Posts
-
Strikingly, BuildZoom and Bitnami Lead Hottest Y Combinator Winter 2013 Startups
Tomorrow marks 1 month since Y Combinator Demo Day for the Winter 2013 class of startups, and since I’ve been tracking their progress for awhile now I have a pretty good sense of who has seen sustained interest, growing traffic, and increased audience through social media. The weeks after Demo Day were a strange time, in some ways anti-climactic as companies leave the YC nest but also exciting as they begin to close in on funding rounds which will be announced in the coming months.
On 3/25, 4/7, 4/15 and 4/21 we measured of several data points for each company. For this ranking we use Alexa rank (traffic) scaled to product unique visitors, Twitter followers, Facebook followers, and LinkedIn followers to assess who has been gaining the most visibility to customers and the outside world since Demo Day.
Want to analyze this data yourself? Download the raw dataset here.Of course this is no measure of revenue, but it does give a good sense of which companies have the strongest top of funnel for gaining new leads right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies at the top of this list were the most competitive deals for funding, and the most in-demand for jobs.
It will be interesting to see whether this ranking holds up one year from now.
Full disclosure: I have made an angel investment in Bitnami. -
Art Is Hard
My old startup died.
I have been working on my new startup.
It’s kind of named after this band I love, but not entirely.
New name, and we’ve got a long way to go.Art Is Hard
Cut it out – your self-inflicted pain
is getting too routine
the crowds are catching on – to the self-inflicted song
Well, here we go again – the art of acting weak
Fall in love to fail – to boost your CD sales
And that CD sells – yeah, what a hit
You’ve got to repeat it
you gotta’ sink to swimIf at first you don’t succeed
you gotta recreate your misery
’cause we all know art is hard
young artists have gotta starve
Try, and fail, and try again
the comforts of repetition
Keep churning out those hits
’til it’s all the same old shitOh, a second verse!
Well, color me fatigued
I’m hiding in the leaves
in the CD jacket sleeves
tired of entertaining
some double-dipped meaning
a soft serve analogy
This drunken angry slur
in thirty-one flavors
You gotta’ sink to swim
immerse yourself in rejection
regurgitate some sorry tale
about a boy who sells his love affairs
You gotta’ fake the pain
you better make it sting
you’re gonna’ break a leg
when you get on stage
and they scream your name
“Oh, Cursive is so cool!”You gotta sink to swim
impersonate greater persons
’cause we all know art is hard
when we don’t know who we are -
Zombie VC Shakeout Continues
Earlier this month my post “Zombie VCs” raised hackles throughout the industry by naming firms who appeared to be inactive based on a lack of new investment data available in Crunchbase,
If today’s article byDan Primack of Fortune “Fewer than 100 tech VCs left?” is anything to go by, my active investors list may be far too inclusive, and the zombie VC list should probably be quite a bit longer.
According to Fortune:
New data suggests the decline has been more severe than previously thought, finding fewer than 100 active U.S. VC firms in the technology sector.
In fact, in a presentation made by venture capitalist Mark Suster to FLAG Capital it appears active investors (defined as those who have invested 1M per quarter for 4 consecutive quarters) has dropped to just 86 firms:
Fortune.com
ONLY 100 TECH VCS LEFT? @msuster SAY SO. NO LOOK AT ME, GRIMLOCK, ME ONLY ATE SOME OF THEM. buff.ly/15JXjqS
— FAKEGRIMLOCK (@FAKEGRIMLOCK) April 24, 2013
-
Everything I Am
Oh oh oho.
damn, here we go again.
Oh oh oho.
Common passed on this beat, I made it to a jam,now everything I’m not, made me everything I am.
damn, here we go again.
people talking shit, but when the shit hit the fan
everything I’m not, made me everything I am.I never be picture-perfect-Beyonce
Be light as Al B or black as Chauncey
Remember him from Blackstreet
He was as black as the street was
I’ll never be laid back as his beat was
I never could see why people’ll reach a
Fake-ass facade they couldn’t keep up
You see how I creeped up?
You see how I played a big role in Chicago like Queen Latifah?
I never rock a mink coat in the winter time like Killa Cam
Or rock some mink boots in the summertime like Will.I.am
Let me know if you feel it man
’cause everything I’m not, made me everything I amDamn, here we go again.
everybody sayin’ what’s not for him
everything I’m not, made me everything I am
damn, here we go again.
people talk shit, but when shit hits the fan
everything I’m not, made me everything I amand I’m back to tear it up
haters, start your engines
I hear ’em gearin’ up
people talk so much shit about me at barbershops
they forget to get their haircut
OK fair enough, the streets is flarin’ up
’cause they want gun-talk, or I don’t wear enough
baggy clothes, Reebok’s, or Adidas
can I add that he do spaz out at his shows
so say goodbye to the NAACP award
goodbye to the India.Arie award
they’d rather give me the nigga-please award
but I’ll just take the I-got-a-lot-of-cheese awarddamn, here we go again.
everything I’m not, made me everything I am
damn, here we go again.
people talk shit, but when shit hits the fan
everything I’m not, made me everything I amI know that people wouldn’t usually rap this
but I got the facts to back this
just last year, Chicago had over 600 caskets
man, killing’s some wack shit
oh, I forgot, ‘cept for when niggas is rappin’
do you know what it feel like when people is passin’?
he got changed over his chains, a block off Ashland
I need to talk to somebody, pastor
the church want tithe, so I can’t afford to pay
the slip on the door, cause I can’t afford to stay
my 15 seconds up, but I got more to say
That’s enough Mr. West, please no more todaydamn, here we go again.
everybody sayin’ what’s not for him
everything I’m not, made me everything I am
damn, here we go again.
people talk shit, but when shit hits the fan
everything I’m not, made me everything I am -
Double Tap
Last night I logged into Referly for the first time in a few weeks. I’ve been trying not to do that, because there are still so many things I want to fix and when I see them I just… and I was so in love with it and it’s just… and knowing that we aren’t continuing in this direction it just… hurts. It hurts.
I logged into the admin panel. I don’t know what I expected to see. If you’ve ever wondering what would happen if you stopped working on your startup I can tell you now so you don’t have to satisfy your morbid curiosity.
If you stop working on your startup, it dies.
None of this four hour workweek perpetual motion machine bullshit. It dies, or in our case it lingers on the brink of death. I’m still amazed that we have so many pageviews a day with nothing, no tweets, no Facebook posts, no blogging, no efforts to drive traffic or create new content at all (I had to let go of all our lovely writers). We turned off all our automated emails to customers, it’s been a month since we’ve sent them anything new, there are no new features (we let our engineers go too). It’s just me, Kevin and Andy now. The team went from 8 people to 3 in 24 hours. I couldn’t even go to our office for a week, it was too sad sitting there with those empty desks.
(But don’t you dare feel sorry for me, I did all this myself.)
It would be so easy to rationalize a case for “it’s working on its own, maybe you really have something here”. 8 new collections were made today, and 12 yesterday, and 5 the day before that… and I’m just wondering, who *are* these people? And 5 people signed up today. And 20 people logged in. Oh god, I’m actually tearing up because 175 new items were added to profiles today and these graphs look like… Actually, it kind of looks like the site is just doing its thing without us. It’s not growing, but it’s not dead.
This is why zombies are the worst, they suck you in and prey on your worst fear.
Did I make a huge mistake shutting this down?
I was so good until last night! I didn’t do this for 40 days… but on the 41st I gave in. I opened my editor tools to review all the new collections being created lately, the ones making the graph look like a weak little heartbeat.
It’s all spam.
Sigh. Now I remember why we shut this down. Back to work.
-
Profitable Tableau Software Raised Only $15M, Files for $150 Million IPO
Correction: According to Reuters, Tableau has raised more than $100M in venture capital, although regulatory filings for these additional rounds have still been difficult for me to track down.
Seattle-based Tableau Software, filed its S-1 documents for an IPO earlier this month on the New York Stock Exchange, and even snagged the sweet ticker symbol $DATA. With a total of $15M in two venture funding rounds in 2004 and 2008 from New Enterprise Associates, it can be assumed that the founders and employees of the company have managed to hold on to plenty of equity and will enjoy significant personal financial outcomes when the company enters the public markets.
Updated with the link to the current S-1 dated April 19, 2013.
The company provides products for data visualization that are used on your desktop to analyze propriety data sets and turn them into compelling visuals with ease. This may sound unsexy to consumer tech junkies, but it has massive value for the analysts, business intelligence and data management professionals using it every day in their jobs.
Interactive Visualizations Build With Tableau
It’s easier to get excited about consumer technology companies with big news, because we can easily download their app or visit their website and get hands on with the product to evaluate for ourselves how “deserving” of the good news they are. With B2B companies this can be a bit trickier, so I’ve dug up some notable data visualizations made with Tableau to give you an idea of the end results.
A Tale of 100 Entrepreneurs – “How Long Does It Take To Build A Technology Empire?” Wall Street Journal
Sanjay Bhatt of the Seattle Times won the 2011 Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism for his story on mortgage modifications, using this data visualization.
What Customers Are Saying
A quick skim of Twitter reveals an active community of Tableau users, many of whom even publish their data visualizations to the web for others to see or include them in news stories and blog posts.
Just used @tableau for a presentation at school for the first time. Nailed it!
— Jeff Dickson (@jeffddickson) April 18, 2013
Woohoo look what came today! Thankyou @tableau @jeweloree . Sheena gave up punk rock for data. twitter.com/pgilks/status/…
— Peter Gilks (@pgilks) April 19, 2013
The TableauLove Tumblr account, created Russell Christopher, an employee who loves them “so much so I totally stalked them (in kind of a spooky way) and convinced them to hire me”, shows a ton of interesting visualizations. The company also recently added the ability to follow other data dorks (I say this with love, being one myself).
Naysayers Critical of Product Strategy & Sector Value
Last month, before the IPO filing was made public, Alex Williams of TechCrunch reported he was fairly non-plussed with Tableau 8.0, bemoaning that the company has yet to release a SaaS version of its product that could be run in the browser and expressing annoyance that downloading the new Tableau Public software required Windows to install. He said:
Tableau Software is a world-class company, but this release shows that they are behind the curve. The APIs Tableau is offering illustrate that the company is taking a new direction. But APIs have been standard for years.
Tableau offers software that brings simplicity through visualization. During these years, a wave of innovation has happened, making it easier to do visualizations that were not possible just a few years ago. By not offering a SaaS capability, Tableau is leaving a lot on the table and forcing the company into ever deeper relationships with a host of fellow legacy software providers
While Williams made SaaS sounds like some kind of silver bullet the commenters were not having it, criticizing the story as a “drive-by review”, “shill for Chart.io”, and pointing out “the ‘cloud’ bias that Techcrunch appears to have”. My personal favorite:
Alex,
With all due respect, Tableau is as solid as it gets when it comes to Enterprise IT. They are not building for Silicon Valley hipsters who think that their tiny little MongoDB qualifies them to be Big Data experts. They are building for real companies of mid-America, and their products solve real problem.
O, yeah, comparing Chartio and their two customers to Tabeleau is like comparing a child’s tricycle crowdsourced on Kickstarter to a Formula One race car.
Dev
GigaOm also cast some aspersions on the IPO, asking whether big data visualization is over hyped and suggesting that how this IPO goes will either validate or pop the big dollar amounts some market experts predict this sector will reach in the coming years.
The Bottom Line
If I were a founder of a profitable company that had taken very little venture capital and was looking at a massive IPO, I’d probably be thinking something along these lines.
Congrats to Tableau. Haters gonna hate.
-
The TechStars Index – Seeking Alpha Among 162 Active Companies
This post is part of the Startup Index Series, featuring data-driven posts about the companies in various portfolios including Y Combinator, 500 Startups and Andreessen Horowitz. Which portfolio would you like to see analyzed next?
TechStars is a seed stage startup accelerator funding companies in Boulder, Boston, Chicago, London, New York City and Seattle. It’s mentor roster features several notable founders and venture capitalists and they self-publish a lot of stats about their companies including active companies, failure rate, funding and employees by class and more. Applications are open now for Seattle and London 2013. Apply here.
Unlike previous indexes, this list factors in several different data points and no longer over-emphasizes web traffic. In order to avoid having these indexes gamed I am not going to reveal the exact formula I use to calculate the ranking, but I can tell you that externally measurable factors like Twitter followers, Facebook likes, page rank, inbound links and even number of employees all play a part in calculating the ranking of these companies.
Founders, if you feel your company is ranking incorrectly, or have feedback for me about how I can make this list better I would love to hear from you. My email is morrilldanielle (at) gmail.
-
Google Announces Plans to Shut Down Google Affiliate Network
J.J. Hirschle, head of the Google Affiliate Network, announced today that the company has decided to shut down Google Affiliate Network following a review of goals and outcomes of the program. While its certainly no Google Reader, this does seem to be part of an ongoing effort at Google to eliminate lines of business that aren’t creating significant value.
We’re constantly evaluating our products to ensure that we’re focused on the services that will have the biggest impact for our advertisers and publishers.
To that end, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.
No doubt competitors Commission Junction and LinkShare, who comprise the “big 3” for large advertisers along with GAN, were pleased to have Google off their turf. But this move does make me wonder whether Google saw meaningful revenue opportunities with performance-based affiliate programs (it sounds like not if you read between the lines of the announcement), and how much they are actually leaving behind for the hungry sales reps waiting in the wings. With many investors already sour on e-commerce I wonder what this means for other businesses relying on performance marketing to monetize.
What Google product do you think is next on the chopping block?
-
B2B Startups Cloudant & Clustrix Enter Y Combinator Index Top 10 (April 2013)
Last month the first Y Combinator index ranked the entire portfolio by web traffic and Facebook monthly active users (where applicable). These two data points provided some relative ranking, but didn’t do much to bring enterprise companies to their expected positions in the list and overly favored companies with short term spikes in traffic rather than long term investments in building teams, earning inbound links and creating audiences on socia media channels.
This new ranking factors indicators like Facebook likes, Twitter followers, web traffic, page rank, inbound links, number of employees and other data I am collecting through proprietary methods.
You’ll now see companies like Clustrix (scale-out SQL databases) and Cloudant (distributed database as a service) in the top ten, along with big jumps from OwnLocal (publisher tools & monetization), MemSQL (another database company!), AeroFS (private file syncing and collaboration) and many more. The Winter 2013 companies have also been added.
At a Glance: Top Companies by Batch (Not Exited)
- Winter 2013 – Bitnami
- Summer 2012 – 9GAG
- Winter 2012 – Daily Muse
- Summer 2011 – Codecademy
- Winter 2011 – HelloFax
- Summer 2010 – Hipmunk
- Winter 2010 – Optimizely
- Summer 2009 – Olark (this batch has 4 companies in the top 20)
- Winter 2009 – Airbnb
- Summer 2008 – Cloudant
- Summer 2007 – Dropbox
- Winter 2007 – Weebly
- Summer 2006 – Scribd
- Winter 2006 – Clustrix
- Summer 2005 – ClickFacts
If you feel a company is incorrectly ranked on this list please email me or let me know in the comments, I would love to hear your thoughts. My email is morrilldanielle (at) gmail.
-
Here’s What the New Facebook Profile Design Looks Like
Over the past few days friends have been remarking that they’ve seen various pieces of Facebook’s new design rollout, including various shades of blue for the top bar. I had yet to see anything resembling the new design they hinted at earlier this month until today. I opened up my profile page and there it was, the new layout for profiles with a little tour to help me check it out. My overall reaction is that it is pretty and feels like a subtle change after a few minutes using it. I like that my about page is a bit more interesting and that pictures are bigger. It feels glossier like a magazine.
I snapped some screenshots, since I’m not sure what my profile page will look like for others: