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Hi there,
I'm going to be in Munich and Amsterdam next week with some friends and also will be seeing some customers. If you've got any recommendations for things to do, places to go, etc, let me know.
Payments exits climbing
The exit environment for VC-backed payments companies is looking up. Most of that has come via M&A so it will be interesting to see whether highly-valued payments firms like Adyen, Stripe and Square find strategic buyers (unlikely given size), test the public markets or continue to raise in private IPOs.
Here's the data on payments exits.
No unicorns in this newsletter :)
If I'm being honest, part of me cringes every time we do research on unicorns. I personally think our fascination with unicorns is bad for entrepreneurship but that's a story for a different day.
But we do lots of unicorn research (and I mean a lot) because the data tells us it works from a business perspective for CB Insights.
Nevertheless, I'm happy to report that today's newsletter, minus this little digression about unicorns, has no research about unicorns.
Back to the good stuff.
e-sports is big business
Huge in fact. We dig into the e-sports vertical with some data and find that more than half of e-sports and game-streaming deals have come since Amazon's huge acquisition of Twitch in September 2014.
LTV is the new eyeballs
Mark Suster has a solid post entitled Fauxmentum that talks about startups with you guessed it - fake momentum. A couple of the characteristics he mentions are visible among SaaS startups especially:
- Startups whose customers are other startups
- Startups who are spending and burning a lot with some nebulous view of life time value (LTV)
LTV is in many ways becoming the new "eyeballs".
In the dot com boom, startups pointed to the number of visitors to their website (eyeballs) with a view that if you get enough eyeballs, the money would flow.
For some SaaS startups today, it is burn money to acquire the customer because it'll all work out in the LTV.
This will not end well.
Anatomy of healthcare startups
We dug into our data to identify a handful of startups that might literally change your life.
For those in the States, have a great 4th of July holiday. Look forward to seeing some of you in Europe next week.
Love,
Anand
@asanwal
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