When Should You Move To Silicon Valley?

The question continues to come up often in our work with global entrepreneurs, so further to my earlier Harvard Business Review piece, I will add more color to it. First, here’s a recap from the HBR piece:

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When Will the Design Innovation Bubble Burst?

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Return on investment is diminishing for all businesses and investors are rushing to Silicon Valley startups to improve their portfolios’ performance in the hunt for profit. High profile successful startups, such as AirBnB, Uber, and Tesla may mistakenly lead investors into believing that by applying design, innovative startups can dramatically change the odds of creating breakthrough innovations and successful businesses. What will happen when the music stops and there are just too few chairs to go around? >>>

The Commoditization of Venture Capital

The venture capital market is getting more and more irrational every day. VentureBeat just reported this week that VCs are ‘collecting logos’ of unicorn companies.

According to Pitchbook, more than 60 percent of all VC-invested capital went to rounds of more than $25 million in 2014, the highest percentage since the dotcom boom. There were 414 rounds of $25+ million last year, 50 percent more than the 276 rounds in 2013. VC capital invested jumped $20 billion from 2013 to 2014, while the number of financings fell by 16 percent.

Historically, private company valuations have largely been tied to valuations in the public market. But there is now growing concern that VC valuations have exceeded reasonable public valuations — a dangerous sign. Facebook’s $22 billion acquisition of WhatsApp has inflated valuation expectations. Meanwhile, potential tech buyers such as Google, Yahoo, Alibaba, Apple, and Microsoft have tens of billions of dollars in cash holdings. Series D+ valuations saw a 50 percent jump from 2013 to 2014. Valuations now exceed some of the closely watched historical exit parameters. We’ve also seen a significant increase in median Series B valuations. Capital invested in late-stage rounds was up to $11.5 billion in Q2 and $10.6 billion in Q4, representing the only two $10+ billion quarters since the dotcom boom. Seed rounds declined to 221 in Q4 versus 564 in Q1 2013.

I discussed the danger of overvalued private unicorns in Why Not All Private Unicorns Will Become Public Unicorns earlier.

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Raising Money From 75 Angels: Manmeet Singh, CEO of Dataguise (Part 2)

Manmeet Singh: I started thinking of better ways to secure data. That’s when I started thinking about data masking. Data masking can keep the data relevant and useful for non-production, and in certain cases, production environment also and take the personal PII and PCI values out of it. I found a couple of people who shared the same ideas and we started this company.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company going, you said you raised $900,000 in the beginning. Before you raised the money, what did you do to validate? Did you have a set of early customers, or at least, a customer discussion? What was the validation process like?

Manmeet Singh: That’s a good question. My validation was my consulting group. >>>

Successfully Crowdfunding Design Driven Startups

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Design-driven startups are ideal for attracting funding on crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Crowdfunder. However, competition for funds is fierce and only the top percentile receives significant funding. For example for Kickstarter “Design” projects only the top half percentile receive funding in excess of half a million and the average funding is $7,500. Thus, funding on Kickstarter follows the Power Law where the top percentile receives the bulk of the pledges and the funding then dwindles down to nothing. >>>

This Is How to Create Wealth for the Middle Class

The world is becoming a more unequal place everyday. The concentration of wealth at the tip of the economic pyramid is increasing.

The Economist recently did a piece on the subject:

A NEW paper by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics suggests that, in America at least, inequality in wealth is approaching record levels. The authors examine the share of total wealth held by the bottom 90% of families relative to those at the very top. In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until well after the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks to collapsing wealth among richer households, broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and almost the same share as the bottom 90% of the population.

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Startup Accelerator Applying Multisided Crowdsourcing

By Guest Author Soren Petersen

Identifying and attracting potential startup firms has so far been a game of chance, with far too much money chasing far too few opportunities. Those most experienced at this game are leading Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms (VC firms). Studies at Harvard University show that entrepreneurs receiving financing from VC firms have only an eighteen percent chance of success. However, a learning curve does take place and if those same entrepreneurs succeed and obtain VC backing for a second startup, they now have a thirty percent success rate. >>>

How To Monetize a Q&A Site: Answers.com CEO David Karandish (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: In this strategy of being the a customer service portal for brands, the business model around that is not exactly an advertising business model; it’s more a SaaS business model, isn’t it?

David Karandish: That’s where half of the revenue comes from, but we leveraged the Advertising.com business model to build out the subscription piece. Three years ago, we had no subscription revenue. Today, it’s approximately half of our overall revenue. We were believers in both. We’re not against the dot-com side. We’re really excited about what we can do on the advertising there, but we’re looking at it saying that if we restrict ourselves to just Answers.com, we’re missing a big market where some of the most commercial questions and answers are available—or should be available—on some of the top websites of the world.

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