Posts

See an updated version of this post: Trends in the Startup Acquisition Market in 2015

The venture-backed startup IPO market has remained strong over the past five quarters, with 20 or more IPOs in each of those quarters. I was curious how the strength of the IPO market has impacted the acquisition market. In particular, how the number and value of startup acquisitions has changed, and more specifically, whether there are any trends in the sizes of acquisitions.

It would seem hardware startups are booming. First, the amazing success of the GoPro business and IPO, which set a 23-year high-water mark for a consumer hardware company. Second, there seems to be a growing number of hardware startups bubbling in incubators like Lemnos Labs and Highway1. Third, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites have enabled hardware startups to mitigate one of the biggest risks in starting out: obtaining a reliable proxy for consumer demand. But do the data support the idea that the hardware ecosystem is as vibrant as it seems?

Benjamin Morris, a writer for arguably the best computational journalism publication, fivethirtyeight, published “Lionel Messi is Impossible” which describes in words, statistics and charts why Lionel Messi is one of the greatest players in the world. Even if you’re not a soccer/football fan, the article is worth reading because it’s one of the finest examples of synthesizing data and a story to convey a point I’ve read in a very long time.

I was eight years old and running with a dime in my hand
Into the bus stop to pick up a paper for my old man
I’d sit on his lap in that big old Buick and steer as we drove through town
He’d tousle my hair and say son take a good look around. This is your hometown

A terrific SaaS VP of Marketing once told me, “If the sales team is focused on hitting this quarter’s revenue target, then the marketing team ought to be focused on next quarter and the following quarter.” In SaaS companies, one of the marketing department’s primary responsibilities is generating sufficient customer interest to enable the company to achieve their revenue targets.

If that’s the case, determining how and when to scale a sales team in a SaaS company is contingent upon the marketing team’s metrics. It would be a mistake to hire a swath of salespeople, assign them quotas and then fail to provide them with enough inbound lead flow to succeed. In that case, marketing would be the limiting factor in the business.

Earlier this week, the Commerce Department announced US GDP in Q1 2014 fell by 3%, the most in a quarter since the recession. I’ve linked to the WSJ’s chart depicting the trend above. The decline was 3x greater than forecasted. Silicon Valley seems unfazed.

As I wrote about earlier this year, we’ve seen a decline in the public markets of about 25% in consumer stocks and 45% in enterprise stocks. But since that time, public tech companies have witnessed a small recovery. Both enterprise and consumer companies are up 18% from their 10 month lows.

Google revealed many novel projects and products at yesterday’s Google IO Conference. At the moment, I’m most curious about the development of Android Wear, in part because of the beautiful Motorola 360 watch and in part because I suspect connected watches bring substantial change to the mobile device market.

It’s easy to write off watches as a niche product. But the addressable market of Android users is now large enough that even a single digit market penetration means tens of millions of users and a potentially interesting new platform for startups to build applications upon. Android counts 1B monthly active users on the platform. A 5% marketshare implies 50M watch users. The total mobile market is now sufficiently large that even niche segments amass substantial user bases. For example, phablets, phones with 5 inch screens or larger which are frequently scoffed at, now represent 21% of Android sales.

Last week, the team at Wharton in San Francisco invited me to speak at the Entrepreneurs Workshop. I chose the topic of the “Five Forces Shaping the Fundraising Market” and prepared a Mary Meeker style presentation, with a chart and a bullet point on each slide, to illustrate the forces in tension. It was great fun.

I’ve embedded the slides from the presentation above and will link to the video once it’s live. To help provide some context to charts, I’ve summarized the five forces below. These are the five major forces shaping the fundraising market today:

There’s a cyclicality to fundraising. Certain sectors rise quickly and become competitive while others decline. I’ve been wondering about the state of the market. First, which sectors are in vogue now in Seed investing and Series A investing? Second, is there a delay between the sectors attracting seed capital and Series A capital? In other words, do seed investors see trends before VCs do?

Jill LePore’s New Yorker polemic “The Disruption Machine” attempts to debunk the incredibly popular Innovator’s Dilemma, a theory written by HBS professor Clayton Christensen. I’ve been reading the debate around it with some interest. It’s becoming a really interesting conversation but I think the debate is focused on the wrong thing - whether or not these ideas are absolutely correct, even axiomatic. They aren’t always true. But that doesn’t mean these concepts are useless. Quite the opposite.