
The Billion Dollar Startup Club - kjhughes
http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/#2015
======
saslobin
@patel0phone asked if i'd share the thought process behind the visual.
challenge was to find an arresting way to bring users into the data within the
limitations of a browser. (we removed the viz on mobile)

i went through several iterations of charting forms -- treemap, bubbles, bars,
scatterplot w.different metrics as well as looking at a collection of graphics
that i find visually interesting.

we landed with this bar chart arrayed around a circle.

a lot of what i try to do with my work is to push traditional charting forms
into fresh presentation. if you're new to dataviz i'd recommend you learn the
traditional charting forms first and understand those deeply before you try
this at home.

it important to note this chart lives in context of all of the data --
including a straight bar chart within the table.

hope this helps. best of luck to you all!

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bhaumik
That's a really interesting way to display that trend. I'd love to hear about
the thought process that led to using that semi-circle visual. Any WSJ
designers/devs lurking HN? Also, has anyone seen something like this used with
other data sets?

When we built our own infographic to highlight "The Rise of Coding Bootcamps"
there was much debate on the best way to visualize this information. While I'm
happy with the result[1], there's definitely much room for improvement.

[1][http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic](http://www.thinkful.com/bootcamps/infographic)

~~~
didgeoridoo
As a frequent critic of arbitrary & misleading data visualizations... I love
it. It's a nice, compact way of showing off the data:

\- it shows a 40x+ range without transformations that might muddle the story

\- it captures the long, flat tail (partly an artifact of the artificial $1B
floor), which compacts nicely

\- the "focus" of the data is on the top quartile, which is permitted to
dominate the visual

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shpx
Kabam is worth a billion? Their business model is buy good underground games,
then squeeze every last cent out by making it pay2win. There is no good on
this earth.

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parag_c_mehta
Can you guys seriously redefine what startup means ? Eg. Flipkart started ~8
years ago, employs 15,000+ employees. What/How can it be called a startup ? If
acquisition of funds is the only definition of startup then all companies are
startups as at some point they all needed to raise funds.

~~~
andrewtbham
these are venture funded companies that haven't gone public.. the readers of
wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre-
ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private
equity guys looking to acquire companies.

~~~
shas3
> the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that
> might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in
> vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.

There are 300k brokers in the US. [1] WSJ has 2.5 million daily subscribers.
[2]

[1] [http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and-
fina...](http://www.bls.gov/ooh/sales/securities-commodities-and-financial-
services-sales-agents.htm) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal)

------
skosuri
Can someone explain to me how Theranos is worth $9 billion? Everytime I hear
about them, their "technology" sounds so sketchy that it's hard to think it is
not a scam. Is there so much promise behind closed doors that I'm just missing
something that's worth that much?

~~~
dr1337
While the tech looks sketchy, the company looks even sketchier. Look at the
About Us page - [https://www.theranos.com/our-
company](https://www.theranos.com/our-company)

One employee listed and a whopping sized board of directors, most of which
come from the government or the military. Smells like something straight from
the military industrial complex.

~~~
mattlutze
It really looks like their biggest malady is a junior web PR team. A lot of
the web site looks and reads like someone had a lot of good ideas but hadn't
really run/written for large projects (like a major corporate web site)
before.

~~~
puranjay
They use the word "actionable" right at the very beginning

Classic rookie copywriter mistake.

------
martingordon
I'm getting flashbacks of the Kevin Rose $60 million BusinessWeek cover.

~~~
puranjay
To be fair to BusinessWeek, Rose did get a $200 million offer from Google.
That $60 million wasn't wrong; Rose was.

To be even more fair, Digg collapsed because it made mistakes, but the field
it pioneered - crowd-curated news - is now a multi-billion dollar business.

------
curiouslurker
Why do companies with documented shady ethics like JustFab continue to excel?

~~~
rhizome
Capitalism doesn't discourage dirty tricks.

~~~
adventured
Yes it does. One very large factor in people trading with other people is
reputation. Whether we're talking 1910 or 2015. See: eBay (or a dozen other
obvious examples).

Maybe you're smarter when it comes to business than, say, Warren Buffett. His
theory is that having a good reputation is immensely important in business.

Businesses suffer or die all the time in the free market due to poor
reputations. You see those consequences at a small town level, and you see it
at a very large level.

To easily test your theory: try setting up a business in a small town. Proceed
to cheat or otherwise perform dirty tricks on all of your customers. See what
happens.

~~~
pm90
Agreed. Unfortunately, today's globalized world is very unlike a small town.
So, a lot of crooks can scam a whole bunch of people before they are
blacklisted as such.

~~~
Kiro
On the other hand globalization has made it much harder to scam in many ways
since information about scams spread instantly. Back in the days you could use
any simple trick and people would buy it over and over again since they had
never heard of it before. Nowadays the scammers need to be much more
inventive.

~~~
billmalarky
Multi-level marketing scams beg to differ.

~~~
Kiro
I don't know if I agree. MLM companies need to put some serious effort into
combating all the bad press they get on the internet (efforts which are
inventive indeed!). Without globalization it would be a walk in the park.

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rasz_pl
I especially enjoy all those 'valued at' companies with no product, no tech
demo, but promises and ideas.

------
krschultz
Nice graphic, but someone needs to update the valuation on Fab. I am sure they
are not worth 1.3 billion anymore.

~~~
mxfh
Also it's visually misleading, the area of these segments doesn't matter, it's
only the radius in a linear fashion.

Assuming the perceived value is most commonly interpreted as area: the larger
numbers look even bigger than they are by a magnitude since the area scales
with r²/2 (circular sector area) while the actual value r is only growing
linearly.

Simplified calculation (no doughnut, no offset):

    
    
           linear    area
       a   11     => 60 units
       b   46     => 1058 units
           difference in value b/a
           x4.2   => x17.6

~~~
jacques_chester
There's a whole chapter on mathematically troublesome graphics in _How To Lie
With Statistics_.

------
coke12
Note the valuations for Snapchat[1] and Pinterest[2] may have both roughly
doubled today, or at least soon will.

[1]
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat-s...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-17/snapchat-
said-to-seek-up-to-19-billion-value-in-funding-round) [2]
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion-
valua...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/pinterest-seeks-11-billion-valuation-
with-new-funding-1424311549)

------
lettergram
It's always difficult for me to view Chinese companies as a fair competitor.
The Chinese government plays favorites, and startups (more or less) have to
have connections and be supported by the party. If they aren't supported, they
wont be around very long.

Point being, it seems mildly disconcerting to me that Chinese companies are
compared to U.S. counterparts.

------
zkhalique
OK explain this: [http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-
club/?co=Fab](http://graphics.wsj.com/billion-dollar-club/?co=Fab)

Versus this: [http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-
valua...](http://qz.com/300825/how-fab-com-went-from-a-1-billion-valuation-
to-a-15-million-fire-sale/)

Who is right?

~~~
adamnemecek
WSJ's table lists the valuation date to be June 1, 2013. The Quartz article is
from Nov 2014. So you do the math.

~~~
zkhalique
Well their label shouldn't say "valuations as of Feb 2015" then

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portman
Does anyone know why this exclusion exists?

    
    
        Excluded from this list are companies that were
        majority-controlled by an institutional investment 
        firm at one point. 
    

I presume this is why Supercell ($3B valuation) is not included, because they
were at one point 51% owned by Softbank. But I can't understand why that
matters.

------
dkhenry
So is that the total list ? Is it possible that there is a company valued over
1b that they could have missed. I am seeing lots tech companies, but not much
non tech companies.

~~~
pkaye
The word "tech" has lost all its meaning now... basically if you do anything
online your are considered a tech company.

~~~
lugg
It hasn't lost its meaning so much as its managed to find its way into
_everything_.

------
personjerry
What happened to Zalando and Rocket Internet between September and October?

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Rainymood
Am I the only one really surprised to see Razer pop in there somewhere?

And really, how many of those are we still able to call 'startups', in my
opinion almost all of these 'startups' have transcended the 'startup' phase
and now are simply 'companies'.

------
jsprogrammer
Thanks for horribly breaking my back button WSJ/Murdoch.

------
eliteposter
Domo (Domo.com) should also be listed.

