Category Archives: Start-up data

Updated data in equity of 800 (former) startups

As you might know, I regularly compile capitalization tables from companies which filed to go public or were acquired with shareholder data. The last time I published posts about it was in April 2020 with 600+ such tables. I have now more than 800.

I just posted two articles using these updated data:
– The age of founders and non-founding CEOs on August 4,
https://www.startup-book.com/2021/08/04/the-age-of-founders-and-non-founding-ceos/.
– Employee ownership in startups – The stock option millionaire on August 6, https://www.startup-book.com/2021/08/06/employee-ownership-in-startups-the-stock-option-millionaire/.

The content is as follows:
– Individual cap tables: pages 8-834.
– Updated statistics: pages 835-850.
– Table of content: pages 851-860.

I do not plan to do a new analysis. The one with 600 was rich enough I think. Still the individual cap table are available here:
Equity List 800 Startups – Lebret – Aug2021

or on Scribd but you might need an account to fully benefit from them.

Here is the link to the document or to more similar ones on my Scribd account.

Employee ownership in startups – The stock option millionaire

August is a good month to look back at data and previous posts. I just published one about the age of founders. Here is a quick look again about what employees may gain in startups when succesful. In addition to hopefully what they do with more pleasure than in big established companies, they usually have access to stock options and one of the myths of Silicon Valley is that in the most succesful startups, everyone becomes a millionaire.

A few years ago, I published some data about employee onwernship based on 600 startups. Have a look here. I also commented a guide about stock options in Rewarding Talent – A guide to stock options for European entrepreneurs by Index Ventures.

So how much ownership an employee have in a startup. I looked at my 800-startup database, and built the following tables. Please go to the end of the post for another analysis.

The three tables show some nuances depending upon the field, geography and period but with an ownership around 0.1%, yes employees are close to being millionaires. Now as the next table show, the situation might be different depending who you are in the company from a manager to a junior.

This last table is an extended version from the one used in the presentation I make about equity sharing in startups:

The age of founders and non-founding CEOs

The age of founders has been a recurrent topic here as you might see from tag #age. In my analysis about hundreds of startups (822 at this time, and 600 lately), I just thought it would be interesting to check the correlation, if any, there might be between the age of founders and a CEO among these founders or not. Intuitively, one might think that the less experimented founders may induce a non-founding CEO. So here are the results:

The numbers speak and may seem counterintuitive. A majority (and often an overwhelming majority in the digital world) of startups have a founding CEO and the average age of founders is lower in this case. Question of dynamism, of envy of the team, I do not know …. Do not hesitate to react and comment.

23andMe goes public (IPO) through a SPAC

DNA testing 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki‘s startup, just went public through a SPAC, Virgin Group Acquisition Company (VGAC) of Richard Branson.

So what is a SPAC? It took me some time to understand and I am still not sure about the details… If you are interested about general information, you may want to read the Wikipedia link below or the following articles:
OK, What’s a SPAC? from the New York Times, Feb. 2021 or
The Pied Piper of SPACs from the New Yorker, June 2021.

A standard IPO is a process where a private company becomes public by offering its existing shares for sale to the public with the possibility of creating new shares bought by the public at the IPO.

A SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company as explained on Wikipedia) is a process where an empty shell or “blank check” company is created by raising money on a public stock exchange, it becomes a public company with no activity and just new shareholders. Then it may acquire an existing private company by a negociation where the existing shareholders of the SPAC and of the private company agree on a balanced value between the two companies. By this reverse merger company, the private company becomes the public company and the SPAC name disappears.

So 23andMe followed such a process and I understood the following to build the cap. table of the new public company. VGAC, the SAPC, had raised $509M at IPO in October 2020. Then Richard Branson proposed to Anne Wojcicki to acquire 23andMe. It worked and they agreed on a price per share of $10, so that the $509M would give 50.9M shares to the VGAC shareholders.

23andMe had its own shareholders, including Anne Wojcicki (about 100M shares), Sequoia (24M shares), Glaxo (39M shares). There were shares detained by managers and board memebers and about 28M stock options too. (The two other cofounders are not mentioned in the IPO document.)

What makes it a little more complex is the additional fact that there was an “private placement” at the IPO of $250M at $10 per share, i. e. 25 new shares in the cap. table.

I am not full sure about all this. It could be that I am mixing the Private Placement, the SPAC shareholders and the 23andMe shareholders, but in a way this is a detail. Where I am confused is that the press annouces a value of $3.9B and I obtain $4.9B which the stock options are not sufficient to explain… Please react if you see a good explanation!

Another quick look at data on public tech companies : loss, loss and more loss? (2/2)

Following the initial post introducing the topic of loss (see here), here is the promised of profit/loss of 168 IT companies (software, internet, ecommerce) extracted from the 787 companies mentioned before. You will find at the end of the post the full list of companies with their IPO year, profit at IPO, in 2019, and in 2020. So are these companies losing or making money?

Here are some results, but be careful, they are not statiscally relevent and not a proof of anything, but I hope an interesting illustration: in the 90s, the companies going public seem to be profitable, then the companies seem to be losing money at IPO ine th 21st century, with the exception of the famous outliers that Google, Facebook or Alibaba have become. These were profitable at IPO. The following table gives the average values by year of listing.

More recently, beginning in 2015, the companies are (on average) losing money at IPO but also in 2019 and 2020. Following a comment on LinkedIn that I copied in the comments below, I agree that the averages are misleading if outliers hide the number of profit or loss making companies. So here is the table of the number of profit making companies per IPO year:

Again, if you want to look at the performance of individual companies, check the table below. And as a kind of conclusion, all this reminds me a great article from the New Yorker that you may like: How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism

 

 

Start-up Founded IPO Income at IPO Income 2020 Income 2019
Airbnb Jun-08 Nov-20 -674        -4 584           -674
Accolade Jan-17 Feb-20 -56             -50           -290
Adobe Dec-82 Aug-86 1         5 260         2 951
Adyen Nov-06 Jun-18 71            261            204
Affirm Jun-12 Nov-20 -112           -124           -134
C3.ai Jan-09 Dec-20 -70             -69             -33
Akamai Aug-98 Nov-99 -28            557            478
Anevia Jun-03 Jun-14 0,03               -1
Wallix Group Oct-03 Jun-15 0               -7               -6
Visiativ May-94 Jul-14 0                1                3
AmWell Jun-06 Aug-20 -88           -224             -87
Amazon Jul-94 May-97 -5       21 581       11 388
Ansys Jun-70 Jun-96 -1            433            451
Applovin Jul-11 Mar-21 -125           -125              76
Asana Dec-08 Aug-20 -118           -211           -118
Avalara Aug-99 May-18 -64             -49             -50
Avast Plc Oct-88 Oct-18 -33            240            352
Alibaba Jun-99 Nov-07 40       24 049       23 882
BrightCove Aug-04 Feb-12 -17               -6             -22
Baidu Jan-00 Aug-05 1         3 596            317
BigCommerce Jun-09 Aug-20 -42             -38             -41
BiliBili Jun-09 Mar-18 -28           -482           -206
Bill.com Jun-07 Nov-19 -7             -31               -7
Box Apr-05 Mar-14 -168             -43           -144
Chegg Jul-05 Oct-13 -49               -6               -9
Checkpoint Jul-93 Jun-96 15            846            825
Coinbase Jun-12 Feb-21 322            322             -30
Compass Oct-12 Mar-21 -270           -270           -388
Coursera Oct-11 Mar-21 -66             -66             -46
Coupang May-10 Mar-21 -474           -593           -770
Salesforce.com Feb-99 Jun-04 -9            455            463
Criteo Nov-05 Mar-13 12            106            135
CrowdStrike Aug-11 May-19 -140             -92           -141
Castlight Health Jan-08 Mar-14 -62             -62             -40
Casper Sleep Oct-13 Jan-20 -98             -89             -93
Citrix Apr-89 Dec-96 2            504            681
Cyber-Ark Soft. Apr-99 Jun-14 7               -5              63
DoorDash May-13 Nov-20 -668           -461           -667
Dropbox May-07 Feb-18 -111           -256             -52
Datadog Jun-10 Sep-19 -10             -24             -16
Delivery hero May-11 Jun-17 -202        -1 404           -680
DigitalOcean Dec-11 Feb-21 -43             -43             -40
Docusign Apr-03 Mar-18 -115           -243           -208
Domo Sep-10 Jun-18 -176             -84           -125
Electronic Arts May-82 Aug-89 5            837         1 000
Eventbrite May-03 Sep-18 -38           -224             -68
eBay May-96 Sep-98 -1         2 150         1 786
eGain Corp. Sep-97 Sep-99 -11                7                4
Elastic NV Feb-12 Sep-18 -52           -167           -102
Facebook Jul-04 Feb-12 1 000       32 671       24 932
Funding Circle Aug-10 Sep-18 -38           -154           -120
1-800-Flowers Aug-76 Aug-99 3              58              34
Flywire Jul-09 May-21 -11             -15             -17
Jfrog Ltd Apr-08 Aug-20 -5               -9               -5
Fastly Mar-19 Apr-19 -30           -105             -45
F-secure Dec-88 Nov-99 1              17                5
Farfetch Oct-07 Sep-18 -112        -3 200           -353
Fiverr International Apr-10 Jun-19 -36             -11             -34
Go Daddy Jan-97 Jun-14 -199           -404            218
Globant SA Aug-13 Aug-13 -1              85              74
Google Sep-98 Aug-04 105       48 217       39 725
Groupon Jan-08 Jun-11 -413           -260              10
GrubHub Feb-04 Apr-14 15           -147               -6
Guidewire Sep-01 Jan-12 35               -6              29
HelloFresh Oct-11 Nov-17 -15            405                1
The Honest Co Jul-11 Apr-21 -14             -13             -31
Hubspot Apr-05 Aug-14 -34             -43             -27
JD.com Nov-06 May-14 -50         8 311         2 307
KnowBe4 Aug-10 Mar-21 -2               -1           -124
LendingClub Oct-06 Dec-14 7           -187             -30
Lemonade Jun-15 Jun-20 -108           -122           -108
Lyft Inc. Mar-07 Mar-19 -910        -1 764        -2 702
Medallia Jul-00 Jun-19 -82           -138           -114
Mimecast Mar-03 Oct-15 1              34                4
Model N Dec-99 Mar-13 -5               -6             -15
Mogu Feb-11 Nov-18 -81           -110             -92
Momo Nov-11 Nov-14 -8            476            552
Marin Software Mar-06 Mar-13 -26             -16             -17
Microsoft Jan-75 Mar-86 24       56 627       46 374
nCino Dec-11 Jun-20 -27             -40             -28
CloudFare Jul-09 Aug-19 -87           -100           -103
Netflix Aug-97 May-02 -37         4 585         2 688
Nuance Comm Jul-94 Apr-00 -18            103            145
Xing / New Work Aug-03 Dec-06 -1              41              53
Okta Jan-09 Mar-17 -76           -193           -183
Olo Jun-05 Feb-21 3                3               -8
OneMedical Jul-02 Jan-20 -44             -76             -53
ON24 Jan-98 Jan-21 -17              21             -16
OpenDoor Tech. Mar-14 Dec-20 -339           -218           -229
Oracle Jun-77 Mar-86 2              14              14
Oscar Health Oct-12 Feb-21 -405           -402           -259
Overstock.com May-97 Jun-02 -14              49           -134
Procore Jan-02 Feb-20 -83             -95             -82
PagerDuty Feb-09 Mar-19 -38             -62             -49
Pinduoduo Apr-15 Jul-18 -83        -1 040        -1 096
PDF Solutions Nov-92 Jul-01 -9             -16               -7
Phreesia Feb-05 Jun-19 -15             -25             -15
Pinterest Oct-08 Apr-19 -62           -126        -1 358
Anaplan Jun-08 Oct-18 -47           -153           -148
Palantir Jun-03 Aug-20 -579        -1 164           -564
Poshmark, Inc. Jan-11 Dec-20 -49              23             -49
PluralSight Jun-04 Apr-18 -96
Pintec Jul-12 Jul-18 -13           -137           -728
PubMatic Nov-06 Dec-20 7              31                8
Paypal Dec-98 Feb-02 -130         5 274         3 113
Qad Inc Aug-79 Aug-97 1              11               -2
QuinStreet Apr-99 Feb-10 17              19              11
Qutoutiao Jun-16 Sep-18 -14           -171           -324
Coupons.com May-98 Feb-14 -59             -50             -22
Roblox Mar-04 Nov-20 -86           -266             -76
Redfin Oct-02 Jun-17 -22                1             -71
Renren Oct-02 May-11 -62             -95           -141
RealNetworks Feb-94 Nov-97 -4               -5             -19
Deliveroo Aug-12 Mar-21 -312           -323           -453
Rovio Nov-03 Nov-07 10              41              18
Rapid7 Jul-00 May-15 -32             -72             -40
Shopify Sep-04 Nov-15 -22            249           -141
SmartSheet Jun-05 Mar-18 -49           -120           -103
Snap Inc Jul-10 Feb-17 -514           -828        -1 000
SnowFlake Jul-12 Aug-20 -348           -543           -358
Splunk Inc Oct-03 Apr-12 -10           -777           -235
Spotify Dec-06 Feb-18 -1 606           -655             -88
Sprout Social Apr-10 Oct-19 -20             -31             -46
Square Jun-09 Oct-15 -154            272              26
Swissquote Aug-99 May-00 -2              91              44
Squarespace Oct-07 Apr-21 30              32              65
StoneCo Mar-14 Oct-18 -27            279            274
Sumo Logic Mar-10 Aug-20 -92             -78             -91
SurveyMonkey Mar-00 Sep-18 -24             -80             -62
Teladoc Jun-02 Jun-15 -17           -515             -80
ThredUp Jan-09 Mar-21 -47             -46             -36
Atlassian Oct-02 Dec-15 6           -296           -565
Tenable Sep-02 Jul-18 -41             -36             -90
Talend SA Sep-05 Jul-16 -22             -70             -58
TrustPilot Feb-07 Mar-21 6             -15             -29
Tufin Software Jan-05 Mar-19 -4             -33             -27
Tuya Jun-14 Feb-21 -70             -69             -73
Twilio Mar-08 Jun-16 -35           -472           -369
2U Apr-08 Feb-14 -27           -190           -241
Twitter Jun-06 Nov-13 -79            101            528
Unity Software Aug-04 Aug-20 -163           -274           -150
Uber Jul-10 Apr-19 987        -6 488        -7 874
Upland Jul-10 Sep-14 -9            100              90
Upstart Feb-12 Nov-20 -5                6               -1
Upwork Dec-99 Oct-18 -4             -21             -15
VipShop Holding Aug-08 Mar-12 -156         1 134            804
Vroom, Inc. Jan-12 Jun-20 -143           -193           -128
Verisign Apr-95 Feb-98 -19            837            849
Wayfair May-02 Aug-14 -11            351           -929
WorkDay Mar-05 Oct-12 -79           -206           -423
Windeln Oct-10 May-15 -8             -13             -14
Wisekey Feb-99 Mar-16 -33             -27             -21
Wish Jun-10 Nov-20 -129           -631           -144
X financial Mar-14 Sep-18 51        -1 308            774
Yelp Sep-04 Mar-12 -16             -34              35
Yext Nov-06 Mar-17 -26             -93           -120
Yandex Sep-97 May-11 100            554            321
YY Apr-05 Oct-12 -12            102            716
Zillow Dec-04 Jul-11 -6             -14           -207
Zalando Feb-08 Oct-14 -113            377            175
Zendesk Aug-07 May-14 -22           -169           -141
Zhihu Dec-10 Mar-21 -79             -96           -169
ZipRecruiter Jun-10 Apr-21 63              65               -5
Zoom Video Apr-11 Mar-19 7            659              12
Zynga Oct-07 Aug-11 90           -375              64
Zscaler Sep-07 Feb-18 -35           -107             -35
Zuora Sep-06 Mar-18 -46             -73             -85

Another quick look at data on public tech companies : loss, loss and more loss? (1/2)

I was motivated a few days ago to look at the work I have been doing for years on public tech. companies, their cap. tables, their overall financial performance. If you do not know what I am talking about, you can have a look at my past analyses on 600, then 700 companies through the tag 600 (former) startups. I’ve now 787 such cap. tables.

It’s been known that there are differences with fields such as biotech. vs. software/internet. About biotech, check Are Biotechnology Startups Different? Regarding software, and more specifically Internet or ecommerce companies, I have not done a similar analysis but I began to notice a while ago that these companies were also money-losing companies at IPO. In the past, you were only going public in IT when you were beginning to be profitable. This was more than 20 years ago! The recent argument for going public while losing money was that these companies would make a profit once they have reached a threshold in size. Amazon was not profitable for many years after its IPO.

But isn’t that argument flawed? Will Uber or AirBnB and similar platform companies ever make a profit? Too early to say and the future is unpredictable. But I thought I would look at the current situation of my 787 companies and have a quick look. So before studying the profit profile of IT companies (this will be in part 2, my next post), here are the basics. There is a total of 435 public companies –  353 companies have been acquired, liquidated (315) and a few are still private (37). My next post should follow soon.

Market Cap # $B
$1T 4 7’253
$100B 17 5’274
$10B 88 3’273
$1B+ 168 623
<$1B 150 55
Total 427 16’478

These numbers again show the power law distribution (and not Gaussian) and here is the long list of names for those interested:

$1,000B+ $100B+ $10B+ $1B+
Amazon Adobe Inc. 10x Genomics, Inc. 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.
Apple Alibaba Group Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. 1Life Healthcare, Inc.
Google Amgen Inc. Adyen N.V. 2U, Inc.
Microsoft Cisco Systems, Inc. Affirm Holdings, Inc. 8×8, Inc.
Facebook, Inc. Airbnb, Inc. 908 Devices Inc.
Intel Corporation Akamai Technologies, Inc. AbCellera Biologics Inc.
JD.com, Inc. Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ACADIA Pharmaceuticals Inc.
Netflix, Inc. ANSYS, Inc. Acceleron Pharma Inc.
NVIDIA Corporation AppLovin Corporation Accolade, Inc.
Oracle Corporation Arista Networks, Inc. Adaptive Biotechnologies Corp
PayPal Holdings, Inc. Atlassian Corporation Plc Agios Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Pinduoduo Inc. Avalara, Inc. Alector, Inc.
salesforce.com, inc. Baidu, Inc. Aligos Therapeutics, Inc.
Shopify Inc. Bilibili Inc. Allogene Therapeutics, Inc.
Square, Inc. Bill.com Holdings, Inc. AlloVir, Inc.
Tesla, Inc. BioNTech SE American Well Corporation
Xiaomi Corporation Check Point Software Amyris, Inc.
Chegg, Inc. Anaplan, Inc.
Citrix Systems, Inc. Arcutis Biotherapeutics, Inc.
Cloudflare, Inc. Asana, Inc.
Coinbase Global, Inc. Asetek A/S
Coupang, Inc. Avast Plc
CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. Axonics, Inc.
CureVac N.V. Beam Therapeutics Inc.
Datadog, Inc. Berkeley Lights, Inc.
Delivery Hero SE Beyond Meat, Inc.
DocuSign, Inc. BigCommerce Holdings, Inc.
DoorDash, Inc. BlackBerry Limited
Dropbox, Inc. Bloom Energy Corporation
eBay Inc. bluebird bio, Inc.
Elastic N.V. Blueprint Medicines Corp
Electronic Arts Inc. Box, Inc.
Enphase Energy, Inc. C3.ai, Inc.
Equinix, Inc. (REIT) C4 Therapeutics, Inc.
F5 Networks, Inc. Ciena Corporation
Farfetch Limited Cimpress plc
Fortinet, Inc. Cirrus Logic, Inc.
Garmin Ltd. Compass, Inc.
GoDaddy Inc. ContextLogic Inc.
HelloFresh SE Corcept Therapeutics
Horizon Therapeutics Coursera, Inc.
HubSpot, Inc. CRISPR Therapeutics AG
Illumina, Inc. Criteo S.A.
Intuitive Surgical, Inc. CyberArk Software Ltd.
Jazz Pharmaceuticals plc Deliveroo plc
Lam Research Corporation Denali Therapeutics Inc.
Logitech International S.A. Design Therapeutics, Inc.
Lyft, Inc. Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Marvell Technology, Inc. DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc.
Micron Technology, Inc. Domo, Inc.
Moderna, Inc. Eargo, Inc.
NIO Inc. Edgewise Therapeutics, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. Editas Medicine, Inc.
Okta, Inc. Enanta Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Palantir Technologies Inc. Eventbrite, Inc.
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. Exelixis, Inc.
Pinterest, Inc. Extreme Networks, Inc.
Procore Technologies, Inc. Fastly, Inc.
Qorvo, Inc. Fate Therapeutics, Inc.
QuantumScape Corporation FireEye, Inc.
Roblox Corporation Five Prime Therapeutics, Inc.
Seagen Inc. Fiverr International Ltd.
Snap Inc. Flywire Corporation
Snowflake Inc. FormFactor, Inc.
SolarEdge Technologies, Inc. Generation Bio Co.
Splunk Inc. Gevo, Inc.
Spotify Technology S.A. Glaukos Corporation
StoneCo Ltd. Globant S.A.
Synopsys, Inc. GoPro, Inc.
Teladoc Health, Inc. Gracell Biotechnologies Inc.
Tuya Inc. Groupon, Inc.
Twilio Inc. Grubhub Inc.
Twitter, Inc. Guidewire Software, Inc.
Uber Technologies, Inc. Idorsia Ltd
Unity Software Inc. Inari Medical, Inc.
Upstart Holdings, Inc. Infinera Corporation
VeriSign, Inc. InMode Ltd.
Vipshop Holdings Inogen, Inc.
Wayfair Inc. Inphi Corporation
Workday, Inc. Inspire Medical Systems, Inc.
XPeng Inc. Instil Bio, Inc.
Yandex N.V. Intellia Therapeutics, Inc.
Zalando SE iRobot Corporation
Zendesk, Inc. Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Zillow Group, Inc. JFrog Ltd.
Zoom Video JOYY Inc.
Zscaler, Inc. Juniper Networks, Inc.
Zynga Inc. Karuna Therapeutics, Inc.
Keros Therapeutics, Inc.
Kymera Therapeutics, Inc.
Lemonade, Inc.
LendingClub Corporation
MacroGenics, Inc.
MaxLinear, Inc.
Medallia, Inc.
Mimecast Limited
Model N, Inc.
Momo Inc.
NanoString Technologies, Inc.
Natera, Inc.
nCino, Inc.
New Work SE
nLIGHT, Inc.
Nutanix, Inc.
Olo Inc.
ON24, Inc.
Opendoor Technologies Inc.
Oscar Health, Inc.
Overstock.com, Inc.
PagerDuty, Inc.
Phreesia, Inc.
Pluralsight, Inc.
Poshmark, Inc.
Power Integrations, Inc.
Prelude Therapeutics Inc
PTC Therapeutics, Inc.
PubMatic, Inc.
Pulmonx Corporation
Pure Storage, Inc.
QAD Inc.
Qualys, Inc.
Quotient Technology Inc.
Rambus Inc.
Rapid7, Inc.
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Redfin Corporation
Revolution Medicines, Inc.
Ribbon Communications Inc.
Rubius Therapeutics, Inc.
Sana Biotechnology, Inc.
Sangamo Therapeutics, Inc.
Schrödinger, Inc.
Seer, Inc.
Silicon Laboratories Inc.
Smartsheet Inc.
Soitec S.A.
Sonos, Inc.
Sprout Social, Inc.
Squarespace, Inc.
Stoke Therapeutics, Inc.
STORE Capital Corporation
Sumo Logic, Inc.
Sunrun Inc.
Supernus Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
SVMK Inc.
Swissquote Group Holding Ltd
Synaptics Incorporated
Talend S.A.
Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc.
Tenable Holdings, Inc.
The Honest Company, Inc.
ThredUp Inc.
Trustpilot Group plc
Turning Point Therapeutics, Inc.
Upland Software, Inc.
Upwork Inc.
Vaxcyte, Inc.
Veracyte, Inc.
Viasat, Inc.
Vroom, Inc.
Xencor, Inc.
Xperi Holding Corporation
Yelp Inc.
Yext, Inc.
Zhihu Inc.
ZipRecruiter, Inc.
Zuora, Inc.
Zymergen Inc.

Food delivery startups – a quick analysis

Yesterday I discovered an Indian startup filed to go public on its national stock exchange. I did not know it, shame on me. Zomato is the latest filing in a small number but extremely visible services in the food delivery sector. Who does not know Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats and others.

I am not sure that twenty years ago I would have pu the sector in technology innovation, but I have to admit innovation has many faces. On Crunchbase, the sector is said to have 616 organizations with $12.5B in funding (see Crunchbase Food Delivery Startups). Traxn gives the largest players here. So thanks to my database of 777 cap. tables, I could have a look at some statistics, with the exception of FoodPanda (acquired by Delivery Hero, funded with $318M including Rocket Internet), iFood (Brazil, owned by Movile, $587M in funding) and Swiggy (India, $2.5B in funding including Accel). Here are the data at time of the IPO filings.

Start-up JustEat GrubHub Zomato Delivery Hero Deliveroo DoorDash Median *
Geography United Kingdom Illinois India Germany United Kingdom Silicon Valley
Founded Aug-01 Feb-04 Jan-10 May-11 Aug-12 May-13 Sep-02
IPO / exit Apr-14 Apr-14 Apr-21 Jun-17 Mar-21 Nov-20 Mar-13
Years to IPO 12,7 10,2 11,3 6,1 8,6 7,5 7,4
VC Amount 88 86 1529 1711 1856 2578 84
1st round 8 1 1 4 4 2 4,4
Sales ($M) 150 137 338 297 1 680 885 23
Income ($M) 10 15 -310 -202 -312 -668 -14
Market Cap. 1 465 1 988 6 782 4 700 10 220 17 384 560
PS 10 15 20 16 6 20 17
PE 147 133 102
Nb of Emp. 886 680 3 469 12 098 2 561 3 279 189

*: the median value is based on 777 startups compiled over years. PS and PE are the ratios of market caps to sales and earnings (profit)

Just Eat has no data on founders as the initial Danish company with 5 founders has been bought and moved/launched in the UK.

Here are the data to date (GrubHub has been acquired by Just Eat in 2020):

Market Cap. $B Sales – $B Loss – $M PS Employees
Just Eat 15,4 2,8 -151 5,4 9 000
Delivery Hero 39,4 2,0 -939 19,5 35 528
DoorDash 46,0 2,9 -458 15,9 3 886
Deliveroo 6,3 1,6 -225 3,9 2 060
Zomato 6,8 0,3 -310 20,1 3 469

What is interesting is the difference in dynamics between companies launched before 2010. Something not really new if you follow this blog, in terms of growth dynammics. Here are some more data about shareholders

Start-up JustEat GrubHub Zomato Delivery Hero Deliveroo DoorDash Median *
Found. 5,7% 6,2% 4,5% 7,1% 12,0% 9%
Emp. 9,4% 25,1% 7,0% 17,2% 18,9% 18,5% 21%
Emp. shares 9,3% 12,1% 3,1% 11,7% 9,4% 4,8% 8%
ESOP-granted 0,1% 9,7% 0,6% 5,5% 9,5% 11,8% 8%
ESOP-reserved 3,3% 3,3% 1,9% 5%
Dir. 0,2% 0,06% 0%
CEO 1,0% 3%
VP 0,2% 1,1% 0,2% 0,2% 0,8% 1%
CFO 0,2% 0,3% 0,2% 1%
Investors 66,0% 59,3% 70,2% 59,9% 74,0% 68,7% 51%
IPO 24,6% 9,7% 16,6% 18,4% 0,6% 16%
Total 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%
Nb of Dir. 2 2 2
Dir % 0,1% 0,03% 0,2%
Nb of found. 2 4 3 2 3 2
Found. % 2,9% 1,6% 1,5% 3,6% 4,0% 4,5%
Found. age 27 31 31 33 23 37,6
F1 28 27 31 33 29
F2 26 29 33 21
F3 31 20
F4 38

The founders are young, own little. How teh sector will develop, I do not know. There is already concentration. Barriers to entry look low. Some experts have doubt about long term profitability… tough to say. Deliveroo shows no IPO shares as the initial filing did not include any new shares. It may have changed at the recent IPO which was not a success; and here are the individual cap. tables.

Coursera files to go public (#750)

After Deliveroo yesterday, here is Coursera’s cap. table. It’s #750 in my long list of startups (see here my most recent analysis – data about 700+ startups).

Coursera and Udacity are probably the most famous MOOCS companies and I could not be surprised if they contributed to create the edtech category. Coursera just filed to go public on Nasdaq so its numbers are available.

Revenues of $293M, with a loss of $66 million in 2020. A lot of venture capital since its foundation in 2011, $464M in total from Kleiner Perkins (and legendary partner John Doerr, and NEA.

Founded by two Stanford professors, specialists of artificial intelligence, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, age 43 and 34 at the time of foundation. They are not managing the company anymore. No information about Koller’s shareholding probably because she owns less than 5% of the company and has no executive role.


Coursera founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller are computer science professors at Stanford University

Source : NPR

Deliveroo plans to go public

There was a lot of buzz today about Deliveroo announcing its IPO soon. By the way Coursera, the edtech company just announced it too and I will post about it next. So I had to build its cap. table and thanks to the openness of the British register of companies, I could do it (at least partially) even before the company filed its IPO document.

Interesting data I think about the company growth, its funding and the founders stakeholding. £1.3B invested to cover £1.1B loss, 2’500 employees in 2019 and £1.2B revenues in 2020. Among the best European VCs (Index, Accel) plus Amazon, Fidelity, DST, T.Rowe Price as late stage investors. What else?

PS (March 19): a former colleague mentioned an article saying that early investors would have made “60’000 per cent return” on their investement. At the same time, I discovered about Coupang in South Korea which looked similar to Deliveroo. So I also checked the multiple return for seed investors in Coupang. Here is first its cap. table.

So for Coupang, the initial price per share was $0.02, and I assumed a $35 at IPO, which makes a 1750x multiple.

For Deliveroo, I assume a price per share of £900 with a series A price at £8.36. It is true there were also seed shares at £1,5. This would be a 600x (or 60’000 per cent, not an annuela return though)

So Coupang is even better than Deliveroo…

GAFAM do not suffer from the crisis (part II)

Yesterday I published data in Tesla, Google and Facebook do not suffer from the crisis. and after linking my post to the usual Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, one of my readers (thanks Manuel!) told me it would be fun to add Uber as a comparison. I said I would if/when I find the time and then thought why not AirBnB, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft?

I could only compile data about revenues of these firms and I think it is striking enough:

I wrote yerterday the growth rate was above 100% (doubling every year) in the early years declining to around 40% (doubling every other year) then to 15% (doubling evry five-year). Here are the growth rates of these old and new Titans. It begins again with 100+% for all of them. Too early to say about the future of Uber and AirBnB.
The three others of the GAFAM.
– Microsoft even had a 50% growth in its second decade, Amazon was closer to 30% and Apple struggled with 20%.
– In their 4th decade, Microsoft had an average grwoth of 10% and Apple 30%.

OK Manuel?