
Promising Startups - ayanai
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-fifty-best-startups/
======
blueyes
This article's main table suffers from the inaccurate assumption that funding
round size and frequency correlates with promise. What's worse, Quid is
including a "hotness" factor for the sector the startups work in, so the piece
can be sure to include the most faddish, hyped technologies currently in SV.
Not impressed, but great PR for Quid.

~~~
fragsworth
I agree. The numbers they provided are absolutely useless.

Better numbers would be "Size of last round", "Days since last round",
"Valuation of last round", and "Founder ownership after last round".

~~~
peter422
Companies routinely lie about when funding round happen to maximize news
impact. They'll generally sit on the news until they can announce it with some
other big feature or release or something (because they know without fail all
the tech news will report fundraising rounds).

So "days since last fundraising" or "days between fundraising rounds" are
going to be very inaccurate metrics.

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vivekpreddy
The Breakout List seems to be a better list of "hot startups." It's still VC
heavy, but there are a few other companies listed that aren't your traditional
VC-backed startup. The companies listed are going after large markets (for the
most part), growing fast in terms of revenue and generally have good financial
backing (although that's not a prerequisite from what I can gather).

[https://breakoutlist.com/](https://breakoutlist.com/)

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tdumitrescu
"Almost eight years later, it turns out that the list had its share of
flops—companies that shut down or lost value—but some notable home runs as
well. Cloudera, Palantir, Evernote, Twitch and Spotify all increased at least
30 times in value since 2009. If YouNoodle’s list had been a venture
portfolio, it would have been one of the best-performing funds of the last two
decades."

Am I crazy, or has only one of those companies (Twitch) actually made it to a
liquidity event for its investors? There are some serious doubts around some
of those "home run" companies keeping anything near their crazy private
caluations.

~~~
fnbr
Exactly. It's hard to say that they've had massive successes when none of the
companies have returned money to their investors. That's proof that you've
succeeded. The rigor imposed by the SEC makes it a lot harder to fake/inflate
the valuations.

That said, I think all of those companies have done great things. Spotify, for
instance, has revolutionized the music industry, and Palantir is a major
player when it comes to government software (my employer competes with them in
Canada).

------
omouse
There's a list of companies that have raised money but it doesn't appear that
there's a list of companies that are profitable. Disappointing that only VC-
funded startups are highlighted.

 _Quid began with a list of around 50,000 private companies that had received
venture capital or venture debt in the past three years_

Ohhhhh. There's the problem.

~~~
at-fates-hands
Some of the best startups I worked for were self funded and avoided VC money.
The growth was slower, but the products we put out tended to be better vetted,
better coded and far more stable.

Both places were a joy to work at since you were mainly concerned with the
quality of the product you were producing instead of how fast you could get it
to market.

~~~
omouse
It's because you can only fool your customers/clients for so long before they
realize your product is garbage. If you have poor quality you need to have a
lot of support staff to deal with the calls/emails or you need to have deep
pockets to offer discounts and refunds repeatedly.

It's so fucked to read about VC-funded startups and read Paul Graham's earlier
essays because he pretty much summed up a startup as "move as fast as possible
to build a product that your customers want" and emphasized quality. Somewhere
along the line, getting VC funds somehow has dwarfed that goal.

~~~
tim333
He was of course not a huge fan of VCs

>Back in 1997, one of our competitors raised $20 million in a single round of
VC funding. This was at the time more than the valuation of our entire
company. Was I worried? Not at all: I was delighted. It was like watching a
car you're chasing turn down a street that you know has no outlet...

etc
([http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html))

~~~
beaconstudios
and yet YC is the center of the universe for SV VC-funded tech startups.

~~~
at-fates-hands
What do you think changed? Did PG change his view on things, or did the
industry change?

A LOT can happen over 15+ years, and considering how fast SV and the tech
industry moves, that's almost an eternity.

~~~
beaconstudios
I couldn't say for sure. The cynic in me wants to point to the amount of money
in software VC, but I think PG is more principled than that. Perhaps it's
related to the fact that YC provides a lot more in terms of advice and
guidance than cash, and then passes startups on to seed/series-A investors.

------
petard
Why is Artificial Intelligence a market sector?. Seems as much useful as
having a "PHP", "Java" or "<put technology name here>" market sector.

~~~
swalsh
I disagree, if Tensor Flow was a market sector, that would be weird... but
"Artificial Intelligence" as a term is the equivalent to "Web Development" as
a term.

~~~
nostrademons
See eg. the AI effect and Tessler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done
yet."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

There's this weird effect that's been observed wherever once an AI technique
starts working, it becomes a field in its own right and ceases to be
considered "AI". So for example, beam search and A* were once considered AI;
now they're just algorithms that everyone should know. SVMs, decision trees,
linear regression, and other statistical machine-learning techniques were once
considered AI; now they form the basic knowledge for the field of data
science. Computer vision, handwriting recognition, and OCR were once
considered AI (indeed, they were some of the first applications of artificial
neural networks); now they are fields in their own right. Ditto machine
translation and voice recognition. Even information retrieval with its
subfields of synonym recognition, language models, bigram recognition, NLP,
named entity recognition, etc. were all considered AI.

That "AI" is considered the hot sector means that VCs don't have a clue what
is coming next.

------
Duhck
It's cool to be included on this list with companies I hold in very high
regard.

My company (Astro aka Twist Home), isn't one of those sexy AI / ML companies
trying to make crazy futureworthy tech, we instead make super simple connected
home experiences, and yet people find what we are doing interesting.

I can cite 100 other "lists" we've made this year, but this one seems at least
researched versus the typical autogenerated list based on SEC Form D filings.

------
veritas3241
Any ideas as to why they would've excluded biotech? Would they have dominated
the list? What about companies that combine some of these fields (biotech +
AI)?

~~~
gmarx
and does biotech imply wet lab stuff only or is this including software? Does
it include healthcare?

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rdlecler1
The fact that they referenced SoilIQ which was renamed Edyn nearly 3 years ago
makes me question the robustness of this study.

~~~
jasonlaramburu
We've asked the author to update the story.

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raldi
I love the HN policy of de-editorializing headlines.

~~~
jt2190
This one's editorialized to the point of meaninglessness, though.

I'd have preferred to see something like:

"Quid's list of 50 promising startups."

------
danpalmer
I'm not particularly confident in their methodology. I think particularly
their first stage will suffer from a large number of false-negatives:

\- "top venture capital firms" is an odd filter, especially given that
industry specific investment funds are likely to have pretty good signal on
good businesses in their industry.

\- "companies that already show traction in their industry" isn't great
considering that "AI" is considered an industry here, and startups being
particularly "disruptive" might be difficult to classify.

\- "companies in a sector that was an expanding market opportunity" is
incredibly vague.

------
_sy_
Instamotor (marketplace + fintech, San Francisco) is on there and we're hiring
engineers :) jobs@instamotor.com

~~~
FLGMwt
I'm not personally looking, but would be curious in a brief rundown of tech,
business, and your example day-to-day.

Good luck!

~~~
_sy_
happy to! email me at sy@instamotor.com

~~~
tarr11
It'd be better if you did it here...

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noahmbarr
We're on the list. Not sure I'm happy or sad.

Original title "These Are the 50 Most Promising Startups You’ve Never Heard
Of"

Our company is in this list.

Have very mixed feelings: \- Happy for the PR, \- Unhappy because it means
that our marketing team hasn't done a fabulous job on driving awareness.

it means we could probably do a better job

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sulam
I'm impressed by the geographical distribution. Yes there's a concentration in
the SF Bay Area, but it's much less on a percentage basis than the
distribution of startup finding as a whole.

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5706906c06c
I worked at OmadaHealth series A to C setting up the InfoSec program. It was
fun! Looking forward to their continued success!

------
pinaceae
Just a single autonomous car startup.

Peak autonomy already over?

~~~
Apocryphon
Maybe smart autos are being dominated by non-startup large players. Google,
Apple, Uber, GM, etc.

