The Billion dollar startups
A friend sent me a list of startups that have achieved the billion dollars value. It confirms the belief that technology startup, especially software startups are doing very well financially. If you look at the time they start the company and today you can see that with good visions, good leaderships, and proper business models, many have grown their startups to large enterprise in a very short time. It looks like every two or three months, some startups reach the value of billion dollars or more. (Based on market value of Initial Stock Offering (IPO) or being acquired by another company). Of course after that they are no longer startups but successful large companies.
The list consists mostly technology startups in the U.S. but if we look to other countries, I am sure the data would be much more impressive. (Think about China, Japan, S. Korea and India!).
At this time I can name a few successful startups that have become giantswith value more than a billion dollars such as Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Shanda, 360Buy, Sina, Sohu, Netease, NetDragon, KingSoft (China). DeNA, GREE, Rakuten, CyberAgent (Japan) and NHN, Nexon (Korea) etc.
If you do not believe that startup is the new trend today and future Billionaires and millionaires are mostly young technical people then you may want to look at this list. (Most of these companies founders are young, many are in their twenty and thirty. Only few are in their forty)
| Company | Founded | Market Value |
| SolarWinds | 1998 | 3.9 B |
| NetSuite | 1998 | 4.3 B |
| VMware | 1998 | 37 B |
| OpenTable | 1998 Jul | 1 B |
| 1998 Sep | 210 B | |
| Rackspace | 1998 Oct | 8 B |
| PayPal | 1998 Dec | 1.5 B |
| Zappos | 1999 | 1.2 B |
| SurveyMonkey | 1999 | 1 B |
| Opsware | 1999 | 1.6 B |
| SalesForce | 1999 Mar | 19 B |
| Shutterfly | 1999 Dec | 0.9 B |
| Netezza | 2000 | 1.7 B |
| ArcSight | 2000 | 1.5 B |
| ExactTarget | 2000 | 1.3 B |
| BillMeLater | 2000 | 0.9 B |
| Pandora | 2000 Jan | 1.3 B |
| TripAdvisor | 2000 Feb | 4.8 B |
| SuccessFactors | 2001 | 3.4 B |
| Guidewire | 2001 | 1.5 B |
| DealerTrack | 2001 | 1.1 B |
| Jive | 2001 Feb | 0.8 B |
| Kiva Systems | 2000 | 0.8 B |
| 2002 Dec | 10 B | |
| ServiceNow | 2003 | 3.7 B |
| Skype | 2003 Aug | 8.5 B |
| Glam Media | 2003 Sep | 0.7 B |
| Palantir | 2004 | 2.5 B |
| Splunk | 2004 | 2.6 B |
| Kayak | 2004 Jan | 1.8 B |
| 2004 Feb | 41 B | |
| Evernote | 2004 Sep | 1 B |
| Yelp | 2004 Oct | 1.1 B |
| Palo Alto Networks | 2005 | 3.5 B |
| Box | 2005 | 1.2 B |
| Zillow | 2005 | 0.7 B |
| Bebo | 2005 Jan | 0.85 B |
| HomeAway | 2005 Feb | 2 B |
| YouTube | 2005 Feb | 1.1 B |
| Workday | 2005 Mar | 7.7 B |
| Millennial Media | 2006 | 1.2 B |
| 2006 Mar | 8 B | |
| Demand Media | 2006 May | 0.7 B |
| Nicira | 2007 | 1.2 B |
| Gilt Groupe | 2007 | 1 B |
| Tumblr | 2007 Feb | 0.8 B |
| Hulu | 2007 Mar | 2 B |
| Dropbox | 2007 Jun | 4 B |
| LivingSocial | 2007 Jul | 2.9 B |
| Zynga | 2007 Jul | 1.6 B |
| Github | 2008 Feb | 0.8 B |
| AirBnb | 2008 Aug | 2.5 B |
| Yammer | 2008 Sep | 1.2 B |
| Groupon | 2008 Nov | 1.8 B |
| 2008/09 | 1 B | |
| Square | 2009 Feb | 3.2 B |
| Storm8 | 2009 Mar | 1 B |
| Fab | 2010 Feb | 0.7 B |
| 2010 Mar | 1 B |
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
