4. The Billion Dollar Club Airbnb is definitely in the club . The crowdsourced marketplace for turning your apartment into a hotel for a night grew 800 percent last year in nights booked to 800,000. There are currently 60,000 listings, and bookings keep growing by 40 to 50 percent a month. Sublets are next .
5. The Billion Dollar Club Square is also in the club . It is raising at least $50 million. Square passed 500,000 card readers and 1 million transactions in May, and is processing more than $3 million a day in mobile payments. COO Keith Rabois told us at Disrupt NYC that Square will do $1 billion in transactions this year, and he thinks it could ultimately do better financially than Paypal (where he was an early executive).
6. The Billion Dollar Club Dropbox , the Y Combinator file-sharing startup that only ever raised $7.2 million might end up with the largest valuation in the club, perhaps as high as $1.5 billion or $2 billion. It’s just growing like crazy, with 25 million users saving 200 million files daily. That’s up from 4 million users 18 months ago.
7. The Billion Dollar Club Gilt Groupe is already in the club. It closed a $138 million round at about a $1 billion valuation last May. One of the first companies to introduce online flash sales in the U.S., Gilt is on track to do $500 million in revenues this year and has expanded from fashion to food , travel , local deals , and more.
8. The Billion Dollar Club Gilt Groupe is already in the club. It closed a $138 million round at about a $1 billion valuation last May. One of the first companies to introduce online flash sales in the U.S., Gilt is on track to do $500 million in revenues this year and has expanded from fashion to food , travel , local deals , and more.
9. The Billion Dollar Club Just above this group, is Pandora (which just went public with a $2 billion market cap), LivingSocial (with a $3 billion valuation), LinkedIn (already public, with a $6.3 billion market cap), Twitter (which is worth anywhere from $3.7 billion to $10 billion ), Zynga (which will be worth north of $10 billion when it goes public), Groupon (which could be worth more than $25 billion ) and Facebook (which is already worth $50 billion and could go as high as $100 billion by the time it IPOs).
37. Stake and Investment Lifecycle What do we need to optimize? Size of the circle or Promoter Stake?
38. Valuation Soft Parameters ‘ We want to raise money and hire some people and build the product. Of course, we will start with market research’ ‘ We have burnt the midnight oil for last two years to research this need, built the product and have left our jobs a few months ago because we just had to get started’
39. Valuation Soft Parameters “ We will hire a sales head as soon as we get set. We don’t mind even hiring a CEO” ‘ Here is the Sales Head, my co-founder, and I remain the CEO till the company is large enough to attract a professional ’
The first thing to understand about VC ’s is that they’re not investing their own money. Venture capitalists start by raising money from a bunch of investors, and then distribute it to various startups. But the investors are expecting to get their money back, generally within 10 years of committing it to the fund.