Armed with startup data, Crunchbase looks back on 2016 to predict what’s comingNo one has a crystal ball. Armed with loads of startup data, the research outfit Crunchbase has nevertheless churned through some numbers to create an interesting snapshot of what happened in 2016 — and what might happen in 2017 — by examining six distinct trends. The first trend — and it’s given the most weight in the report — centers largely on where funding flowed worldwide. In fact, looking back, 2016 may well be viewed as a pivotal year in the globalization of venture capital and venture-backed startups. The reason: the amount of venture dollars plugged into startups around the world last year grew 19 percent over 2015, with $176 billion invested altogether, says Crunchbase. Yet the story was very different in the U.S., where venture investments were off 11 percent from their 2015 levels, with U.S. based startups attracting $76 billion, down from $86 billion the year before. VC investment activity dips in 2016, but still reaches $69B across 7,751 companiesVenture capital investment activity dipped last year from a record 2015, but returned to normal activity in 2016 and marked the second-highest total in the past 11 years. Pitchbook and NVCA today released their Venture Monitor for Q4 2016 and found $12.7 billion deployed to 1,736 companies for the most recent quarter. California led all states with $6.1 billion invested across 587 deals, representing nearly half of all venture capital invested during the fourth quarter. New York ranked second with $1.6 billion invested across 192 deals, followed by Massachusetts with $1.2 billion invested in 131 deals. Washington state ranked fourth with $568 million invested across 81 deals, while Texas ranked fifth in dollars invested with $385 million. It ranked fourth in terms of deals with 106. [ Geekwire ] Related : VCs Raise Most Since Dot-Com Era But Are Slow to Spend It An entire library could be filled with books about how the bright minds in Silicon Valley find and fund the next Google or Facebook. But there are four basic steps to startup investing: 1) Persuade people to give you lots of money. But the basic mechanics are sputtering. AMOUNT SPENT ON STARTUPS GLOBALLY IN 2016 $101 billion There's no problem with steps one and two. U.S. venture capital funds devoted to startup financing collected more money in 2016 than any year since the dotcom bubble, according to datafrom research firm PitchBook. [ Bloomberg ] Alexandra Wolfe Takes a Deep Dive Into Silicon Valley for Valley of the Gods“I was writing this book and I was like, ‘I’ve finally come up with something new!’ ” the journalist Alexandra Wolfe, giggling, remembered by phone. “Then my dad was like: ‘I wrote the first story on Silicon Valley.’ ” Wolfe was referring to her just-published first book, Valley of the Gods, a sharply observed, often quite funny anthropological deep dive into the strange inner workings of the Bay Area tech
world. And her dad, if you haven’t already guessed, is Tom Wolfe, the nattily attired octogenarian novelist and New Journalism pioneer who gave us such sharply funny classics as TheBonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and also, apparently, a 1983 magazine profile of Robert Noyce, an inventor of the microchip and cofounder of Intel, who earned the nickname, “Mayor of Silicon Valley”). [ Vogue ] Denali Tietjen of General Catalyst Over the past four years, we’ve backed over 100 student-founded startupsthat have raised additional funding from leading seed stage firms including Notation Capital, Box Group, First Round Capital, Slow Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. How This Founder Created The Airbnb Of High-End FashionAnyone who has used the cost-per-wear theory to justify a coveted fashion purchase just got something better — let's call it a cost-per-rent theory — which allows you to have your Louboutins and rent them too. Julia Gudish Krieger is making it possible with her New York City-based startup, VillageLuxe. "Referred to as 'the Airbnb of high-end fashion,' VillageLuxe allows women to borrow designer clothing, shoes and accessories directly from other women," says Krieger. [ Forbes ] Precursor Ventures raises $15.3 million for seed investing, with a twistCharles Hudson has lived in the Bay Area for the last 20 years, working as product manager, as an entrepreneur, and an investor. As such, he’s had a front row seat to a number of changes in the way startups are funding, including the evolution of numerous angel investors into so-called micro VCs into fund managers who are now responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars. Take investor Jeff Clavier, who began sprinkling tiny amounts of money across what appeared to be a new crop of capital-efficient startups back in 2004 and
soon after launched a firm, SoftTechVC, where Hudson would become a partner in 2013. By 2014, SoftTech had closed a fourth fund with $85 million. Last June, it closed on a record $150 million across two funds. Moving your company from the pre-seed to seed stageI previously alluded to some of my goals for 2017 with an overarching goal of focusing time on pre-seed companies. To be clear, 500 Startups is not making a shift in its priorities — these are merely my own personal views and activities. (500 invests in all areas of the “seed spectrum” but with a big focus on post-seed) I’ll talk more later about why I’m spending more time at pre-seed, but for the time being, I wanted to start sharing some more details of some of these activities that I have planned. Curated by Venture Pulse Team. Find us on : [ Venturepulse.org, CrunchBase,
AngelList ] |