diversifying: terrible data viz - CB Insights Research

M&A and IPO activity in 2016. Crowded unicorn club. HR tech talk.

Useless subway maps

Hi there,

We just released our 2016 Global Tech Exits Report which tracks M&A and IPO activity among tech companies.

Check out a few highlights scattered below.

But first…

Inspiration without f-bombs

Last week, we sarcastically pitched a new tagline involving a shark and the F word.

Here’s some new wall art in the CB Insights office which I’m assuming somebody will find a reason to be offended by.

IPOs up

Globally, there were 3260 M&A exits and 98 IPOs in 2016, a 4% decline over 2015 which saw 3421 M&A exits but only 90 IPOs. Overall, exit activity was up in the second half of 2016 with 1726 exits compared to 1632 exits in H1’16.

You take pictures of your food and post them?

Here is the fastest route to visit every Michelin star restaurant in the USA. It’s 3,426 miles in total.

Unicorns only

We updated our unicorn club infographic to show the 185 private companies currently valued at $1B+ and when they gained admittance to the club. There have been three unicorns added to the club so far in 2017: Zhihu, Zoom Video Communications, and URWork.

Please stop the subway dataviz

We’re diversifying away from just bad graphs to bad dataviz.

Stumbled upon this on the r/webdev sub-reddit.

I have never, ever found any of these subway maps helpful (unless they are actual subway maps). My favorite comment on this Agile dataviz from Reddit was this one: “Ha! You just rolled a 6 and landed on refactoring, lose two turns.”

HR tech talk

We highlight perspectives from top investors, entrepreneurs, and corporate execs within the HR tech industry. Reid Hoffman, partner at Greylock, shares insights below.

Unicorns vs exits

After drawing even in Q3’16, unicorn births surpassed the number of $1B+ tech exits in Q4’16. But overall unicorn births in 2016 (25) were down from 2015 (77). Meanwhile, there were more tech exits of $1B or more in 2016 (18) than there were in 2015 (12).

The Industry Standard

CB Insights data is the most trusted by those in the industry and the media. A few recent hits.

Vator. Ronny Kerr digs into Blue Apron’s business model and cites data from the CB Insights 2017 Tech IPO Pipeline Report.

Deal Street Asia. A look at M&A activity in Singapore with a reference to CB Insights unicorn data.

VCCircle. Dearton Thomas Hector (@deartonhector) writes about Uber’s announcement that it will launch UberEATS in India and quotes CB Insights CEO and co-founder Anand Sanwal on the subject.

Hope you had a terrific Tuesday.

I love you.

Anand
@asanwal

P.S. Today is the last day to get $1000 off Future of Fintech tickets using code NLFintech17. Get your tickets here.

This report was created with data from CB Insights’ emerging technology insights platform, which offers clarity into emerging tech and new business strategies through tools like:

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