 12y agothese are venture funded companies that haven't gone public.. the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.
- shas3 12y ago> the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies. There are 300k brokers in the US. [1] WSJ has 2.5 million daily subscribers. [2] [1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and-financial-services-sales-agents.htm http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and-fina... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal
- parag_c_mehta 12y agoSorry but by that logic, Dell became a startup comapny after being a public company :)
- Rainymood 12y agoAm I the only one really surprised to see Razer pop in there somewhere? And really, how many of those are we still able to call 'startups', in my opinion almost all of these 'startups' have transcended the 'startup' phase and now are simply 'companies'.
- saslobin 12y ago@patel0phone asked if i'd share the thought process behind the visual. challenge was to find an arresting way to bring users into the data within the limitations of a browser. (we removed the viz on mobile) i went through several iterations of charting forms -- treemap, bubbles, bars, scatterplot w.different metrics as well as looking at a collection of graphics that i find visually interesting. we landed with this bar chart arrayed around a circle. a lot of what i try to do with my work is to push traditional charting forms into fresh presentation. if you're new to dataviz i'd recommend you learn the traditional charting forms first and understand those deeply before you try this at home. it important to note this chart lives in context of all of the data -- including a straight bar chart within the table. hope this helps. best of luck to you all!
- personjerry 12y agoWhat happened to Zalando and Rocket Internet between September and October?