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Two days ago, Silicon Valley Secret Agent published an article "Silicon Valley in 2008", reviewing the entry of Web 2.0 ten years ago The development status of some representative technology companies in the final period. This change has made user-led Internet products with core content a new trend in the market, developed new business opportunities, and also brought about new social problems.
Ten years have passed, and companies derived from technology and the Internet have become more abundant, and the services they provide have become more diversified and segmented. Technology and entrepreneurship are no longer unfamiliar to many people, and concepts such as “blockchain”, “Internet of Things” and “big data” have entered thousands of households.
The global situation in 2018 was complex and changeable, and the technology industry was also greatly affected. Under such circumstances, there are still eight unicorn companies that have successfully gone public. Let’s take a look, what business are these companies engaged in? What are their characteristics?
(Photo source: Eventbrite)
Eventbrite was founded by the Hartz couple in San Francisco in 2006. It is a website mainly engaged in event management and ticket sales. Its profits mainly come from Transaction fees generated from paid activities on the platform. Eventbrite went public on September 20, 2018. Its listing was not accidental. It came largely from the expectations of investors and the market.
There are two types of events on Eventbrite: free and paid. Although it is not high-tech, the user experience of the website is very good and the operation is simple and convenient. Enterprises, merchants and organizations can launch events and sell events on Eventbrite. From ticket reservations to headcount counting, Eventbrite helped them better solve a series of arrangements and coordination for subsequent activities.
In addition, Eventbrite products accurately satisfy the young consumer groups in the mid-range market around the world without participating in high-end and low-end market competition.
At the same time, Eventbrite's products are highly internationalized and have a clear trend of global expansion. In April 2018, Eventbrite acquired the Spanish ticketing service company Ticketea, and in August it acquired the Canadian ticketing website Picatic with the purpose of merging third parties. However, when secret agents observed the company's recent financial statements, they found that Evenbrite has continued to lose money in the past two years, and its expansion model of burning money to seize the market will continue for some time.
Ha, you didn’t expect that our old friend DropBox was only launched last year!
In 2007, Dropbox was founded by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), incubated by the well-known incubator Y Combinator, and is also headquartered in San Francisco. Dropbox's main business is file hosting services, including cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud and client software; it makes money through commercial and individual user payments.
DropBox basically has all the conditions for a company to succeed: it entered the market early, its main founders are talented, its core technology is high-quality, it is completely free for ordinary users, its business and enterprise expansion are at a steady pace, and it has gained industry and consumer trust. The reader likes and so on. The secret agent and many surrounding classmates are its loyal users. Today, DropBox has more than 500 million users in 180 regions around the world. In 2016, Dropbox was named the Best Startup of the Year by TechCrunch.
(Picture source: DropBox)
Although Dropbox’s profits have not been stable in the past two years, and it has recently suffered consecutive losses, its quarterly financial report in March 2016 showed that there had been High profits of more than US$1.1 billion.
SurveyMonkey (hereinafter referred to as "SVMK") is an APP that is no stranger to people studying abroad in North America. In addition to time planning questionnaires like Doodle Pool, SVMK's information questionnaires are also very popular.
In 2015, it was named to Forbes’ list of unicorn startups and went public in September 2018. In addition to providing free and paid services to individual users, SVMK also provides data analysis and brand management marketing solutions to merchants to achieve profitability.
What is surprising is that the product SurveyMonkey actually appeared as early as 1999. It was not until Dave Goldberg became the CEO of SVMK in 2009 that the company expanded rapidly (unfortunately, Goldberg announced in 2015 Died in 2008. By the way, his wife is Sandberg, the second boss of Facebook). Goldberg saw the future value of "data" very early. Coupled with his excellent management and attitude towards people, SVMK has a small, capable and fast-moving team. To this day, the SVMK team is still small, with only more than 700 people worldwide, but it is extremely efficient.
Today, SVMK’s business is highly globalized, with products in 190 countries and regions. SVMK achieved profitability in 2017, but has been losing money last year. Since SVMK's business is related to data receipt collection, it also has stable cooperation with large customers. Regarding its future, the secret agent said: I am optimistic about you!
(Source: Survey Monkey)
Founded in 2007, Zscaler is an information security company that was listed on Nasdaq in March 2018. It mainly provides automated threat forensics and dynamic malware protection to protect against advanced cyber threats such as advanced persistent threats and spear phishing.
In detail, on the one hand, Zscaler is very similar to many companies that provide traditional security protection services. It mainly provides Internet security, network security, firewall, sandbox, SSL inspection, and anti-virus vulnerability management services; on the other hand, Zscaler Zscaler's business areas also cater to emerging segments involving mobile IoT and data monitoring.
Compared to other startups, Zscaler is a breath of fresh air among private technology company "unicorns." The company's founders took the initiative to significantly self-fund, achieving "cash flow neutrality", which represents stable revenue and profits. Today, it is common for startups to rely on rounds of financing to survive. Let alone startups, many traditional industries, such as energy companies and real estate companies, are unable to do so.
(Source: Zscaler)
The spies believe that this company’s business also has great reference value for China’s Internet industry. After all, security risks and user privacy leaks in the IoT field have become one of the main reasons affecting the development of start-ups.
DocuSign, as its name suggests, is a technology company that provides electronic signature technology and digital transaction management services. Founded in 2003, DocuSign was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in the United States last April. Now, DocuSign has hundreds of millions of users and has supporting services for individuals, merchants and enterprises.
It is safe, easy to use, and can meet the individual needs of users... These features have allowed DocuSign to quickly occupy the enterprise customer market. In 2012, US media Business Insider reported that about 90% of Fortune 500 companies have signed up to use DocuSign. The spy saw in the company’s financial report announcement that although DocuSign had been losing money in the past two years, it turned around at the end of 2018 and may achieve profitability in the new year.
(Source: DocuSign official website introduction)
Anaplan, also from San Francisco, was established in 2006. Its main product is enterprise performance management software. The company has more than 20 offices, 175 partners and more than 900 customers worldwide. Anaplan products are used in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, human resources and operations. On October 12, 2018, Anaplan became publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Anaplan's business is mainly faced with commercial customers. Through the patented memory computing engine (Hyperblock) to build a multi-tenant data architecture SaaS platform, the product can achieve dynamic collaboration and intelligent planning; by connecting people, data management, project planning, real-time planning and decision-making, it ultimately improves business efficiency. Another huge advantage of Anaplan is that its services are completely based on "cloud" and support "zero deployment". Users can log in to the platform Anaplan on smart devices to connect to the service.
In the first half of 2018, competition in China's enterprise cloud service product market was fierce, but SaaS performance management software was not optimistic. Beisen's survey shows that in China, more than half of Chinese company executives and human resources departments believe that this investment is not worthwhile, and nearly half of employees also believe that it is unnecessary.
It seems that in the Chinese market, how to get people to accept enterprise management products may be a greater challenge than the technology itself.
Bloom Energy was founded in 2001 and moved to NASA’s Ames Research Center (NASA ARC) in Silicon Valley in 2002. After 17 years of development, this energy rookie was officially launched on July 25, 2018. Available on the market today. The company mainly regenerates solid oxide fuel cells, using environmentally friendly natural gas and bioenergy and converting them into electricity.
Many of its partners are large enterprises in the energy field and Forbes 500 companies in various fields, and even include some North American government agencies. In 2014, Bloom Energy established the largest fuel cell deployment program ever in the United States, including 75 commercial facilities in California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Do you think the founder must be American?
You are wrong! ——There is an inspirational "American Dream" story behind Bloom Energy.
Source: Bloom Energy
Its founder, K. R. Sridhar, was born in India. He immigrated to the United States in 1982 and obtained a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois. Sridhar is currently the director of the Space Technology Laboratory at the University of Arizona and a professor of aerospace mechanical engineering.
(Source: CNBC.com)
After participating in the work, Sridhar worked on a NASA project called Mars Oxygen Production to provide environmentally friendly hydrogen for vehicle batteries. Unfortunately, this scientific research project was canceled in 2001 with the failure of the Mars Odyssey (Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander) landing. But Sridhar’s journey to convert Mars battery technology into commercial applications has yielded different results.
Finally, the only foreign company among these eight listed unicorns is China's NIO (NIO), which is called "China's Tesla" internationally. They are relatively familiar, so I won’t introduce the secret agent separately here.
(Source: Axios)
Unfortunately, after being launched last year, a traffic accident of NIO in December once again triggered consumers’ concerns about driverless and electric vehicles. In our previous article on "What to Watch at CES", we pointed out that "Chinese Technology" and "Autonomous Driving" have set the tone for technology development in 2019. As for the future development of NIO, let us wait and see.
After reading the introductions of these eight companies, are you surprised?
The secret agent talked about his feelings. Compared with the unicorns that went public 10 years ago, basically every one of these companies has maintained a safe and efficient core business. In addition to energy startups and automobiles, in terms of cloud services Each has its own merits; you can basically make a joke or say: they are not cool or flashy, and they "should" be listed on the market.
After the Wall Street financial crisis ten years ago, unicorns developed around "security and stability"; ten years later, the data age will come, and the past 8120 years will leave us with unknown consequences. What opportunities and future?
Not enough? Welcome to read the previous series of articles by Secret Agent:
Come and tell the Secret Agent what you think!