Month: January 2024

Aileen Lee, who coined the term unicorn (defined as a startup that reaches $1 billion in valuation within 10 years of founding), has penned a follow-up called Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 years later (including a slide deck).

A bunch of interesting data points, but four that stood out to me are:

1. unicorns have gone from 38 % enterprise startups in 2013 to 78 % enterprise startups in 2023 (somewhat tracking my observation of the temporary death of digital consumer startups)
2. 41 % of unicorns were public in 2013, only 3 % are public in 2023.
3. 66 % of unicorns had exited in 2013, only 7 % in 2023.
4. Unicorns, especially enterprise, are significantly less capital efficient

Clouded Judgement provides a weekly, data-driven look at the intersection of private and public market for technology companies.

One interesting data point in the beginning of 2024 is the valuation of SaaS companies (in the US market). After a strong end to 2023, valuations (example used is enterprise value / next twelve months revenue) are pretty much back to normal.

It is clear that the public stock market loves high growth. Which indicates that for high growth companies (30%+ per year), the IPO window should be open in 2024.

At least the main problem isn’t valuations themselves, but a combination of late-stage startups not performing to the expectation of the stock market (in profitability and revenue growth) and the problem of the overhang of high private valuations from 2020 and 2021.

Alliance VC has participated in the pre-seed round for Hemi Health, a Danish-based startup fighting headaches and migraine. Hemi Health is founded by ex-Kry/Livi employees Benedicte Grytte Dahl and Sune K-Holm Nielsen together with Anna Løfqvist and Mathias Iversen. Read more at Shifter (in Norwegian).

Digital/physical and data-driven health is one of Alliance VC’s focus areas, and we hope to invest in more Nordic-based health startups in 2024.

Carta, a widely used cap table management service, has shut down its secondary-transaction business. This follows complaints that Carta (or at least some of its employees) used private information from cap tables to find potential sellers of shares. Without the approval of the companies.

Kjetil Holmefjord, of Norwegian pre-seed and seed investor Sondo Capital, has written his annual review of Norwegian tech funding. Good read.

Cross-over investor Coatue is closing its European office in London. Reduction/focusing during bust years often follows geographic expansion during boom years in venture capital.

Good discussion on best startup of 2023, best venture funds of 2023, SaaS and challenges for 2024 and more.

CJ of Mostly Metrics takes a chainsaw to the usefulness of LTV/CAC. He’s prefers CAC payback time and net dollar retention.

LTV/CAC is useful but one should understands its weaknesses, especially during the first 2-3 years in a startups journey.

MacRumors shares that no new iPad model was released in 2023. That was the first year since the iPad’s launch in 2010 that no new model reached the market. It feels like another sign that the broader mobile market is getting more mature, both from a technology and product point-of-view. This slowdown obviously follows the smartphone becoming the most popular consumer technology ever.