
Startups from 2010: Acquired, Pivoted or Still Going? - chmars
http://blog.louisgray.com/2014/06/50-top-startups-from-2010-acquired.html
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pbiggar
Its funny that lists of top 50 startups basically only include consumer/social
startups. Square is the largest business on that list that could be considered
B2B, but even then its about as consumer-facing as a B2B company can be. After
that you have to wait to Echo in #32, though while selling B2B, its end users
are all consumers.

I remember 2010 as the peak of time when all the excitement was about
mobile/social/location startups, so I guess its no surprise that a list then
only includes that kind of company. SaaS (esp B2B SaaS) [1], is basically
completely absent from the list.

I see people making the mistake of thinking consumer companies are the only
companies out there, but hopefully people will start to see that SaaS
companies are worth discussing in these lists. Investors and public markets
are already in love with SaaS, so maybe the 2014 list will be more
interesting.

[1] Before any pedants say that all of these are SaaS because the software is
hosted and thus delivered as a service, please don't. SaaS as a business model
means paying for a service via a recurring revenue model.

~~~
louismg
There's no question I wrote this with a consumer/social filter. I didn't go
into enterprise (like storage, for example), even though I worked 8 1/2 years
at a network storage company. There's definite bias toward a Twitter platform
that never materialized.

I was careful to say "50 Top" instead of "Top 50". I know it's nuanced, but I
didn't want it to be an end-all be-all king of lists. Just "Hey - here's 50
I'm watching."

~~~
AVTizzle
"50 Top" vs "Top 50" \- I didn't realize that, but you're right, it's a subtle
yet important distinction. Well said.

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quaunaut
#28, Justin.tv, needs an addendum:

Most of the team(including Justin himself) now is working on Twitch.tv, a
games streaming platform that is doing extremely well and is under rumor to be
bought by Google for $1b, though that deal might have gone away considering it
was leaked extremely early.

~~~
louismg
Thanks for the update. No doubt I didn't give a full bio for every company.
I'll add the first bit.

~~~
emmett
Actually Twitch is a 100% pivot of Justin.tv. We took the entire team working
on JTV, the platform, the cap table, etc. and pivoted to a specific vertical
that had been promising on JTV. (I'm the CEO)

~~~
louismg
Acknowledged. Thanks for checking in.

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aw3c2
This should include a "did they leave their users in the rain" column, ala
[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

~~~
louismg
So you're saying you want this incredibly long post to be even longer? :)

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001sky
This is a very interesting post. Very few people tend to go back and look at
their thought process historically like this. Not just evaluating a single
action, but a portfolio of ideas and stand them up to the tests of time. So
kudo's for doing that.

 _Of the fifty companies named, 21 are independent, 19 were acquired, four
pivoted, and six are dead. I expected more to be dead, outright, but it shows
me many companies in search of an out found a willing corporate partner - be
it another startup, or a large company, be it Blackberry, LinkedIn, Yahoo! or
eBay. Tumblr sold for more than a billion, and Spotify is valued at much more.
Others, no doubt, went for nothing except a handshake. Interestingly, none of
these 50 were acquired by Google._

This "soft-portfolio" has something like an 80% "success rate"\-- if you count
success as _independent_ or _exited_ , or 90% if the criterion is "not dead".
Normally those would both count as 'successes', but I think you're right to
highlight that resume/grade inflation that may make the data less informative
than otherwise.

~~~
louismg
Thanks. I considered this post would only be of interest to me, and even then,
it'd probably be worth it. Glad HN picked it up.

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Mithaldu
The tweetdeck entry should note that twitter, in acquiring it, threw away
their entire product and rewrote it from scratch with less than half the
functionality; thus making it less an acquiry and more of a snuffing.

~~~
dotBen
That's still an acquisition. Companies get acquired for a variety of reasons
and not all of them are because the parent company wants it to
succeed/improve.

The only reason Twitter bought Tweetdeck was that Bill Gross was threatening
to make a "twitter rival", and acquiring Tweetdeck would have given him a
massive springboard audience and Twitter graph data.

Twitter acquired Tweetdeck to throw it into the toilet, basically, so that
someone else couldn't benefit from it. Nothing wrong with that.

~~~
Mithaldu
I appreciate the detail on the behind-the-scenes bullshit. That said:

> Nothing wrong with that.

AHAHAHA, have a hearty "fuck you with a rusty pipe" from germany.

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dzohrob
The original Blippy team is now working on Tophatter.com —
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/tophatter-
iphone/](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/tophatter-iphone/)

Blippy.com seems to be run by a team unrelated to the original Blippy folks.

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droob
Another metric I'd like to see: "total user-hours wasted onboarding, learning,
importing, and exporting data". So many of these follow the same dumb pattern:
"Make this tool part of your life! We're the solution! Uhhhh… never mind."

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ilamont
"50 top startups" is an unrepresentative sample of the ecosystem. It's not
clear what criteria were used to place startups on this list, but almost all
had entered the Valley hype cycle, indicating heavy-duty funding and/or a paid
PR push. If their funding runway was long enough, and they were able to get
follow-on rounds (or be acquired/achieve profitability), it shouldn't come as
a surprise that just 12% have hit the deadpool.

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ChuckMcM
Interesting. In particular the long lived startup notion and another
difference between this eco system and the one in the 90's. The focus on
revenue earlier rather than later has allowed many companies to continue
along, whereas in the 90's they were pretty much dead if they didn't IPO or
get acquired. So 40% are still alive, only 10% died outright. Much better
survival rate than before.

~~~
louismg
A big number of those in the "Acquired" column were acquihires that saw the
product killed shortly after.

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rudimental
Interesting to see. I'd love more explicit measurable predictions and then,
like this, observing the results and reflecting.

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choult
It's slightly inaccurate to call Tweetmeme dead - yes we've shuttered the
original site, but the team has transitioned quite successfully into DataSift:
[http://datasift.com](http://datasift.com)

~~~
Diamons
Then it's not inaccurate.

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notastartup
what can we learn from this list? handful has been acquired, most are
independent. What does it mean by independent, are they stagnating, dying,
growing? Those would be very interesting.

~~~
chime
What I learned from this list is that Louis Gray is pretty good at picking
promising companies.

~~~
asmosoinio
I agree, seriously impressive with only 6 companies dead after 4 years.
Especially with the ones later in the list -- the big ones naturally would die
slowly even if they do.

