At least at one point, when its stock was sky high.
If I say “Unicorns” you will instinctively think of Facebook, Spotify, Tesla or Uber.
Why?
Well first of all, the put a lot of effort into their branding and marketing.
It helps if your CEO is a Twitter savant like Elon Musk.
Or if you constantly seem to butt heads with governments like Mark Zuckerberg.
If not, the next plausible reason is that you are a B2C company that focuses on consumers and it gets people talking.
Think about it.
All of the ones I mentioned earlier: Facebook, Spotify, Tesla or Uber.
Plus Snap and a few more, are all consumer-facing.
They deal with the average joes, from high schoolers to retired uncles.
They are easy to consume, easy to comprehend to the layman and easily accessible.
It should be, that is one of the hallmarks of a good B2C company.
But if you look at the recent data of the 20 most valuable startups that IPO-ed between 2010–2019, you will see that more than half of them are unknown to the common man.
B2B dominates when it comes to high valuation startups, at least in the last decade.
Some of the best companies are rarely talked about.
“ServiceNow, Crowdstrike, Workday, Veeva, Livongo, The Trade Desk, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, DataDog, and ZScaler are some of the most successful companies of the last 20 years, but they almost never trend on Twitter.”
So true.
Perhaps it is because their customers aren’t on Twitter or social media.
Most B2B deals are larger in quantum, done behind closed doors and the sales cycle often takes forever.
In short, they aren’t too sexy.
At least to the average joe and reporters, who needs big flashy headlines to get your attention.
Oh and take a look at the chart in the comments.
Fascinating that Tesla, who at one point, has a market cap of $1.1T, raised only $142m.
Facebook raised nearly 5x more and is still worth less than Tesla!
I guess Elon’s antics and adept skills in navigating the media is unparalleled.
In short, B2C is sexier and worth more, but B2B is more consistent and still wins big.
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#startups #business #startupx #growth #success #socialmedia #culture #entrepreneurship #strategy #elonmusk #tesla #facebook #valuation #ipo #funding #marketvaluation #facebook #bootstrapping #venturecapital
