VBProfiles.com, the force awakens

The team has been tirelessly working to improve the platform. This new VBProfiles.com evolution is a major step towards our vision of being the ultimate market intelligence platform for curious minds, strategists, experts, and market researchers.   We have plenty of ideas on how to drive the site forward and are very excited to get your take on where we are heading.

A few months ago, we issued a features and benefits survey with the question: "What would be your recommendations to take VBProfiles.com to the next level?" The top answers we got centered around 3 things:

i.                Deeper reports and monthly summaries

ii.               Ability to create your own reports by downloading the data

iii.              Customize the site for your benefits:

And here’s how we responded to your recommendations.  

Deeper reports and summaries:

On top of the existing Daily Hub, which features all the must-read industry related news delivered straight to your email, we have introduced the Monthly Briefing and the Quarterly Intelligence Report. 

The Monthly Briefing summarizes the emerging trends, the new and upcoming companies, latest product innovations and Funding & Acquisition related information. The Quarterly Intelligence Report provides deep strategic insights on your market.

Ability to create your own reports and conduct your research by downloading the data: you can now export all the people and company data from our platform to run your own research. Use cases include: building up your sales list, identifying investors and board members for your company, building your own market performance insights, etc.  

Customize the site for your benefits: what we are basically doing is giving you access to all our tools to create your own markets or lists to generate the data you need regarding the specific things you are interested in. Here’s how to do it:

- Clone our markets: You can now take one of our markets and make it yours. This allows you to remove the companies or topics you are not interested in, and add the ones that make sense to you. You can then track these lists and generate your own market summaries.

- Generate Your Own Market Summaries: Say you want to know about a list of investors by the companies that they have invested in. You can now create a list with all these companies, generate a market summary and get all the important information about the people, investors, partners, and customers that are associated with the companies that you’ve selected, which saves you hours of research.

- Create your own landscapes: You can now create multiple public and/or private lists, and combine them into one list (i.e., “a list of lists”) to build out your own custom landscape.

So now let’s look at how you can combine these powerful new features. Say you want to track the entire BigData industry. Go toVBprofiles.com and identify all the BigData lists we have. Create “a list of lists” with all these Big Data lists. You are now able to download all the Big Data Companies, People and VCs. You will also receive all the must-read articles for your new list through our Daily Hub, as well as the Monthly Briefing, which will provide all the new entrants, funding, trends, and product innovations. On a quarterly basis, you will also receive our Quarterly Insight Report, showing your market’s deep drivers.

To see all this in action, check out our getting started with the new VBProfiles.com video and our how to refine your market video, or book a 15 minute meeting with our team: aaron.garcia@spokesoftware.com 

Releasing New Features

The team has been tirelessly working to improve the platform. This new VBProfiles.com evolution is a major step towards our vision of being the ultimate market intelligence platform for curious minds, strategists, experts, and market researchers.   We have plenty of ideas on how to drive the site forward and are very excited to get your take on where we are heading.

A few months ago, we issued a features and benefits survey with the question: "What would be your recommendations to take VBProfiles.com to the next level?" The top answers we got centered around 3 things: 
o Deeper reports and monthly summaries
o Ability to create your own reports by downloading the data 
o Customize the site for your benefits: 

And here’s how we responded to your recommendations:  

Deeper reports and summaries: On top of the existing Daily Hub, which features all the must-read industry related news delivered straight to your email, we have introduced the Monthly Briefing and the Quarterly Intelligence Report. 

The Monthly Briefing summarizes the emerging trends, the new and upcoming companies, latest product innovations and Funding & Acquisition related information.The Quarterly Intelligence Report provides deep strategic insights on your market. 

Ability to create your own reports and conduct your research by downloading the data: You can now export all the people and company data from our platform to run your own research. Use cases include: building up your sales list, identifying investors and board members for your company, building your own market performance insights, etc.   

Customize the site for your benefits:  What we are basically doing is giving you access to all our tools to create your own markets or lists to generate the data you need regarding the specific things you are interested in. Here’s how to do it: 
- Clone our markets: You can now take one of our markets and make it yours. This allows you to remove the companies or topics you are not interested in, and add the ones that make sense to you. You can then track these lists and generate your own market summaries.
- Generate Your Own Market Summaries: Say you want to know about a list of investors by the companies that they have invested in. You can now create a list with all these companies, generate a market summary and get all the important information about the people, investors, partners, and customers that are associated with the companies that you’ve selected, which saves you hours of research.
- Create your own landscapes: You can now create multiple public and/or private lists, and combine them into one list (i.e., “a list of lists”) to build out your own custom landscape. 

So now let’s look at how you can combine these powerful new features. Say you want to track the entire BigData industry. Go toVBprofiles.com and identify all the BigData lists we have. Create “a list of lists” with all these Big Data lists. You are now able to download all the Big Data Companies, People and VCs. You will also receive all the must-read articles for your new list through our Daily Hub, as well as the Monthly Briefing, which will provide all the new entrants, funding, trends, and product innovations. On a quarterly basis, you will also receive our Quarterly Insight Report, showing your market’s deep drivers.   

Philippe

Comparison between VBProfiles Unicorn and Atomico Billion Lists

After an article released by John Koetsier on Unicorns, we received questions from Robin Wauters about the validity of our number of Unicorns for Europe. He introduced two different lists from Atomico and then from GP BullHound. 

1. Comparison between the Atomico and VBProfiles lists:

The Atomico list identifies software companies that got valued more than US$ 1 Billion either as a Unicorn, while being public or through an acquisition. the term software companies is taken at large as it includes companies such as Prosper or YouTube, which are not technically software companies, but technology enabled services. And Atomico's list doesn't include Unicorns like Fitbit which is a hardware company. 

Atomico's list contains 236 companies:

·       165 Unicorns defined as having reached the US$ 1 Billion valuation while being private:

·        50 companies that reached the Billion Dollar valuation after going public;

·        15 companies that got acquired for more than one Billion without reaching Unicorn Status;

·          6 companies for which we could not find evidence the company reached a Unicorn status.

Regarding the VBProfiles 206 Unicorn list, while comparing our list with our Atomico's, we identified 14 new unicorns (8 from Asia, 6 from the USA, 1 from Finland (Europe)) and we are adding those to our Unicorn landscape. 1 other Unicorn in the Atomico list (Anaplan) was not part of the 206 Unicorns as of 12/2015 because the company announced their funding in January 2016.

2. Comparison between the GP BullHound list:

GP BullHound list relates to 13 European companies valued more than US$ 1 Billion in 2015.  Again Anaplan announced their funding in 1/2016 so were not part of our study. We could not confirm Ve status as a Unicorn and Skrill was acquired for US$ 1.2 Billion but was not valued US$ 1 Billion privately so is not technically a Unicorn.

3. Work Ahead:

This exercise enabled us to identify two sources of problems: 

• We are counting some companies such as YouTube as Unicorns when they should not;
• Through the GP Bullhound study, we identified 3 companies that we categorized as US companies when they were originally from Europe. We are going to scrub all our addresses to make sure that the companies are associated to the countries they are originally from, not with the country of their current headquarters. 

We are going to report back to John and Robin about our findings moving forward but, at this point and based on this initial work, we are not expecting major changes in the study for the number of Unicorns coming from Europe. I will keep updating the blog as new information is available.