Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups Editor’s note: Aileen Lee is founder of Cowboy Ventures, a seed-stage fund that backs entrepreneurs reinventing work and personal life through software. Previously, she joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 1999 and was also founding CEO of digital media company RMG Networks, backed by KPCB. Follow her on Twitter @aileenlee. Many entrepreneurs, and the venture investors who back them, seek to build billion-dollar companies. Why do investors seem to care about “billion dollar exits”? So, we wondered, as we’re a year into our new fund (which doesn’t need to back billion-dollar companies to succeed, but hey, we like to learn): how likely is it for a startup to achieve a billion-dollar valuation? To answer these questions, the Cowboy Ventures team built a dataset of U.S. Learnings to date about the “Unicorn Club”: We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S. Some deeper explanation and additional findings: So, what does this all mean?
Digital & Mobile in 2014 The astonishing growth of all things digital continues to gather pace around the world, as We Are Social’s new Social, Digital & Mobile Worldwide report on the key social, digital and mobile stats from around the world demonstrates. It should come as little surprise that much of this growth is being fuelled by connected mobile devices, but this year’s data do reveal some interesting trends and anomalies, especially in relation to Japan and Korea. You’ll find the complete story in the SlideShare deck above, but we’ve pulled out some of the highlights below. UPDATE: We’d like to thank the lovely folks at GlobalWebIndex for allowing us to use the data in their premium Active Usage: Social Platforms data pack in this report – you can get more info on this by clicking here. Internet Adding up all the users in individual countries around the world, there appear to be around 2.5 billion global internet users today – roughly 35% of the world’s population: click to enlarge click to enlarge
Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014 ORLANDO, Fla., October 8, 2013 View All Press Releases Analysts Examine Top Industry Trends at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2013 October 6-10 in Orlando Gartner, Inc. today highlighted the top ten technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2014. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 10. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. “We have identified the top 10 technologies that companies should factor into their strategic planning processes,” said David Cearley. Mr. The top ten strategic technology trends for 2014 include: Mobile Device Diversity and Management Mobile Apps and Applications The Internet of Everything Hybrid Cloud and IT as Service Broker Cloud/Client Architecture The Era of Personal Cloud