Welcome to the Unicorn club

Techrun - Welcome to the Unicorn club
by Aileen Lee, Founder of Cowboy Ventures



Lee talks about the Unicorn club - the super companies that have been backed by VCs and grown into $ l billion companies.  Some of them are:    Facebook, Google, Amazon.  Most of them are consumer and IT based.

Money is made from the vc backed companies on the exits (ipo, sale of the companies)

Here are more, copied from the article:

Learnings to date about the “Unicorn Club”:

1. We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups.

2. On average, four unicorns were born per year in the past decade, with Facebook being the breakout “super-unicorn” (worth >$100 billion). In each recent decade, 1-3 super unicorns have been born.

3. Consumer-oriented unicorns have been more plentiful and created more value in aggregate, even excluding Facebook.

4. But enterprise-oriented unicorns have become worth more on average, and raised much less private capital, delivering a higher return on private investment.

5. Companies fall somewhat evenly into four major business models: consumer e-commerce, consumer audience, software-as-a-service, and enterprise software.

6. It has taken seven-plus years on average before a “liquidity event” for companies, not including the third of our list that is still private. It’s a long journey beyond vesting periods.

7. Inexperienced, twentysomething founders were an outlier. Companies with well-educated, thirtysomething co-founders who have history together have built the most successes

8. The “big pivot” after starting with a different initial product is an outlier.

9. San Francisco (not the Valley) now reigns as the home of unicorns.

10. There is very little diversity among founders in the Unicorn Club.

Some deeper explanation and additional findings:

1) Welcome to the exclusive, 39-member Unicorn Club: the Top .07%

• Figuring out the denominator to unicorn probability is hard. The NVCA says over 16,000 internet-related companies were funded since 2003; Mattermark says 12,291 in the past 2 years; and the CVR says 10-15,000 software companies are seeded each year. So let’s say 60,000 software and internet companies were funded in the past decade. That would mean .07 percent have become unicorns. Or, 1 in every 1,538.
• Takeaway: it’s really hard, and highly unlikely, to build or invest in a billion dollar company. The tech news may make it seem like there’s a winner being born every minute — but the reality is, the odds are somewhere between catching a foul ball at an MLB game and being struck by lightning in one’s lifetime. Or, more than 100x harder than getting into Stanford.
• That said, these 39 companies have shown it’s possible  – and they do offer a lot that can be learned from.

                      

--

Prof Jorge Saguinsin

BIDDA:   BELIEVE, INSPIRE, DREAM, DO, ACHIEVE

Dr. Kongkiat Ketpetch, Improving Health Care through IT and Improved Nutrition

An Ateneo Graduate School of Business Advantage

Dr. Kongkiat Ketpech is a medical doctor, who had the personal mission of improving health care in Thailand.  In Thailand, you need to pay only 30 baht for any disease to be treated. But you have to pay a an annual capitation (premium) of l,200 baht.  It is challenge to do this.  So they studied how rural hospitals and the only 3 solutions were IT, IT, IT.

l.  IT project.  The idea is to get information on the hospital:  patients, number of days stay, expenses, medication etc.  Employing the best IT graduates, and using Linux,  open source software, they were able to get dashboard picture on a daily basis of hospital operation within the network.  They found out that the l,200 baht capitation was exceeded.  The actual cost was 2,400.  The budget was being eaten by chronic/lifestyle  disease, not by infectious diseases. The prevalent diseases were hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and malnutrition

2.  So he embarked as an Ashoka fellow this time, on a nutrition project.  They promoted organic food, and food low on glycemic index like brown rice.  This benefitted the farmers who were encouraged to raise organic food and or brown rice.

There is none like this in PHL.  He can be contacted at kongkiat@ipensook.com

I understand his software is being used in the Phil and maybe is being used by DOH, Philhealth to lower hospital costs and improve delivery of services

What Pisses You Off

 One of the NU6 (or N12 as the case maybe) I require from students is to write on what pisses them off at their neighborhood, mall, and at the school.  Frankly speaking, I think the students are speaking truthfully when they talk about cost benefit analysis of their high tuition at AGSB, and the value that they get.


In terms of equipment and machinery, in the two sites where I teach, the IT does not work properly and hence my blog teaching methodology does not work well; there is no wifi, there is virus at the computer;  I think I lost the contents of my USB; maybe we  blame the landlordon the over all ambiance is that of run down place:  dirty, bad maintenance dark hallways (no lights) dusty wall. Whatever happened to 5s being taught at opeman?

Maybe, these are the causes of low turn out of enrolees.  If we are to be entreprenurial, then these things must be addressed sqarely.  Brutal facts/reality bite. And hard.








Our generation needs an ENTREPRENEURIAL REVOLUTION.

On blogging and use of the Internet/web

Four months ago I was, despite my insistence in the company that we go IT, and the requirements at the school where I teach part time, that all teaching staff must be IT literate, I would not know how to open an email or safely remove a USB from a computer. I was a PU man (puro utos)  However, when my daughter, upgraded a power point on the day of the presentation, I decided to take matters in my own hands.  I learned the following:

l.  Make a power point (how to copy paste pictures and images)

2. Upload at slide share

3.  Tweet, upload at Flick.R account,

4.  Open  Gmail account, use of google maps

5.  Blog, put on widgets, upload pictures.

Outcomes/achievements:  I have uploaded created l6 ppt on entrepreneurship at slideshare, am on Linked In, created 8 blogs:  2 on biking, 2 on entrepreneurship, 4 corporate blogs. One of my slides have 600 visits. We have blogs that have over l500 visits.  Our ranking at memorial park page has gone up from 4 to no 2 (even without a website still). For organic search, we are no. l.  Blogging works. Under my own name, I have about five pages at google search (that was from less than one 4 months ago) Many more under profjorgeentrep (that is because of the tweet under the same name)