Blah blah blah Unicorn
Hi there,
We have a great guest post from David Beisel of NextView Ventures this week. David provides a data-driven view (we love this) into their seed investment portfolio including what % get follow-on funding, what models work best for getting follow-on funding, how much they raise, and how long it took.
You should read it.
I always feel like somebody's watching me
So Unilever is suing upstart Hampton Creek over their Just Mayo product. I guess that's one strategy to deal with disruptors.
But this issue of disruptors is one we're seeing more and more. Specifically, who are the private company challengers to public companies? We're working with a number of hedge funds and mutual funds who are keen to understand this.
Beyond finding challengers, they use private market data to understand things like:
Given all the interest from public market investors, we're looking for a product manager to help build out our public equities offering. If you have experience in developing products for the hedge fund/equity research communities and in developing sales strategies for this industry, please reach out to me (can respond to this email).
No survivorship bias here
I spoke at the Cornell Entrepreneurship Summit last week and the title of my talk was "Birthing Unicorns is hard". While financing and media stories about billion dollar companies are increasingly frequent, I wanted to share some data on just how hard it is as that part of the story seems to get glossed over.
The full presentation is available here.
Best,
Anand
@asanwal
P.S. Do states where marijuana is legal have greater VC growth than those where it is not? Here is the answer.  |
|
Where the 'smart money' is going
We've been analyzing the financing trends of 20 elite VCs across a range of industries as to where they place their bets is a great leading indicator of which markets and areas are hot. See a few below:
|
CB Insights Top Deal Searches
CB Insights users can query our database in powerful ways. See a few below or sign up free:
|
|
|
Mobile app momentum update
Here's a cross-section of this week's list of mobile apps with momentum. Check out the CB Insights Mobile Alerts Newsletter for criteria and the rest of the apps.
Significant Rank Improvement
- Yik Yak (Social Networking)
- Riffsy GIF Keyboard (Utilities)
- SnapGrab (Photo & Video)
- Lumosity Mobile (Education)
- Shopular (Catalogs)
|
|
|
Insights on venture capital
Interesting articles by venture capitalists or about investing and M&A.
Why you don't want to give financial information to all your investors. Upfront Ventures' Mark Suster explains.
Selling tech to everyone. A16Z's Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky explain why mobile is now everything.
Don't accept the excuse of complexity. Khosla Ventures' Keith Rabois on how to operate.
The ultimate metric for media startups. Skift's Rafat Ali on an ugly, unspoken truth about media.
Messing with a competitor's fundraising. Amid the Uber-Lyft hoopla, USV's Fred Wilson says not to waste your time trying to mess with a competitor’s financing.
Related to messing with a competitor is Mayonnaise Wars, which details Unilever's lawsuit against startup competitor Hampton Creek. |
Our Last Two Newsletters
In case you missed them:
|
|
