One of the more amazing stories of the Billion Dollar Unicorn Club members is that of Taboola. Taboola is an online content discovery platform that has shown how to grow from zero-revenue for the first four years to a revenue run-rate of over $100 million in the sixth.
The market is eagerly awaiting the IPO of another unique Billion Dollar Unicorn club member – Etsy. Over the past decade, Etsy has become the go-to place for one-of-a-kind artisan products. By establishing their presence in a niche space, they have managed to create a successful business model that not only earns high revenues, but is also profitable.
I was one of the few people bullish about Tim Cook’s ability to steer Apple forward. I was right. It appears that there is nothing to stop Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) blockbuster growth. The recent quarterly results reported earlier this week blew out market expectations and showed the strength of the company’s financials. Apple not only reported record earnings, but also ended the quarter with an unimaginable $178 billion in cash.
Microsoft has had an eventful beginning to the year 2015. The company is charging down the path of its mobile and cloud-first initiative and Windows gradually becomes a supporting actor in their movie.
The Billion Dollar Unicorn Club has several companies with high valuations and little or no revenues. One such company is San Francisco-based content discovery app Pinterest. But it appears that things are beginning to change as Pinterest scouts for a viable business model. Analysts are projecting revenues based on the early experiments.
As I mentioned in my book Billion Dollar Unicorns, valuation without revenues have returned with a vengeance. The climax of these valuations was Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. Another Social Messaging firm Snapchat is going through similar valuation cycles.
According to a recent comScore report, the total online retail spending for the November–December period in 2014 was estimated to grow 16% to $61 billion. The researcher expected sales through mobile devices to see higher growth rates. Desktop generated e-tail sales were projected to grow 14% to $53.2 billion and mobile commerce was expected to grow 25% to $7.9 billion. According to the ChannelAdvisor Same Store Sales (SSS) report, during the November-December period, holiday sales did report the expected 16% growth.
According to recent market reports, the world will see 1 million minutes of video cross the Internet every second by 2018. Analysts estimate that video streaming will account for 80%-90% of global consumer traffic by 2019. TV and video streaming services provider Netflix is already gearing up to cater to this growth.
Continuing with our coverage on Billion Dollar Unicorns, here is an EdTech company Pluralsight, which has successfully bootstrapped their business and followed a roll-up strategy with additional funding to move closer to becoming a proud member of the club.
Continuing with our discussions on Billion Dollar Unicorn companies, here is another interesting company. Online education-focused player Lynda.com recently became a member of the club when their last round of funding held earlier this month valued them at $1 billion.