Statistic Info

The WSJ published a recent chart of the 49 startups with billion dollar valuations. According to their research, there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations ever. The absolute number of these massively valuable companies alone is amazing. Ten years ago, most of them would have gone public by now. But what other insights can we tease from the data about these very special businesses?

First, the Billion Dollar Club (BDC) is nearly evenly split between Consumer and Enterprise companies, as the table below shows. I’ve noted the median dollars raised, the median valuation and the valuation efficiency in the table. The valuation efficiency is the valuation divided by the capital raised. This metric tries to answer the question, how much capital did the startup need to raise to achieve that valuation? This is a somewhat flawed metric[1] but I’m going to use it to compare the relative attractiveness of sectors[2].

Tomasz Tonguz

More Tech Services Stats

At Facebook, 15 percent of tech roles are staffed by women

In 2017, the global adoption rate for biotech soybean amounted to 77 percent.

Only 8% of large companies use internet sales strategies. The proportion of companies relying on internet sales increases as company size decreases

Gross dollar churn among companies with an internet go-to-market strategy saw a meaningful increase, up from 8% in 2015

Agile projects are twice as likely to succeed as projects run with traditional project management

SAAS companies invest between 80% and 120% of their revenue in sales and marketing in the first 5 years of their existence

In 2017, Foxconn Technology Group achieved a net income of 135.37 billion New Taiwanese dollars, the equivalent to approximately 4.55 billion U.S. dollars.

Negative Churn and Expansion Revenue

Japanese company Hitachi accounted for three percent of the world’s market for diagnostic imaging in 2017.

The median SaaS business generates 16% of its new Annual Contract Value (ACV) from upselling to existing customers

More Growth Strategy Stats

26% of SAAS companies with at least $15MM in GAAP revenue had a revenue growth rate + EBITDA margin of 40% or higher.

54% treat upselling and add-on sales as high priority

High-growth companies are 8X more likely to reach $1 billion in revenues than those growing less than 20%.

Achieving a SaaS Quick Ratio of 4 is a good benchmark for young, high-growth companies but the equation changes as those companies reach scale

The statistic shows the worldwide IT spending on enterprise software from 2009 to 2020.

Net-revenue churn improves with larger Average Contract Value (ACV), likely due to more structural churn among SMB customers and higher switching costs associated with larger contracts

In 2018, the revenue of General Dynamics amounted to nearly 36.2 billion U.S. dollars.

Getting paid in advance is really smart idea if you can do it without impacting bookings, as it can provide the cash flow that you need to cover your cash problem

More than 1/2 of SAAS companies increased their spending on customer retention last year

Is your SaaS business viable?