Billion Dollar Unicorns: BlaBlaCar Expands Internationally with Acquisitions

There has been a surge of funding from VCs that has been driving the meteoric growth in valuation for car sharing firms including Uber and Lyft. I have my reservations on valuations of these companies. But then, there are companies like ride-sharing BlaBlaCar that have managed to enter the Billion Dollar Unicorn club while avoiding the accompanying regulatory heat and by being able to develop a scaleable model that caters to today’s shared economy model.

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Billion Dollar Unicorns: Good, Bad and Ugly

You’ve heard me and others comment on the issue of artificially bloated up Unicorns and their questionable exit paths into the public market, or even into the arms of private suiters. In this post, I want to highlight some really good Unicorns, lest you think all Unicorns are artificially bloated. And, I will also point out the at risk ones.

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Focus on Sustainable Growth, NOT Growth at All Cost

You may have read my recent piece Billion Dollar Unicorns: Box Struggles in its Public Avatar, where I discussed how this darling of the VCs is finding the public market rather unfriendly:

Their stock is trading at $13.71 with a market capitalization of $1.65 billion. It touched a high of $24.73 soon after listing in January this year. Box had listed on the exchange at $14 a share. As expected, its valuation has fallen since pre-IPO levels. Prior to listing, Box had raised $564.1 million with their last round of $150 million valuing them at $2.4 billion.

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State of the Entrepreneurship Union: The Disease Has Become an Epidemic

I have always been bullish about the spread of entrepreneurship as a global phenomenon. My organization has worked diligently towards propagating the lessons learned from successful entrepreneurs to those coming after, on a global scale. It has been thrilling to watch the world adopt entrepreneurship as a key tool for economic development.

One of my worries have always been that the Silicon Valley disease of equating entrepreneurship with venture capital financing will also spread, corrupting and misleading inexperienced entrepreneurs around the world.

Well, I am very sorry to report that the disease has, indeed, spread.

In fact, it is now an epidemic.

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Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to find people with experience in Prague?

Vince Steckler: Not too successfully. For the most part, what we did was transplant people. For example, I brought over my old deputy from Symantec to run sales. He ran sales out of Prague for two or three years and groomed one of the Czech guys.

Sramana Mitra: He’s no longer with the company?

Vince Steckler: No, we rotated him back to the States. He runs Corp Dev in the States. His number two in Prague took over running sales. It doesn’t really work well with remote management or transplanted management. You have to have the skills transferred. We’ve done a fair amount of that. Then, we’ve moved heavily into three areas. There are four popular mobile security products in the world. None of them are American. The big ones globally are the two Chinese companies and the two Czech companies—us and AVG. Obviously, we know each other very well. We are very big in mobile. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You were able to cater to all that from Prague?

Vince Steckler: Both from Prague and the community. Prague is very cosmopolitan. We can do a lot of support and customization but what’s most important is the community. Most users don’t realize where the company is from. Brazilians tend to think the company is American. Mexicans, who know it’s so popular in Brazil, thinks it’s Brazilian. Very few realize that it’s Czech. When they do, they don’t necessarily know what Czech is.

Sramana Mitra: What is the customer acquisition strategy?

Vince Steckler: The customer acquisition strategy is pretty straightforward. It’s to build a damn good product. It’s almost like Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams. Build it, and they will come. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me how you got there.

Vince Steckler: It’s basically a few things. When the company went into France, we started at the community side. The competition in France at that time had English language products, which doesn’t really go very real well in France. So we built a French language product. Since everyone in the company was Czech, there wasn’t anyone who knew French but there was one developer who claimed he knew French. It turns out his experience with French was because he had a couple of French girlfriends. The quality wasn’t very good. >>>

Building a Unicorn from Prague: Avast CEO Vince Steckler (Part 4)

Vince Steckler: It was very intriguing because it was a very engineering-oriented company. Of the 40 people, there was one person in Finance, one person in Marketing and Sales, and 38 engineers. They weren’t doing very good business because there wasn’t anyone paying attention to it. I actually joined there taking what people would probably consider a lot of risk and massive base pay reduction.

Sramana Mitra: They were doing all online?

Vince Steckler: All online. It was a freely distributed product with a premium product. They were one of the early starters of the freemium model. There wasn’t much difference between the free product and the paid product. From the time someone downloaded the free product until the first time they got asked for any money was 15 months. There was just so many obvious things you could do, but it was also a product that had a very loyal user base, which is very important. >>>