Startup Investment Portfolio Game
I read about technology news and startups fairly regularly and often find myself saying “man, I wish I could invest in them”. I thought it would be a fairly fun exercise to compile a list of companies I’m excited about now and look back on them in the future. For the past few months I’ve been maintaining a Google Spreadsheet of startups I would invest in if I could. Keep in mind that I have absolutely no track record, don’t live in Silicon Valley, and am still in college. That aside, even the best investors aren’t able to participate in every deal they want in on – but if I had money to invest in private companies, these are the ones I would look to get involved with. Last Updated: 3/26/2013
| Company View Notes | Date | Pre-Investments |
|---|---|---|
| AnyVivo | 5/8/2012 | $20k |
| Tackling just about the only e-commerce vertical Amazon won’t touch – which also happens to be a $40b industry: pets. Plus, jellyfish (their first niche) are wicked cool. | ||
| Airware | 3/26/2013 | $100k |
| Marketplace and platform for unmanned arial vehicles, or “Drones”. Automated hardware, some of which will be mobile, will shape the future and create many billion dollar industries. | ||
| Ark | 3/25/2012 | $250k |
| Facebook and Google are inherently incentivized not to build this product themselves. A lot like Greplin in that it allows searching private “locked” data, but this is very well fine-tuned for people. | ||
| Authy | 11/28/2012 | $170k |
| Twilio for 2-Factor Authentication. Team has lots of experience and knows how to scale this. | ||
| Automatic | 3/12/2013 | $100k |
| Vastly improves the most expensive computer you own: your car. Lots of lucrative plays for enterprise/fleet customers with many established potential exits. | ||
| BackType | 4/10/2011 | $1.32m |
| Incredible team of “Big Data” engineers. Solving interesting problem of optimizing marketing around social media data. | ||
| BankSimple | 4/10/2011 | $3.09m |
| Online banking is absolutely awful. Policies and answering basic financial questions are way too complicated for the average consumer. Industry is ripe for distruption. | ||
| BitCasa | 9/18/2011 | $1.3m |
| Eventually local storage will be indistinguishable from data stored remotely (“in the cloud”). A solution like this will be how this is accomplished. | ||
| Breathable Foods (Aeroshot) | 10/23/2011 | unknown |
| Energy drinks are expected to be a $45b+ market in 2014. The Aeroshot is an innovative pure caffein inhaler. Coffee drinkers rejoice. | ||
| Card.io | 6/23/2011 | $1m |
| “Square without the reader”. | ||
| CardSpring | 4/17/2012 | $10m |
| “Closing the redemption loop” is something a lot of companies with big pockets are trying to do. CardSpring has somehow figured out how to expose a developer friendly service that connects credit card numbers to actual purchase data. | ||
| Chartbeat | 7/29/2011 | $3m |
| Leading the space in real-time analytics. Newsbeat should be a huge hit with publishers. | ||
| Couchbase | 4/10/2011 | $10m |
| Innovative marriage of NoSQL and RDBMS database systems. Memcached is Everywhere. | ||
| CloudApp | 5/9/2011 | unknown |
| Love this product. Well built and designed. No clue if the business model works, but it’s almost identical to Dropbox. | ||
| Cloudera | 4/10/2011 | $36m |
| Forefront of “Big Data” trend and generally regarded as the leader in commercially available Apache Hadoop. Disclaimer: I was previously an intern and built their website. | ||
| CloudFlare | 6/21/2011 | $2.05m |
| Will eventually be the security and performance backbone of the internet. Already processing 15% of all internet traffic. Would give left nut to invest. | ||
| Curebit | 8/14/2011 | $170k |
| Injecting themselves into the online commerce feedback loop and creating tools to increase virality sounds like a win to me. Team’s also demonstrated that they’ve done it before. | ||
| Diffbot | 5/31/2012 | $2m |
| Very versatile crawling/parsing api that, as a developer, i know is in high demand. | ||
| DITTO | 2/11/2013 | $3m |
| Incredible technology that remedies the number one problem with buying clothes online: will it fit? | ||
| Dr. Chrono | 5/4/2011 | $20k (YC) |
| One of many potential home-runs in healthcare. Lots of money at stake with digitizing medical records. | ||
| DropBox | 4/10/2011 | $7.2m |
| Love this product and so do the majority of its 25m users. | ||
| DuckDuckGo | 4/18/2011 | $0 |
| Creating a search engine is probably the hardest thing to do successfully, but DDG could have a prayer with its privacy-conscious approach. | ||
| Dwolla | 11/15/2011 | $1.31m |
| Online equivalent to cash that maximizes network effects and doesn’t have interchange fees. $$$$$$ | ||
| Expect Labs (MindMeld) | 9/11/2012 | $0 |
| This could change the way people have conversations digitally. Impressive technology of predictive named entity recognition that could be applied to a variety of other platforms. | ||
| Fab.com | 2/1/2011 | $625k |
| Incredibly brandable domain name. Love the concept and execution so far. | ||
| Fav.tv | 7/22/2011 | $0 |
| World-class design. People are addicted to tv. | ||
| Findery (formerly PinWheel) | 2/16/2012 | $2m |
| Annotate the world. A service like this couldn’t have existed before smartphone proliferation, and it seems to be the perfect mix between FourSquare and Pinterest. | ||
| Foursquare | 6/21/2011 | $21m |
| Could be the company that fully unlocks the power of mobile + local offline commerce. | ||
| Fundable | 7/31/2012 | ~$500k |
| A local Columbus company that could make waves in how technology companies get financed via equity – well timed current legislation being passed. Team is extremely talented. | ||
| GenomeCompiler | 8/7/2012 | ~$1m |
| A compiler for creating living things. We have programming languages to abstract computer language, this is a compiler for the language of living organisms, the genome. Video. | ||
| GitHub | 4/10/2011 | $0 |
| Database of the worlds most prominent open-source programmers and the projects they’re creating. “Engineering talent crunch” | ||
| Greplin | 4/10/2011 | $4.72m |
| Solving the “Other half of search”. Don’t know if people have the problem of knowing where some piece of information is in their private web frequently enough for Greplin to matter, but the product/team are ripe for acq-hire. | ||
| Grouper | 9/20/2012 | $170k |
| Super unique approach to group dating that takes the hush-hush stigma out of finding someone online. Growing nationally quickly. | ||
| Gumroad | 9/5/2011 | $8.1m |
| A bit late on this given it’s likely previous investment valuation, but I still think there’s enough upside for this, and traffic is really starting to take off. | ||
| Hall | 2/7/2013 | $570k |
| Extremely well built Enterprise productivity suite. The main advantage is the desktop/mobile apps which appear to be built to remain lean and fast. This will be a very large Yammer-esque exit. | ||
| Hipmunk | 4/10/2011 | $5.22m |
| They started with flight search, which is pretty well done and has fans, but if they can solve the awful experience of finding a hotel they will print money. | ||
| Humanoid | 11/02/2011 | $600k |
| Bringing an API to outsourced brainpower. | ||
| IFTTT | 8/09/2011 | $0 |
| Super impressive backend, can tell the product will get easier to use (maybe featured tasks in a gallery?) over time. Lots of creative and helpful uses. | ||
| InDinero | 4/10/2011 | $1.22m |
| “Mint.com for small business”. Collecting an incredibly valuable dataset and will be able to do for businesses what Mint did for consumers. Also, Jessica Mah rocks. | ||
| Kiip.me | 4/10/2011 | $4.3m |
| Banner ads in games suck. The concept of turning achievements into rewards is really compelling, and their team is stacked to do it. | ||
| Kontagent | 4/10/2011 | $5.5m |
| From what I’ve seen, the leading analytics provider on the Facebook platform. Huge acquisition play. | ||
| Lawdingo | 3/26/2013 | $100k |
| Marketplace bringing efficiency to finding qualified legal services | ||
| Leap Motion | 7/11/2012 | $14.1m |
| This is an incredibly transformative improvement to human-computer interaction with insane opportunity to revolutionize gaming and healthcare (among other industries). Can’t believe the $70 price-point as well. | ||
| LifeSupport | 12/13/2012 | ~$200k |
| Impressive team of networkers, designers, and hustlers. Currently focused on Columbus, but poised for national growth. Everyone hates hangovers. | ||
| Liftopia | 10/19/2011 | $3m |
| Huge market. I love skiing. Win for resorts: reduces risk of volatile weather conditions. Win for users: cheaper lift tickets. | ||
| MakerBot | 1/13/2012 | $10m |
| My singularity dreading inner luddite loves to fear a company like this. (Read the Wikipedia article on Grey goo). | ||
| MediaLets | 4/10/2011 | $10m |
| I hate advertising, but MediaLets’ approach with rich-media advertising is the lesser of many evils. Team knows what they’re doing. | ||
| Meldium | 2/25/2013 | $100k |
| Solving a real problem of Enterprise password management that companies will pay for to simplify. Solid technical team from Amazon and Microsoft. | ||
| MemCachier | 9/5/2012 | $0 |
| Technically sound pre-funding team. Huge space to disrupt, and open-source memcached is the gorilla in the room. | ||
| Milk | 10/19/2011 | $1.5m |
| Kevin Rose has seen the whole spectrum of the dos and don’ts with running a startup between Digg and companies he’s angel invested in. I expect him to take this corpus of experience and build something meaningful; Oink looks like a great start. | ||
| MinoMonsters | 12/04/2011 | $1.17m |
| This game isn’t out yet, but I’ve used a beta version from their iOS developer and it’s like crack. The game mechanics used here are insane. This could be on the same level of Angry Birds in terms of popularity. | ||
| MixRank | 8/23/2011 | $170k |
| Optimized PPC campaigns on Adsense. No brainer team/product acquisition for Google. | ||
| MobileWorks | 8/13/2011 | $170k |
| Mechanical Turk is great, but result quality is questionably reliable. This approach is extremely well thought out and solves a very interesting and potentially lucrative problem. | ||
| MongoHQ | 8/23/2011 | $417k |
| MongoDB is one of the leaders in the NoSQL space and MongoHQ has built a platform growing very rapidly in revenue and distribution. | ||
| Muzy | 11/04/2012 | $0 |
| Haven’t seen anything reported of funding, but this app has nailed the Open Graph and is exploding. Another different-kind-of-sharing pinterest-like app, but can’t argue with growth. | ||
| Nest Labs | 10/25/2011 | unknown |
| Home automation will play a significant part in energy use reduction and economic efficiency. Nest, tackling the often-looked-over thermostat, is in a great position to do well. | ||
| Offermatic | 9/29/2011 | $4.5m |
| Closing the redemption loop in offline (in addition to online) commerce. Yodlee is destroying their margins, but this is a huge opportunity. | ||
| One | 8/03/2011 | $1m |
| Solving a super fascinating problem of location-relevant interest matching. Could be transformative. | ||
| Optimizely | 4/10/2011 | $1.2m |
| A/B testing might be a buzzword, but it’s still incredibly powerful. From using their product, they make running campaigns dead simple. Acquisition target. | ||
| Outbox | 2/26/2013 | $2.2m |
| Bringing change to a bloated $900b industry (postal mail) – sounds like a huge win. | ||
| PageLever | 8/03/2011 | $20k |
| Significantly improves upon a very minimal Facebook Page Insights product. Well built with and has a clear business model where customers have deep pockets. | ||
| Path | 11/30/2011 | $11.2m |
| Version 2 of Path makes Google’s previous $100m+ acquisition offer denial look prescient. This is where mobile social networks are headed. | ||
| Piada | 11/19/2011 | unknown |
| Irrespective of the fact that this is a restaurant that’s only current located in Columbus, Ohio, this is destined to be the next Chipotle. | ||
| Pocket Gems | 6/28/2011 | $5m |
| Extremely successful independent mobile social gaming company. Backed by Sequoia. No-brainer acquisition for EA or Zynga. | ||
| 7/01/2011 | $700k | |
| Traffic has exploded in 2011. Growing a huge community of people and a database of things they think are cool. Feels like early days of Tumblr. | ||
| Pusher | 6/9/2011 | $1m |
| “Realtime application as a service”. Love the concept, execution is solid, and the team is riding the giant transition to a more interactive and immediate web experience. | ||
| Quora | 5/17/2011 | $11m |
| Definitely a bit too much buzz given their founding team, but if they can effectively get away from the current tech/startup focus into more “normal” topics, they’ll have a goldmine of data/users. | ||
| Recurly | 4/10/2011 | $1.6m |
| Implementing payment solutions sucks. Recurly makes subscription billing simple and beautiful. | ||
| RethinkDB | 4/10/2011 | $1.22m |
| Eventually hard-drives will be solid state, and RethinkDB is poised to lead the field. Until that happens, they’re refocusing on optimizing existing HD solutions. | ||
| RightScale | 5/4/2011 | $42.5m |
| I have no idea why this isn’t built right into Amazon’s Cloud services because managing EC2 clusters manually is awful. | ||
| SnapGuide | 3/29/2012 | $2m |
| Mobile how-to guides wherever you need them. Extremely well thought out product and will be a mainstay on a lot of users’ phones. | ||
| Shopify | 4/18/2011 | $7m |
| Growing like a weed. No-brainer acquisition by eBay or Amazon. | ||
| Shopkick | 6/22/2011 | $20m |
| Incredible early adoption from merchants like Best Buy. Love the product and approach. | ||
| Shortmail (410 Labs) | 7/02/2011 | $0 |
| Everyone uses email, but a few rotten users ruin the experience for everyone. Tying accounts to a social authentication system and placing Twitter-like length restrictions may be the cure. | ||
| SigFig | 7/2/2012 | $2m |
| Mint.com for Investments. Clear acquisition for Intuit or wealth management companies which literally and figuratively print money. | ||
| SimpleGEO | 4/10/2011 | $9.81m |
| Being the location backbone of the web has a lot of potential. Killer team. | ||
| SnipSnap | 5/29/2012 | $555k |
| Paper Coupons will get replaced by *something* in the digital era. This looks like an interesting proprietary technology that will work with existing coupons on a phone. | ||
| Solve Media | 4/29/2011 | $4m |
| Captchas are annoying and command our scarce attention for an otherwise valuable period of time. This approach is equally annoying for consumers, but at least it makes publishers and advertisers money. | ||
| Square | 4/10/2011 | $37.5m |
| Couldn’t be a more lucrative market to disrupt, and Square has all the right pieces in place. | ||
| Storenvy | 6/21/2011 | $1.53m |
| Similar approach to Payvment, but a more Amazon-like approach with a central website (which is more in tune with how consumers currently shop). | ||
| Stripe | 4/10/2011 | $2m |
| I don’t think any merchants or developers wake up saying “man, I can’t wait to use work with Paypal today”. Stripe has a solid team and solid mission of remedying an otherwise excruciating experience. | ||
| Sunglass.io | 5/23/2011 | $0 |
| Software eats architecture. | ||
| Svbtle | 7/24/2012 | $0 |
| This might appear to be just another blogging service, but something tells me Dustin Curtis has his finger right on the head of the future of quality news production and consumption, albeit it’s limited to technology-oriented writers now. | ||
| Swiftype | 5/8/2012 | $170k |
| Site search is something that is an absolute pain to implement and is something almost every company wants to outsource. Google site search is a very mediocre solution and leaves most developers wanting more – this just may be it. | ||
| Tagstand | 8/19/2011 | $170k |
| NFC will change the way technology interacts the real world. It’s a far ways out, but the companies who will be relevant tomorrow will have started today. | ||
| Thalmic Labs | 2/25/2013 | $1.1m |
| Impressive gesture control for the wearable computing devices that are about to explode in popularity. Very cool use cases with gaming and sports – definitely getting acquired. | ||
| Tinder | 1/24/2013 | $0 |
| This is gaining huge traction on campuses and will definitely get more public attention later this year. | ||
| Turntable.fm (Stickybits) | 6/21/2011 | $1.9m |
| I don’t know if the transition from Stickybits to Turntable could be classified as a pivot.. more like a complete redux. Regardless, I’m addicted to Turntable. That being said, online music startups are notoriously hard to succeed with. I just want a custom avatar. | ||
| Twilio | 4/10/2011 | $16m |
| Have seen their traffic skyrocket after reducing SMS costs. They simplify an extremely painful process of manually building out an SMS solution as all previous ways require convoluted APIs or custom software. | ||
| Warby Parker | 12/19/2011 | $13.5m |
| “Zappos for prescription eyewear”. No reason to go into LensCrafters if you can try it on and return for free. | ||
| Withings | 9/17/2011 | $4.13m |
| Huge opportunity to capitalize augmenting smartphones with peripheral devices. Their approach with virality around health products (auto-tweeting) is sick. | ||
| Zaarly | 5/15/2011 | $1m |
| If this reaches critical mass, it will change the world. Incredibly designed and fascinating story behind its launch. | ||
| Zapier | 6/20/2012 | $170k |
| This ties into many more business oriented services that IFTTT doesn’t and will undoubtedly get a lot of people/businesses paying for their (albeit expensive) premium plans | ||
| 92 Companies | Last Updated: 3/26/2013 | |
Companies with a star next to them are once I’m exceptionally bullish on given their current capital intake, likely valuation, and liquidation opportunity. All fundraising numbers (listed under pre-investments column) were obtained via Crunchbase and are meant to indicate the amount of outside capital put into the companies before the date listed. To simulate a real-world investing scenario, I will be adding (and not removing) companies on an ongoing basis. Feel free to correct any mistakes, point out companies you think are exciting, or provide any feedback.
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