50 future unicorns

Folks have been talking about using data to assess the health/traction of private tech companies for a while now.

We at CB Insights were initially funded by a National Science Foundation SBIR grant to tackle this. So we built our Mosaic score to try to track private company health. It rates companies across 3 dimensions:

• Market
• Money
• Momentum

It’s done pretty well. In 2015, we worked with the New York Times to identify 50 future unicorns, and as of February 2019, 24 (48% of our picks) hit the $1B mark.

But the one “M” missing from the Mosaic model is Management.

And so we’ve wondered if we can build a score to understand if individuals or a team are exceptional. There are some basic signals that we know folks use around credentials/pedigree, aka “pattern matching”:

• School, e.g. Stanford, Ivy League
• Former employers, e.g. Xooglers

But if you were building a score to assess team/individual exceptionalism, what would the less obvious signals be?

More on this below.

With Google’s $2.1B acquisition of FitBit, FAMGA cos (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon) have now made 27 billion-dollar acquisitions over the last 20 years.

See who’s been the most — and least — aggressive here.

Here are a few potential signifiers of team/individual exceptionalism (some are better than others):

• Twitter followers
• Patents
• Published research
• Network centrality (connectedness to other exceptional people)
• Career/promotion trajectory

Yes, there are Black Mirror-ish aspects to doing this, for sure.

In our internal discussions about this at CBI, that’s one of the first concerns that comes up (beyond how difficult it might actually be). But it’s still an interesting challenge to think about.

If these are the types of data/algorithm challenges you find interesting, our engineering and data science teams are hiring like crazy.

BTW, we predicted another 50 Future Unicorns with the New York Times in February 2019 — 13 have already hit the mark in just the last 9 months.

That’s 11 zeroes

Just 2 fintech businesses are worth more than $100B: Ant Financial and Tencent’s financial arm.

From focusing on small businesses to expanding into health insurance, we look at how these tech giants are evolving their growth strategies here.

French dip

French tech funding fell by more than 50% in Q3, but 2019 is still set to see a record high.

Read more about tech funding trends in France in La French Tech and CB Insights’ Q3’19 report.

CVC’s balancing act

Three-quarters of CVCs face the challenge of balancing strategic and financial objectives, according to a recent Growth Collective survey.

Growth Collective is an exclusive network with access to senior-level peers, actionable tools, and evidence-based insights to help you overcome corporate growth challenges. Apply here to learn more.

Trippin’ out

Psychedelics could be the next cannabis, with investors and researchers alike starting to look at how the drug category could help treat illnesses.

Expert Intelligence clients can see the startups pioneering psychedelic medicine here.

Forbes. Jeff Kauflin (@JeffKauflin) reports on the growing emergence of neobanks and cites CB Insights research.

The Wall Street Journal. Marc Vartabedian (@marcvarta) profiles an AI-focused venture fund and references PwC and CB Insights’ MoneyTree report.

Financial Times. Richard Henderson (@richhend) and Miles Kruppa (@MilesKruppa) report on the growing influence of the private equity industry and cites CB Insights data.

I love you.

Anand
@asanwal

P.S. We’ve got about 80 tickets left for The Collective (Dec. 10-11, NYC). Use the code 80left to get $500 off.

P.P.S. We’re hiring a director of sales training. See the job description here.

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