A billion dollar software tech company is founded every three months in the U.S.

http://blog.minming.net/post/35553963889/a-billion-dollar-software-tech-company-is-founded-every

by lominming • 14 years ago

219 111 14 years ago

blog.minming.net

andycroll• 14 years ago

Github?

lominming9• 14 years ago

Can't believe I missed that. Added!

rbn• 14 years ago

Tumblr was valued at $800Million last year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020483130457659...

adjohn• 14 years ago

nicira?

ronyeh• 14 years ago

Yup, $1.26B. Founded in 2007.

Seems like the author missed a couple... so maybe Ron Conway was right after all. :-)

lominming9• 14 years ago

Added!

netvarun• 14 years ago

A couple more to add: Splunk (Founded 2004), Workday (Founded Mar 2005)

lominming9• 14 years ago

Added!

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

Funny to think that based on those numbers Google could buy them all and still keep around 54 B.

btilly• 14 years ago

And yet, if Google did so it would destroy the value that they have, and would lose loads of money on the transaction.

ig12• 14 years ago

It's missing so many companies it's hard to know where to begin. The list probably represents only a fraction of billion dollar software companies founded over the last decade. It's heavily skewed towards both American and b2c companies.

Missing ones include: Vancl, Youku, Renren, Wonga, Bazaarvoice, Conduit, Klarna, nicira, Homeaway, Workday, Changyou, ServiceNow, Splunk, Ocado, Giant, Guidewire, DealerTrack, SuccessFactors, SourceFire, ArcSight, Popcap, Yandex, Betfair, ZipCar, Baidu, ExactTarget, etc.

lominming9• 14 years ago

Great list. I added a bunch of them. I should clarify that in the context of the quote, he was mostly talking about mostly software tech companies founded (or for the most part operated) in US. Hence, I did not include the China and Russia companies. I also classify ZipCar as not really a software tech company.

yannski2• 14 years ago

Well, then why do you count Vente Privée or Rovio ? ;-)

jon-wood• 14 years ago

I think its a common mistake to write off companies which have a physical aspect as "not software companies".

The company I work for delivers food to people, but we're very much a software company in that we couldn't possibly compete with the huge players in this market without smart software which lets us run it with the minimum of people. I'm fairly sure ZipCar are the same - there are many car hire organisations, but not that many which can get by without having to rent premises and huge numbers of people to look after car keys and signing in and out.

phreeza2• 14 years ago

Here is a public spreadsheet to work on. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnrABZ3E0SpidDF...

lominming9• 14 years ago

Thanks for the doc!

martincmartin• 14 years ago

ITA Software was acquired by Google for $700M. Endeca was acquired by Oracle for $1B. And what about VMWare?

fraserharris• 14 years ago

I think you missed the "in the U.S."

ig12• 14 years ago

That was added after my comment.

jklio3• 14 years ago

Are you serious about Quora? I'm going to go with no.[1] With the text blurring and desperate requests for Facebook signin details Quora is basically expertsexchange for SV insiders now.

Given the text blurring is a form of cloaking (showing one thing to the search engine, nothing to people who come in from a search) I think search engines should viciously rank them down too. And I don't care if there is some "easy" way to get around the blur (like the "scroll down" for expertsexchange or whatever it was), it's not obvious and it just pollutes the search results. Get rid of it. That said, as was mentioned elsewhere on HN recently, Stackoverflow needs a place for more meta questions to be moved rather than deleted as you can occasionally get a useful one that isn't just rehashing things we've seen 1000 times.

[1]http://www.quora.com/Programming-Languages/In-laymans-terms-...

Jabbles• 14 years ago

When I click on that link there's a "Close" button next to the sign-in button.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

Try scrolling down past the first answer. Subsequent answers have a blur effect applied to them.

majani• 14 years ago

You're right, it is cloaking. Is Google invested in Quora in any way that might compromise their judgement?

jklio3• 14 years ago

I just when back and checked, it's a png of blurred text so it isn't really cloaking. Google presumably can't see that text but it gets indexed from the question, the first answer and the first words of the other answers though. Either way it's a page that's mostly useless getting indexed. Are the results higher because Google thinks a series of images surrounded by relevant text probably have relevant content? Are the results higher from the days when they didn't blur and got a half decent page rank (all those links still pointing at them)? I think Google recalculates fairly frequently, and I personally haven't seen as much Quora in my searches - but it's hard to escape personalisation see the DuckDuckGo experiment - so maybe they are on the decline. That's another argument against them being a one billion dollar company though.

So it's not cloaking, it's just bad and annoying.

jwegan2• 14 years ago

In Quora's case the text blurring applies both to search engines and users. I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see. They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.

Also FYI, most major search engines have "secret" IPs from which they crawl websites using normal user agents (ex: Chrome, Firefox, etc). They then compare the results to the results from their main crawlers to detect the type of cloaking you referred to.

venus• 14 years ago

> I've visited the site as the googlebot user agent and it is exactly the same as what non-logged in users see

.. except, of course, that the googlebot just reads the HTML. The CSS3 blur only causes problems when you try to read the site visually, via a browser.

> They also aren't doing any tricks to hide the full response in the HTML.

Yes, that's why the googlebot can read it.

I don't know why you're bothering to argue that this isn't cloaking. It most assuredly is.

  cloak
  verb
  conceal, hide, cover, veil, shroud, mask, obscure, cloud

newman314• 14 years ago

Quora may be blurring things for both googlebot and users but it still does not excuse the fact that they are deliberately obscuring content for non-logged in users. So in this respect, they are no better than expertsexchange except maybe a less unfortunate name.

mochizuki• 14 years ago

Looking at this and thinking about how many companies created each year that are worth even a million dollars that aren't close to being on this, that must be an optimistic number.

With a more intricate list this could provide some neat data. Most successful time of year to start your company, synchronous business tactics used by those companies, I'm sure there's more.

kirillzubovsky• 14 years ago

So glad to see Scoutie.com made it on the list :) Thanks for putting it together. Encouraging!

MojoJolo2• 14 years ago

Wow. Every 3 months! I was thinking what 2011 and 2012 companies might be included in that list in the future?

Also, I noticed that most if not all of these companies are Silicon Valley startups. Maybe the frequency of billion dollar companies will increase if the list includes companies world wide.

lominming9• 14 years ago

That's the point of the list! It is really hard to predict now. We will know who will make it to the list in a couple of years.

MojoJolo2• 14 years ago

I'm excited to know those companies. I hope you update those list in the future!

pranavk2• 14 years ago

I personally feel its easy for a startup to start in West rather than starting in East. There are some problems in Eastern countries like India, China due to which not many of the startups are able to get converted into a really big one. They are still like slaves. While the quantity of startups getting successful is really high in western countries.

Don't argue that its because of intelligence, perhaps I think they are even better in this.

Yes perhaps its leadership.

panacea2• 14 years ago

Ability to market in the the most affluent markets, more likely.

When I say 'market' I mean top down know-your-customers and investors and partners intimately. Leverage the local connections etc.

Yes perhaps its local.

gtr32x• 14 years ago

Since you started in 1998, you should add in VMware as well.

supersaiyan• 14 years ago

Relative to how many funded?

Matt_Mickiewicz• 14 years ago

3673 companies in the US raised VC money in 2011:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/vc-investing-soars-22-perce...

997 of these where Internet companies.

tcgv• 14 years ago

It would be nice to know how much those companies are worth today.

yurylifshits• 14 years ago

Is there any evidence that Skillshare (on the list) is close to 1B valuation? Really surprised for that one.

lominming9• 14 years ago

It was just my personal attempt to highlight potential companies that may grow to a billion down the road. I maybe totally wrong.

panacea2• 14 years ago

I just checked. I've been given cookies by most of those companies.

confluence7• 14 years ago

People underestimate Quora. They underestimate both Quora and Google+ like they did with Twitter, Facebook, Blogger and YouTube before them.

What people don't seem to get about both Quora and Google+ is that they are networks not based around the people you just randomly happen to know - but instead around the people and things that you are actually interested in. There's a huge difference between the two.

They are interest-based social networks and are essentially pulling niche, technical, specific forums, specific blogs, and just general chatter into one mainstream and real time feed - away from the pseudonym driven, trolling, harsh, fractured, and separate niche areas that we currently have in many areas (Yes I know both Twitter/YouTube began like this - but they have slowly become things you put on your business card/real business use and are based upon).

Quora should not be underestimated as a SV centric bubbletastic startup - although it often appears that way. But then again, so did Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, and even YouTube.

Quora is where you go to hang out with people who actually share your interests (and not just a zip code), talk about the things that you really care about (not about who was the most drunk on the weekend) and just generally talk shop about the world, with the added benefit of a centralized repository where content bubbles up everyday (kind of like YouTube's subscriptions feature). No more refreshing pages :D.

Quora is like the Hacker News for everything else that doesn't already have its own Hacker News with really, really, freaking good UI, addictive game mechanics and really good content filtering.

Quora should not be underestimated. And neither should Google+.

dageshi• 14 years ago

Or Reddit? Which is the hackernews for everything else?

confluence7• 14 years ago

Still uses pseudonyms. Sounds like a small difference. It isn't.

Facebook existed before, on millions of forums, blogs, websites and various accounts. But what changed everything was using real names. It was the real names and social proof that changed everything from something a bunch of nerds used (like IRC/various chat services/various forums) - to something everyone needed to be on and used daily.

Reddit/HN will remain non-mainstream for the foreseeable future.

citricsquid3• 14 years ago

> Quora should not be underestimated

I don't have much of an opinion on Quora and want it to succeed, but your claims seem rather... grandiose. From what I've seen Quora fairs well in very specific situations (where it has a large userbase of people knowledgeable in that specific niche) and then it's mediocre everywhere else. I've never thought "this is the future" while using Quora.

Do you have any examples of Quora that show the potential you talk about? I guess it can be argued "If Quora has a large userbase that are knowledgable in every niche then it will take over the world!" but that sort of argument can extend to almost any service. I see Stackexchange as the biggest competitor to Quora and in my experience Stackexchange is fairing much better (both in users and interfaces, I'd much rather ask a question on a SE site vs. Quora, for example).

confluence7• 14 years ago

StackExchange still has the pseudonym problem. It is also about 10x as harsh and severely limits itself, by well, limiting the actions of their participating clientele. Stack Exchange has relegated itself with it's strict standards to little more than a technical help resource - for the vast majority of use cases.

You don't go to StackExchange to hang out - you go there to ask answer/ask questions. It's like Wikipedia.

On extrapolations:

All large future extrapolations appear, by definition, to be grandiose. If they weren't - well then it would be bloody well bleeding obvious what was about to happen then wouldn't it :D - and it would go without me having to say so.

> Quora fairs well in very specific situations (where it has a large userbase of people knowledgeable in that specific niche) and then it's mediocre everywhere else.

Same with anything else. This is a truism.

The only thing I can say to people is this:

Whenever people tell you to look into something that appears curious - try it for 2 weeks and make your own judgement.

Osmium• 14 years ago

I think the real problem is that a lot of people don't understand the value of a billion dollars.

Quora may be a great company, but is it worth that much?

Rastafarian• 14 years ago

Mentioning poor, useless Quora when the topic is billion dollar companies makes me laugh.

throwa2• 14 years ago

Is there really anything to underestimate in an expertexchange clone. I doubt there is but you can prove me wrong.

yakshay• 14 years ago

Or a company is estimated at a billion every 3 months. How many billion dollar software companies does we really have?

rshlo• 14 years ago

Great and inspiring list. But I think there should be a difference between companies that crossed the $1B worth in the open stock market, and companies that got this value by external purchase.

curiousdannii• 14 years ago

Would love to see this paired with a similar list showing operating profit.

Or to put it another way, how many billion dollar software companies are there whose value hasn't been created substantially by the markets alone?

netcan2• 14 years ago

Think of this as a list of companies that investors or acquirers are/were willing to pay $1b+ for.

If you want companies that have justified their valuation based on past profits, you will need to go to older dates.

eg 1998: OpenTable, Google, Rackspace, PayPal.

wikwocket• 14 years ago

This certainly interesting, but also interesting would be a dash of perspective: How many companies (in total) are founded every 3 months?

erichocean• 14 years ago

600,000 companies are founded each month in the US.

itry• 14 years ago

Does the same number of billion dollar companies die every 3 months?

netcan2• 14 years ago

Really awesome post. Thanks for compiling this.

You need to keep the date in mind when reading this though. More recent years will over-represent fast growers, underrepresent slow growers and include more speculative valuations (ie some companies will eventually exist the list).

Give 2010 another few years and it could be a completely different list. The 1998 list OTOH will probably stay pretty much the same.

fedxc• 14 years ago

So the key to success is to launch your company exactly 3 month after a successful one! :)

pranavk2• 14 years ago

ha ha ha !!!

maxplanck• 14 years ago

It feels like this list is somewhat invalid, given the fact the all companies values are being measured at different points during their lives.

jobigoud• 14 years ago

Hmm, where are the porn companies ?

olalonde• 14 years ago

There is no porn company worth more than a billion dollars.

jQueryIsAwesome2• 14 years ago

And yet they are a safer bet compared to your usual Startup. The demand will exist forever and the revenue model is pretty obvious (adult ads/products).

josefresco• 14 years ago

Would love to see the median value of said companies now. 2002 might have been the only sane year.

wolfparade• 14 years ago

homeaway is a publicly traded company. no need for an asterix. ticker: AWAY

macspoofing• 14 years ago

I don't know about some of those "billion dollar" valuations. But point taken, US is able to churn out very successful tech companies. We're doing something right.

recursive• 14 years ago

I've never been to quora before today. I've always understood it to be a general purpose Q&A site. Given all the chatter in this thread about it, I decided to go there to see what it's about.

I found this page for navigating the subject material: https://www.quora.com/directory/

Is it just me, or is this a rather opaque view of the content? For example, the "B" section for topics doesn't have "bicycles", but it does have "Bizplay - Black Magic Design". I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

A billion dollar software tech company is founded every three months in the U.S.

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