About 15 years since the creation of the first SaaS companies, public SaaS companies account for 14% of total software revenues generated by public companies, a figure growing at about 17% per year. Over the last ten years, the total amount of revenue generated by software companies has tripled from $53B to $169B, meaning SaaS companies are both taking share and growing the market.
Starting in late 2015 through the first quarter of 2016, founders have shifted their seed fundraising strategies toward a single investor. Seeds led by a single investor have increased by 50% in these trailing six months. How much of this trend is due to greater participation of venture capitalists investing in the seed market?
The chart above plots the number of seeds rounds by year. Rounds with VC participation are marked in blue, and those without VCs in red. Both types of rounds have increased by about 5x since 2010. Rounds without VC participation seem to be roughly twice as frequent as those with venture funds. This pattern hasn’t changed in the last five years.
Party rounds symbolized the heyday of the startup seed market just a last year. Called parties because of the number of investors who collaboratively financed seed rounds of startups, the lists became almost comically long as seed sizes ballooned and investor syndicates swelled with them. Recently, I have heard from founders that they are less interested in party rounds, but does the data support the case?
Last week, Facebook launched the messenger chatbot platform, which like Slack, Telegram and others, presents a big market opportunity for startups to innovate. In addition, the companies and products that determine how to most efficiently distribute their product on these new platforms will benefit from user curiosity and less competition, both of which result in lower cost-of-customer acquisition.
“All new ideas are combinations of old ideas, but not all idea combinations are created equal,” wrote Frans Johannsen. Mick Pearson designed the Eastgate office building in Harare, Zimbabwe based on techniques he observed termites employ to stabilize the internal temperature of their nests. Remarkably, the Eastgate maintains an ambient temperature between 73-78°F despite variances in external temperatures from 58° to 88°. Johannsen argues in his book that most innovation comes at the intersection of fields, and Pearson is just one example.
Daniel Kahneman wrote about his experiences with the inside/outside bias. Kahneman, a team of graduate students, and the Dean of the Hebrew University School of Education collaborated on curriculum for judgment and decision-making for high schools. At one point, Kahneman surveyed his team to estimate the amount of time remaining to complete project.
The group’s opinion ranged from 18 to 30 months. The Dean, who had developed several textbooks in the past, initially concurred with the group. But Kahneman prodded him on the timelines for his other projects, at which point the Dean reflected and responded previous teams completed these projects in 7 to 10 years’ time. Thinking as an insider, a member of the team, the Dean dramatically underestimated the scope of the project remaining, despite his expertise. Ultimately, the book was completed eight years later. Inside/outside bias.
About one third of US startups that raise a seed round raise a Series A. The larger the seed investment, the greater the odds the company successfully raises the next round. A $500,000 seed round results in a series A 20% of the time, while $1.5M seed increases the chances to 30%, an increase of half. larger seed rounds enable early-stage companies to experiment more, hire more aggressively, recover from mistakes better and attain more of the milestones necessary to raise a series A.
The Future of Machine Intelligence is a free collection of 10 interviews machine learning experts filed by David Beyer. The interviews explain exactly where we are with the state-of-the-art, the challenges to advanced machine learning, and some of the applications.
In the last interview, Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google, describes sequence-to-sequence machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that has been used to create descriptions of images, and could be used to summarize a 20 minute video into four descriptive sentences. In fact, this summarization ability isn’t limited to graphical content:
Over the last six years, seed rounds have grown in size by 12% annually. Series As have grown by 14%, series Bs by 9%, series Cs by 14% and series Ds by 11%. In that same timeframe, the median series A and series C has doubled. Median seed rounds have more than tripled in size.
Q1 venture capital investment remains steady relative to Q4 2015 at about $15 billion, but down from the near records attained in 2015. Over the last five years, seven of the twenty-nine quarters have reached or exceeded the $15 billion mark, all of them within the last two years. So, on a historical basis, venture capitalists are still investing at rates substantially above average.