BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011

http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/20110516/best-young-tech-entrepreneurs-2011/

by pg • 15 years ago

137 66 15 years ago

images.businessweek.com

pg10• 15 years ago

Congratulations to Tutorspree, WePay, Bump, Greplin, Hipmunk, and Disqus!

akharris• 15 years ago

Thanks PG!

billclerico• 15 years ago

PG - thanks for giving two young guys from the east coast with a crappy prototype a chance!

earbitscom• 15 years ago

This slideshow looks like a YC photo album. Congrats, Paul.

pclark2• 15 years ago

6 out of 20 of the entrepreneurs were funded by YC. How incredible is that?

il• 15 years ago

And many listed doing YC as the best funding decision they ever made.

dh2• 15 years ago

How sad that they only listed companies that got funding. It is not a good culture to look at funding as success, how about growth, revenue or even profit.

pclark2• 15 years ago

raising funding is a reasonable indicator of being in vaguely the right direction of success (defined by your metrics) at an early stage, do you not think?

gyardley• 15 years ago

Hmmm. Honestly, no - it's quite possible to raise a decent amount of seed funding today before you've got any metrics to share at all, based off of the team and how well the team presents the idea.

pg10• 15 years ago

It's true that funding is only a step toward success. I'm constantly reminding founders of that. But as of now, at least, it is empirically a necessary one. Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like (by revenues, market cap, number of users), and you'll find the number that didn't take outside funding is zero or near it.

It's an interesting phenomenon that all the biggest successes take outside funding. Perhaps the reason is that the better you are, the better terms you can get money on, and for any given startup, there are terms so good you'd be stupid not to take money at them.

rimantas• 15 years ago

What about making a list of unsucessfull startups? I bet there be a lot of them with funding too. I am with 37signals on this one — funding only teaches you to spend money.

Even if funding is the first step to success it is still wrong to pronounce startups most sucessfull based only on that. How about waiting till they start to to make money?

Alex3917• 15 years ago

"Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like (by revenues, market cap, number of users), and you'll find the number that didn't take outside funding is zero or near it."

I think looking at how much money the founders made would be the most objective measure. Of course you're going to be able to create a bigger company if you go out and raise a few million bucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll personally be better off in five years.

truthseeker2• 15 years ago

I think the key is 'When did they take the money?' is it before traction or after traction. Yes, it would be stupid to not take money when it is cheap and you have traction.

If majority got funding before traction, that would indicate that VCs/angels are really good at evaluating teams.

rhizome• 15 years ago

I'm inclined to think that the management help (or "help" depending on one's attitude) that typically accompanies funding plays a significant role here. Funded companies usually get access to market(ing) expertise that solo people don't. I don't think that's an absolute rubric, but it can help companies penetrate.

replicatorblog• 15 years ago

You are right that any truly transformative tech company has raised outside money. However, it seems like there is a shadow tech scene comprised of substantial companies that have self funded. e.g.

CSN Stores - $300MM+ annual revenue/ bootstrapped

MailChimp - Approaching $100MM/ bootstrapped

Club Penguin - $350MM acquisition, heard they had a little angel money, but no VC

Ganz/Webkinz - Kind of a startup within a small manufacturing biz, but they have mid 9 figures in revenue.

SparkFun/iFixit - Both $20+MM in revenue with no outside investment.

Provocraft has $100MM+ in virtual good sales

Granted, most of these aren't household names in the tech world, but all thrive based on web tech. I'm sure there are others beyond the ones I know, but there seems to be a playbook that can get a company to $100MM+ without VC.

In closing, I agree with your thesis, and Sequoia's old homepage would back you up 100%, but do you think companies like the ones above are just outliers or are not successful enough?

davidw• 15 years ago

> Construct a list of the most successful technology startups however you like

At this stage in my life, I'm not so interested in most, but in average, meaning: sure all of the really huge companies took funding, but are people who took funding, on average, more successful? In other words, I'm more interested to a surer path to a million dollars than an outside shot at 100 million.

I don't know the answer, but it's an interesting question.

dh2• 15 years ago

I think you are very wrong in this case. The list is not looking for the largest companies in any of those categories. Clearly those that are huge companies took funding along the way to grow, but the list is of young founders and you can easily generate a list of young founders with huge success that did not take funding.

I think the problem with lists like this is it creates a culture of celebrating the funding part only, not the hard work that comes later and the true success that the investor wants.

nhangen• 15 years ago

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I recognize the need for funding (for some, not all), but I hate using it as the primary barometer for success.

How about revenue, or users, or even active users?

It's just damn disappointing to see that the mantra being spread is "raise a ton of cash or bust," and that people not raising money are often ignored.

imjk• 15 years ago

Anyone else see this as a thinly veiled advertisement for the venture capital syndicate. How could the two most important categories on the Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011 be "Funding" and "Wisest Funding Decision?" Everyone's answer seems to be, "Yeah, the best thing we ever did was take $X MM from X venture capital."

LostInTheWoods2• 15 years ago

I don't understand the age discrimination. Is there a "Best Old Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011"?

spydertennis2• 15 years ago

The younger you are the less time you've had to achieve something. Therefore it's more impressive when you do.

robertk• 15 years ago

First statement is true. Second statement is false.

sosuke• 15 years ago

If you setup the list I've no doubt that people would love to see it.

stevenj• 15 years ago

Really cool to see several YC companies listed.

I really wish I could invest in YC.

I bet YC will (still) be a notable player in the industry 20 years from now.

edw519• 15 years ago

Congratulations, Jason Baptiste!

I made a point of meeting Jason when we lived in Miami at the same time. I had to meet this guy who made so many great comments here at Hacker News.

Glad to see you've moved on to bigger and better things. It was only a matter of time. Looking forward to hearing great things about Onswipe.

brianbreslin• 15 years ago

Ed do you still live in Miami?

Ditto on congrats to jason

jasonlbaptiste• 15 years ago

Ed, thank you, it means a lot :). Hope to see you again before my next time in Miami.

pitdesi• 15 years ago

For those who commented on the age discrimination, Businessweek has this list of overall most promising startups:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/06/0627_fresh_entrepren...

iamelgringo• 15 years ago

Just realizing how small the startup community really is. I've had drinks with a quarter of the people on that list at Hackers & Founders over the last 3 years.

Cheers, mates. Next round's on you. :)

rishi• 15 years ago

Solid list and congrats to everyone on it.

I'm not a fan of how much emphasis BusinessWeek puts on the funding amount. It really is the only data point they write about. Would like to see revenue or users... or something else.

tlb• 15 years ago

Funding events are usually announced publicly, while revenue isn't. Revenue is also hard to compare between product, service, and advertising-supported companies.

run4yourlives• 15 years ago

As an "outsider", the only thing I really take from this - besides seeing the prominence of YC startups - is that there certainly is a shit ton of money chasing unproven ideas.

I mean, all of these products seem on the surface to be viable entities. I suppose that alone is better than what was happening ten years ago. However the issue I have is that the degree they need to succeed just to be a positive return is sometimes bordering on the outlandish.

Groupon - a BILLION dollars? Seriously? It's news if an entire industry is worth this much, let alone a single company.

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but a lot of this stuff seems to be overvalued in the extreme.

dxbydt• 15 years ago

Valuation is not revenue is not profitability. Say your dicey tech stock has a beta of 2 & the S&P500 is expected to make 5% this year. CAPM says you'll have an expected return on capital assets of 10% given the zero risk-free rates we have now. That 10% figure in turn drives a valuation model where you plugin rosy growth probabilities & factor in the exploding populations in the emerging markets & do the all important scenario-analysis on what if just 0.1% of those folks bought my product. That spits out numbers that'll make your head spin. I've seen $1 iphone apps valued at $100 million simply cause that's how the valuation model is set up. Financial math is simply legalized delusion :)

pg10• 15 years ago

Whether Groupon is overvalued depends on its price to earnings ratio. What is its current P/E ratio?

southpolesteve• 15 years ago

I disagree. P/E is just one way of valuing a company.

Regardless of their current valuation, my personal opinion is that Groupon faces serious issues regarding the long term sustainability of their business model. They have dominated an ecosystem that will eventually balance itself. I am skeptical that they can maintain their current valuation through that process.

kongqiu2• 15 years ago

What is Greplin's current P/E ratio?

Clearly P/E on its own is not the complete story.

truthseeker2• 15 years ago

I installed Bump on my iPhone but used it just once. Any one knows how Bump is doing in terms of traction and usage?

lurker19• 15 years ago

It's not.

spencerfry• 15 years ago

I've got so many friends that shoulda made this list, but fly under the radar.

kongqiu2• 15 years ago

I'm probably not the only one who'd be interested in an alternative list...

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

Wow, not one of those has any roots whatsoever in science or engineering, except maybe Meraki.

Is this just media selection bias, or is Silicon Valley really just turning into Marketing Valley?

tyler• 15 years ago

Greplin has to do huge scale information retrieval. This probably counts as engineering. (See: SIGIR)

kmfrk• 15 years ago

Quora's on the list. Go figure. :)

pg10• 15 years ago

What do you mean by roots in science or engineering?

juiceandjuice2• 15 years ago

I suppose the meaning of "tech" is somewhat subjective, but to me it seems like most of the companies mentioned purely provide a platform or a service to consumers or businesses, largely with the motivation of selling a consumer something.

I guess I hoped there would be some cool startup working on non-linear optics that I've never heard of, or some bioinformatics startup changing the way we do medicine. Research spin-offs, I guess. I understand there's a lot more intellectual overhead in some of these things, and maybe they just aren't as glamorous or something, but I was hoping to see something along those lines.

bugsy• 15 years ago

Got halfway through the list and gave up. So no one builds products anymore.

delinka• 15 years ago

I really wish the mainstream media (oh, and US automobile manufacturers) would use the same calendar that we mere mortals use.

sahillavingia• 15 years ago

Where's Mark Zuckerberg?

rms• 15 years ago

He's transcended lists like this.

RealGeek• 15 years ago

Wonder how many of them are dropouts?

BusinessWeek's Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs of 2011

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