"There’s still too little diversity at the top" is such a stupid statement given the fact that you are talking about "unicorns", some 0.14% of VC backed companies get to a billion dollars.
By that very definition of "normal" shouldn't really apply should it? These companies and their circumstances are rare. So, you're talking about outliers.
Also, it conflates two very different issues. Performance and diversity. Obviously women can lead and do a fantastic job at top level positions. But, these companies weren't built with or by women at the top.
It's like talking about the fastest people to run 100m sprint, and then complaining that there isn't enough diversity at the top. The fact is, there are hundreds of men who have broke 10 seconds in the sprint, and the fastest female sprint was 10.49 in 1989. Usain Bolt is almost a full second faster than that.
Performance and diversity are vastly different things.
Hopefully more unicorn companies are built by women going forward, but it seems odd to complain that there isn't more diversity in a group that is defined by business value as the only metric.
> Enterprise-oriented companies raise much less private capital;
> The average enterprise-oriented company (where the primary customer is a business) is worth $2.5 billion, less than half the average consumer company.
The enterprise space doesn't seem to be following the winner-take-all mentality as compared to consumer startups. At some point you are still hiring regionalized enterprise sales reps, and each of them can only have so much quota.
Is there a enterprise-unicorn where they don't have traditional-enterprise-sales? Where their distribution/acquisition closely follows consumer companies?
Depends on your definition of "enterprise". For me, two of the characteristics of enterprise software that define it are: it encompasses company wide operations and the purchasing decision is made by a c-level exec. For example, selling Slack to a marketing department or an engineering team is _not_ enterprise. That's simply B2B SaaS. Selling CRM so that the entire salesforce of a company is enterprise software. Following my definition, there are very few companies who don't sell enterprise software without an actual person involved.
Also, if you see the logo of a large company for something like a project management tool (let's use Basecamp as an example), it's most likely one department out of thousands use the tool...not the whole company. I suspect many people misunderstand this.
Interesting tidbit - ever wonder why there are so many Director's, VP's, etc in the sales or product organizations of enterprise software companies? It's because no C-level exec of a large business (think F500) would converse with an individual of an vendor who didn't have a similarly looking title to their own.
Atlassian probably fits the bill more and has proven revenue on it, while Slack is more... "SaaS" in my mind, and really hasn't proven long term revenue traction yet, though it is certainly looking good for them.
Depending on the product, enterprise customers also publically and strategically source from multiple vendors to ensure they're not beholden to vendor lock in.
Consumers rarely act in so organized and thoughtful a pattern.
Negative correlation between NASDAQ and number of unicorns founded in the corresponding year seems really interesting. Any deep thoughts on this ?
> The best times to start a unicorn company could be a) post the launch of a watershed new tech platform; and b) during a prolonged public market downturn. Without many great jobs available, the reduced opportunity cost and related hardship may spawn great innovation and grit.
On a second thought I can come up with 1) the rise of an unusually high number of billion dollar companies may signal an impending market correction and 2), a low number of billion dollar companies are founded during times of market over-exuberance.
I think her points are all generally true, but be aware...
Some of the companies on that list are not actually unicorns. Meaning: they have not consummated a financing with a post-money valuation that exceeds $1,000,000,000.
Just saying that her data (or at least a small part of it that I know about intimately) is wrong.
By that very definition of "normal" shouldn't really apply should it? These companies and their circumstances are rare. So, you're talking about outliers.
Also, it conflates two very different issues. Performance and diversity. Obviously women can lead and do a fantastic job at top level positions. But, these companies weren't built with or by women at the top.
It's like talking about the fastest people to run 100m sprint, and then complaining that there isn't enough diversity at the top. The fact is, there are hundreds of men who have broke 10 seconds in the sprint, and the fastest female sprint was 10.49 in 1989. Usain Bolt is almost a full second faster than that.
Performance and diversity are vastly different things.
Hopefully more unicorn companies are built by women going forward, but it seems odd to complain that there isn't more diversity in a group that is defined by business value as the only metric.