Alright, this first item is not pro- or anti-Trump.
In fact, all Americans should come together against this nonsense.
Oddly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the tech world has already tried to disrupt cuddling.
A search on CB Insights for the word cuddle brought up a couple of notable apps. There was Cuddlr, which went onto become Spoonr, which was billed as the Tinder for cuddling. It racked up a bunch of press and over 200k downloads before shuttering and then restarting and eventually being acquired. There is also another one that called itself the Lyft for spooning.
Now, onto some data.
Take out timeline
M&A activity among food delivery startups has seen a massive increase in recent years, capped off by the recent acquisition of Yelp’s Eat24 by GrubHub. Using CB Insights data, we created a timeline of food delivery startup M&A activity between 2012 and 2017 YTD.
The stories that never get told
Erin Griffith of Fortune has an interesting article (see The Blurb) today about Student Brands, which was revenue-funded (aka bootstrapped) for 17 years before being acquired for $58.5M by Barnes & Noble Education this week.
These are the types of tech successes that rarely get told.
The founder owned 80% of the company and took home $47 million on the sale.
This is definitely more than most VC-backed company founders.
Yes, Facebook and Google’s founders took home a lot more, but let’s be real here.
Yes, I know you spun up some narrative and market size in your fundraising deck to get that VC cash, but this is reality.
The other big part of the above is the founder worked on this for 17 years. That’s old-fashioned. Clearly, he didn’t get the memo that you get into business to exit it.
On the topic of Student Brands, Bryce Robert shared this nugget via Twitter.
Read that tweet again.
$180M exit and founder took home just over $1M. He links to an interesting post entitled Meaningful Exits for Founders (see The Blurb).
Here’s a passage from it followed by some math.
Let’s assume there are 3 founders who equally split the founder equity. We’ll call it 6% each. If they exit for the Series D valuation of $210M, they each take home $12.6M. Even if one founder owned the whole 17% slug, she’d take home $35.7M.
Yes, this is worse than Student Brands founder did (remember that $47M above).
As Bryce says above, it’s like founders don’t like math.
Maps on maps
We’ve published more than 2,600 research briefs on our blog. To help you navigate all that good content, we’ve compiled this list of 90+ market maps highlighting the who’s who of sectors across fintech, auto tech, healthcare, and more.
SEA mega-deals
Funding in Southeast Asia has already reached an all-time annual high this year, pulled up by the region’s most well-funded startups. Deals are also on track for an annual high.
The Industry Standard
CB Insights data is the most trusted by those in the industry and the media. A few recent hits.
