Tom Tunguz

JUNE 17, 2022

Here’s a table of cumulative dilution points for a hypothetical startup raising 4 rounds in one year. Across financing rounds, dilution from capital has fallen by 30-50% in that decade. Cumulative Dilution Points. It’s not the implied ownership of preferred shareholders at the end of these raises.

Finance 360

Finance Startup 360

Tom Tunguz

JULY 15, 2017

The article pointed to the seeming collapse in the amount of venture capital raised by San Francisco startups relative to other regions. Note, the levels still exceed 2010-2013. The startups raising hundreds of millions or billions might bias the data, I thought. Now it’s the Valley startups’ turn to raise.

Investment 203

Investment Startup Venture Capital Trends 203

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 11, 2020

The market bounced back to similar levels once in Q2 2010, but needed eight quarters to return to its previous volumes. This might be for a few reasons: valuations fell, no need to reprice/recap companies, and typically recessions are great markets to start startups. That grew to about $5B per quarter in 2007 and early 2008.

Marketing 359

Marketing Startup Investment Trends 359

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2022

But as a history lesson, let’s use my own startup Adobe Sign / EchoSign to see what happened in ’08-’09 … the worst global recession any of us have ever seen. in May 2009 … but then returned to normal 2% by 2010: #4. When the whole world shut down in many ways. #1.

SMB 297

SMB SaaS Churn Enterprise 297

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 7, 2019

Startups are able to raise larger early rounds because of the financial environment. As I’ve written about before, there’s now a continuum of financial products available to startups at the early stage. But is now at the same level it was in 2010. 1M rounds have lost 51% of their market share since 2010 in dollars.

Marketing 247

Marketing Benchmarks Trends Startup 247

Tom Tunguz

NOVEMBER 19, 2020

Despite the economic backdrop, startups continue to plow ahead. And it would be 4x the size of 2010. One of the biggest changes in the last year in the US is the Fed’s stated low interest rate policy for the next three years. What impact are we seeing in the market?

Venture Capital 353

Venture Capital Government Pricing Investment 353

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 4, 2015

To calculate the data, I filtered all the startups who had been acquired for undisclosed amounts and raised less than $6.5M (the sum of the average seed round in 2014 and the median series A ). Year 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014. Q2 2010, Q2 2011 and Q2 2012 all saw similar drops before the levels rebounded.

Startup 113

Startup Trends Marketing Technical Review 113

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 10, 2019

2018 observed the fewest number of angel-led financing rounds since before 2010. Startup investing is no longer a cottage industry. And the implications for startups? Angel investing was an important part of the Startupland ecosystem. Today, you can’t make the same argument. What does this mean for startupland?

Finance 280

Finance Trends Investment Startup 280

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 9, 2017

Professor Adam Grant wrote Emotional Intelligence is Overrated in 2010. A paper published in 2010 called Emotional intelligence: An integrative meta-analysis and cascading model accumulated the largest data set on emotional intelligence until that point. Professor Grant teaches at Wharton. Is this broadly true?

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Startup Construction Interviewing 185

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 2, 2016

Startups building analytics products command roughly 10% of both seed and series A dollars. of the market in 2010 to more than 7.5% Since 2010, education startups have been on a tear in the seed market growing from 6% to now 10% in 2015. Analytics remains an important category for both markets.

Startup 113

Startup Marketplace as a Service Social Media Advertising 113

Sales Hacker

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

Back then, in 2011, Lyft was a small Series-A startup called Zimride with under 50 employees. Lyft is one of many companies that began as a small startup but quickly rose to a multibillion-dollar company. The total addressable market continues to grow and is ripe for selling to, but very few startups reach unicorn status.

Outsourcing Services 77

Outsourcing Services Scale Startup Outsourced Development 77

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 24, 2014

Does a startup’s location impact its M&A prospects? To answer the question, I’ve prepared three charts used Crunchbase data and focused on the seven states with more than 20 acquisitions since 2010. Californian startups raise 53% of the rounds in this subset of state but see 60% of the acquisitions.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Startup Finance Government 100

Tom Tunguz

JULY 12, 2016

In addition to increasing labor costs, startups in San Francisco are facing monotonically increasing real estate prices. Total vacancy rate has dropped to 8% from a high in 2010 a 17.1%, meaning only 8% of available spaces are available to be rented. In 2009, the average asking rent was $31.37. Source: JLL.

Startup 100

Startup Pricing Trends Data 100

SaaStr

APRIL 1, 2023

PST — Jeff Richards, GGV Capital Managing Director, and Tiffany Luck, GGV Capital Partner, share what it takes to win as a SMBTech startup in today’s economy. Rewind The Clock — How Did We Get Here Most small businesses in pre-2010 didn’t have computers in their store or restaurant. Most didn’t even have internet. Can you believe that?

Scale 185

Scale SMB Merchant Services Payment Methods 185

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2022

The point is that SaaS multiples are still higher than where they were from 2010-2017. Personally, I’m betting on #2 (The Bull Case), planning using #3 (The Rational-Positive Case), and advising startups to extend the cash they do have at least another 6 months. You can see a lot of VCs and others talking about this on Twitter.

SaaS 324

SaaS Azure Cloud AWS 324

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 28, 2016

Like a series of dominos, a startup’s success is a chain reaction. Chris Dixon wrote about wedge business models in 2010. When startups have momentum, we’re saying the odds of their success, the odds that the conditional probabilities result in their favor is increasing. Success begets success.

Business Model 100

Business Model Startup Business Scale 100

Tom Tunguz

JULY 7, 2014

It would seem hardware startups are booming. Second, there seems to be a growing number of hardware startups bubbling in incubators like Lemnos Labs and Highway1. The chart above shows the sizes and frequency of hardware investment in the US since 2010 across different investment stages (Series A, B, C and Seed), using Crunchbase data.

Startup 153

Startup Investment Trends Data 153

Tom Tunguz

JULY 9, 2014

See an updated version of this post: Trends in the Startup Acquisition Market in 2015. The venture-backed startup IPO market has remained strong over the past five quarters, with 20 or more IPOs in each of those quarters. I was curious how the strength of the IPO market has impacted the acquisition market.

Acquisition 100

Acquisition Trends Startup Marketing 100

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 3, 2014

Last week, we analyzed the fund raising history of billion dollar SaaS companies and determined SaaS startups are raising nearly twice as much capital as 16 years ago before going public. Given that trend, I wondered if there is there any truth to the idea that startups today require less capital than before to succeed.

Startup 100

Startup Trends Investment Cloud 100

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 23, 2014

This data is Crunchbase data filtered for the largest 20 or so sectors from 2010-2013. The hardware startup movement has been catapulted by the success of crowdfunding, and the quantified self movement has amassed some tremendous momentum as well. The Android startups which raised seeds in 2011 and 2012 raised As in 2013.

Automotive 100

Automotive Startup Trends Advertising 100

Tom Tunguz

OCTOBER 13, 2014

The startup acquisition market is poised to have its best year in nearly a decade. If acquirers maintain the same pace from the first nine months of the year through Q4, more than 450 venture-backed startups will have been acquired, generating more than $25B in proceeds. The past four years have been great liquidity years for startups.

Acquisition 127

Acquisition Trends Startup Marketing 127

Intercom, Inc.

DECEMBER 31, 2019

To give some perspective, there were about 300 million smartphones sold in 2010. And it’s not just the startups playing this game – Steve Jobs was proudly averse to the notion of subscriptions, and now Apple spends most of its earning calls boasting about the performance of its services division. There are about 3.2

Payment Solutions 259

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Software SaaS Payments 259

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 23, 2018

In other words, investors are concentrating capital in fewer startups. Consequently, this smaller number of startups has substantially longer runway, fueling a longer gestation period to series A. In 2011, the median startup raised a $0.5M Today, the median startup raises a $1.5M seed and a $3M Series A 9 months later.

Machine Learning 189

Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Startup Investment 189

Tom Tunguz

DECEMBER 15, 2014

Are startups growing much faster than they have in the past? The chart above plots the time required for startups to raise rounds at $1B or greater valuation, over the past ten years. The startup founded in 2010 that takes 7 years to reach the $1B mark hasn’t yet been granted enough time to achieve it.

Startup 100

Startup B2C Scale B2B 100

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2014

Below are two charts of data from venture-backed SaaS IPOs from 2010 to 2014. The chart on the right shows the startup’s trailing twelve months’ revenue at the time of their S-1. The chart on the left shows the average revenue per customer in $k at the time the company filed their S-1. Click for larger images.

Startup 113

Startup SaaS Revenue Enterprise 113

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 4, 2017

Let’s take a look at the Crunchbase data for US startups. Seed rounds have seen the greatest growth since 2010 from approximately 1000 rounds per year to more than 4000 rounds per year in 2014. Series As and Bs counts grew 40% from their 2010 figures before falling 20% in 2016. In 2010, there were 1.4

Finance 100

Finance Startup Investment Pricing 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 23, 2017

In January 2010, Andrew Parker wrote a post called the Spawn of Craigslist. Startups are taking advantage of this newly data-literate user base and carving out individual applications, replacing Excel with dedicated workflow that’s optimized for a particular function. The vacation rentals link gave rise to AirBnB and HomeAway.

Scale 198

Scale SMB Education Startup 198

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 22, 2021

There are about 20,000 active SaaS companies today, startups, pre IPO. But then in about 2010, we saw a shift. People have even more agency than they did in 2010 to decide what is it that they want to use at work, especially I would say in the hybrid distributed model that we’re in today? Here what do you see?

B2C 274

B2C Scale Consulting Software Review 274

The Angel VC

MAY 17, 2017

In our weekly investment team call earlier this week we decided to pass on two early-stage SaaS startups that were both on track to grow from zero to $100k in MRR in their first 12 months of going live. The other part is that even as recently as 6-24 months ago, we’d consider a SaaS startup with this growth pattern exceptional.

Business Model 180

Business Model Venture Capital SaaS Underperforming Technical Team 180

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 19, 2017

Though quite rare in 2010, startups have raised more than 750 second seed rounds in each of the last three years. This data shows that they are broadly accepted as a common way to finance an early stage startup. Startups that raise one seed round typically raise $1.0M It’s quite nearly always 2.

Marketing 100

Marketing Finance Startup Trends 100

SaaStr

JUNE 5, 2020

2004-2010 marked the early days of SaaS where the model was still risky, and cloud providers were competing hard with their on-prem predecessors. . What if a $5m ARR SaaS startup could do the same? . Because the SaaS model wasn’t entirely proven, venture capitalists took more risk, and expected a higher return. .

Venture Capital 217

Venture Capital Technical Review SaaS Scale 217

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 12, 2016

The chart above shows the share of market cap commanded by companies which went public in three different decades: the Nineties, the Dotcom era (2000-2010), and the Cloud era (2010-2020). Which era of companies drive this growth? Fifteen years on, Dotcom companies have finally superseded Nineties companies in aggregate value.

Marketing 100

Marketing Cloud Technology Innovation 100

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 6, 2014

The Benefit Corporation became an option in 2010 when Maryland’s legislature signed it into law. But, as James Surowiecki writes in “ Companies with Benefits, ” there is a new option called the B-Corporation, the Benefit Corporation. Subsequently, nearly twenty states have followed suit including California and Delaware.

Startup 100

Startup Consulting Technology Branding 100

Tom Tunguz

MAY 2, 2017

I plotted the mean round size of Series As from 2010-2016 in the bar chart above. They seem to vie more stridently to invest in startups in September, and relax most in March. There is no pattern to investment seasonality in the startups. Are there more prosperous months to raise than others? Also in December?

Startup 100

Startup Pricing Investment Data 100

Baremetrics

OCTOBER 21, 2021

All the data your startup needs Get deep insights into your company's MRR, churn and other vital metrics for your SaaS business. UXPin offers four subscription levels to suit the design needs of companies ranging from startups to large enterprises. A need to consolidate financial data in one place UXPin was founded in Poland in 2010.

Payment Services 98

Payment Services SaaS Payments Payments Payment Solutions 98

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 24, 2016

And this growth parallels the overall startup Series A size which has reached similar highs to rounds in 2000. And to put things into context, seed investment has grown 5x since 2010, Series A investment has doubled and Series B+ has tripled. That range is more indicative of the breadth of different rounds the market calls Series As.

Benchmarks 100

Benchmarks SaaS Pricing Investment 100

Casey Accidental

NOVEMBER 28, 2023

I hope that by studying these and other examples startups can get smarter about how they sequence their S-Curves and drive long term success for their companies. billion exit, Grubhub made a lot of mistakes. All three of these companies made some critical successful moves as well as major mistakes that set them back years.

Payments 62

Payments Scale Payment Methods Underperforming Technical Team 62