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Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 2 : wiz.io

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Reading a few articles about Deepmind (part 1 of this post) and the founders of Adallom and wiz.io, I remembered other stories of European startups or those founded by Europeans. I’m thinking of Spotify (see my posts in 2022 and 2018) or VMWare (see an older post from 2010). We see that more or less curbed ambition has led to different results. Wiz or Spotify have valuations in the tens of billions, Deepmind, Adallom and VMWare (first acquisition) in the hundreds of millions, while the second acquisition of VMWare was also in the tens of billions. I don’t know if there’s a pattern or if I’m creating it artificially, but it’s a bit as if an acquisition in the hundreds of millions was a semi-failure linked to the fear of too much competition or the impossibility of pursuing an independent adventure.

The double adventure of the founders of Adallom and Wiz.io goes a little in that direction. I read a few articles which reference you will find at the end of the article. And I will give the lessons learned by Assaf Rappaport from these two stories. A first success, Adallom bought in 2014 by Microsoft for $320M then a second, wiz.com which Google offered to buy a few days ago for $32B (i.e. 100 times more…) Unlike Deepmind, I did not have access to specific documents, so I had to make some assumptions like some others (see [2]) and cross-check the information available online. Here are the two capitalization tables. But here too, the advice given (which I repeat below) is just as important as this data.

First of all, what I take from the tables:
– Four founders whose story is a classic in Israel (see [1]) created Adallom and then wiz.io. In reality, I am not a big fan of the concept of serial entrepreneurs, but wonder if wiz.io is not rather the scaling up of Adallom like VMWare (2nd period) was for VMware (1st period) or by pushing very hard the Nobel Prize of Demis Hassabis the scaling up of Deepmind! We read in the press that the founders had earned around $25M with Adallom according to some sources and $3B with wiz.io, also a factor of about 100x.
– The same venture capital funds and partners are the investors – Gili Raanan for Sequoia then Cyberstarts and Shardul Shah for Index. These are rare enough to be mentioned especially since these funds intervened at the seed stage.
– For Adallom, multiples of 24x for Series A, 7x for Series B, and approximately 2x for Series C.
– For wiz.io, multiples of 475x for Seed, 73x for Series A, 20x for Series B, 5x, 3x, and 2.7x for Series C, D, and E.

All of this is arguable, but not uninteresting, and there’s a bit of a lottery aspect to it. Don’t get me wrong. Success is rare, never guaranteed. I remember a startup that was offered a $300 million acquisition. The founders and/or investors declined, thinking they were worth more. In the end, the acquisition price was $10 million.

About the ambition and uncertainty, it is also worth reading Shardul Shah (Index) on LinkedIn (Index Ventures just cemented its place as one of the all-time VC greats). Here are some quotes : “I don’t know why we’re talking about averages — none of us are in the business of mean reversion.” […] “I’m not seeking average returns. I’m not seeking good deals—I’m looking for outliers.” […] “I don’t seek comfort. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We’re in the business of taking risk. I’m not a value investor, right? I believe in the power law.” […] “The hardest thing is identifying if you’re delusional or if you have conviction. Sometimes it can feel like a thin line.”

Finally I extract the lessons from Assaf Rappaport:
1. The team is more important than the idea. A startup is built not around an idea, which is going to change anyway, but around a team. The really good VC funds invest in talent, and not in products, ideas or business plans. And also: Don’t drag your feet when it comes to meeting with the best funds. Don’t leave them till the end.
2. One who listens to problems will find ideas. When you meet with customers, you’re not coming to convince them; rather, you’re there to learn from them. If you’re the one who spoke for more than a quarter of the meeting, it wasn’t a good conversation. Customers have problems that you didn’t even know existed, and the way to discover them is with question marks, not exclamation marks.
And also: You need some luck.
3. ‘No’ is the correct answer to determine whether the investor is serious. No matter what kind of offer you get – investment or acquisition – there’s only one response: ‘I really appreciate your offer, but no thanks.’ This kind of answer never deterred a determined investor or company – and if they’re not determined, they won’t invest in any case. And also: You need to prepare a media plan, both internal and external; when things leak, you’ll have only enough time to hit the Send button.
4. The exit is just the beginning of the hard work. On the day after being merged into a giant corporation, don’t sit back and wait until the options mature. Instead, adopt the commando approach: We’re part of a big army, but we belong to an elite unit.
5. Don’t be afraid of activism. In every company, a moment comes when you have to give the conservative corporate people a kick, and then go ahead and act. To be the best workplace and to recruit the best workers, you need to be brave and take a stand, engaging in social activism that gives rise to tremendous team spirit.
6. Take a deep breath and don’t exhale too soon. You shouldn’t be blinded by big money, instead, use it to quickly acquire paying customers, turn down acquisition offers of hundreds of millions of dollars, and grow the company rapidly so it will become a unicorn.
7. Today, it’s possible to overtake everyone with a computer and Zoom

Once again, risk-taking and limitless ambition.

References :
[1] : 7 lessons from reaching a $1.7 billion valuation in just one year https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3904610,00.html
[2] : WIZ, Esprit, es-tu là? Comment les fondateurs de Wiz refont des miracles après le succès d’Adallom https://trivialfinance.substack.com/p/wiz-esprit-es-tu-la

Two great recent startup stories (not in Silicon Valley, but both acquired by Google) – part 1 : DeepMind

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I probably have to admit a bias in favor of startups led by tech founders. It is what I have been advocating for decades now. So when I read about stories going that way, I am more than happy. Recently I was mentioned by friends a documentary movie entitled The Thinking Game.

I do not know why I had not looked at DeepMind before all the more it is pretty easy to get information about British companies and this is a British startup. So you read me, I built its cap. table when it was acquired by Google in 2014 for about

What I read in the table:
– 3 or 4 main cofounders, but Demis Hassibis had the biigest initial stake (80%),
– investors took high risk as the company did not have that much but talent initially, (and no revenue until acquisition ?)
– the main or at least most famous investors were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk,
– the company did not raise that much money : 2M£ in Feb. 2011, £15M in Dec. 2011 / Feb. 2012, finally £25M in 2013 before the £400M acquisition by Google in Jan. 2014.

That’s it for the basic facts. More importantly, the lessons in the article my friends sent to me are:
– First, DeepMind combines crystal-clear strategic clarity with never-ending tactical flexibility. What comes across in the film is the company’s extraordinary willingness to experiment wildly and fail persistently.
– Second, DeepMind’s mission has helped it recruit some remarkable scientific talent, critical to its success. In a discussion after the movie, Hassabis explained that he had always resisted investor pressure to move to Silicon Valley and had been determined to remain in London. “The UK has always been very strong in science and innovation and has a rich history in computing,” he said. “We are trying to carry on in that tradition.” Hassabis reckoned that there was a lot of under-utilised academic talent in Europe, and elsewhere, that could be attracted to London. So it has proved.
– Third, what was essential for DeepMind’s success was its ability to scale rapidly. Back in 2010, few VCs were prepared to go anywhere near a startup with such extravagant ambitions and no business plan. Much of its initial capital came from US investors, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. The company also felt compelled to sell out to Google in 2014 to give it the capital, data and computing firepower necessary to stay at the leading-edge of AI. (The extra resources were essential for recruiting and retaining top talent, too).

Often not to say always the same lessons about risk taking and ambition…

PS: I have not watched the movie yet, so I may amend this post in the near future.

Optimism and Disillusionment in Silicon Valley. Part 3 : Goomics, the end of Googleyness?

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First, it’s important to remember that Aaron Swartz died 10 years ago. He was, maybe, the first casualty of the end of the Internet as we dreamed it, a free or at least easy access to the world information.

What is Googleyness? Laszlo Bock’s Definition of Googleyness is #1 Enjoying Fun, #2 Intellectual Humility, #3 Conscientiousness, #4 Comfort with ambiguity, #5 Evidence that you’ve taken some courageous or interesting paths in your life. In page 134 of Goomics, Manu Cornet mentions “Data-Driven and Transparent, Selfless and Humble, Proactive, with a Sense of Humour & Silghtly Irreverent, Respectful and Fair”.

So what happened between the Volume I of Goomics, (that I had 3 posts about here, there and there) and this second volume, with subtitle Disillusionment? Let us quote the author through a few of his drawings. First of all, Google is an innovative company, as Manu Cornet reminds us through the following and funny quiz, the answers to which you will find at the end of the article.

However, the author has lived his last years at Google with some difficulty. Here are some examples:

His feelings that Google is becoming a normal company with its bad habits of bureaucracy, lack of transparency and even worse bad treatment of harrassment are rather scary.

Let’s end on a refreshing note though, written by a true nerd!

Post-scriptum (before the anwsers to the quiz):

A post-scriptum to close the loop of these 3 articles about disillusionment in innovation. A recent scientific article seems to support some of Michael Gibson’s arguments in Paper Belt on Fire. France Culture in Les publications scientifiques deviennent de moins en moins “innovantes” (see the end of the page) quotes a publication by researchers from the University of Minnesota, Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. An interesting read for those intrigued by the subject.

Answers to the quiz

Postscript (as of August 22, 2023): Page and Brin don’t give many interviews, the latest one I found is this one:

Larry Page and Peter Thiel – 2 (different?) Icons of Silicon Valley

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I just read two long and interesting articles about these important personalities of Silicon Valley. The one about Larry Page was mentioned to me by a colleague (thanks François!) through its French translation. It is rather old (2014) but still very interesting and relevant : The Untold Story of Larry Page’s Incredible Comeback (Nicholas Carlson – April 24, 2014).

The one about Peter Thiel was recently published by the New Yorker, I find it a little less interesting as there is not much new, but still very clear as usual with this great magazine : What Is It About Peter Thiel? The billionaire venture capitalist has fans and followers. What are they looking for? (Anna Wiener – October 27, 2021)

What do they have in common, I am not sure: they have very different personalities, one is rather secretive, the other very visible. They certainly have in common the belief that technology and entrepreneurship can (still?) change the world, but Thiel puts this as a political statement and I believe he is wrong. Politics are about collective decisions (I hope), wheras entrepreneurship is more individual decisions (I think) even if is does include cultural (therefore collective) features.

Page was born in 1973 in Michigan and Thiel in 1967 in Germany, they both studied at Stanford University, Thiel in the law school, Page in the engineering school. They apparently both funded the Singularity university, something I do not really understand except the link to their extreme belief in technology saving the world…

I have written so much about them, you may want to check that through the tags #thiel or #google. In the article about Larry Page, there are very interesting moments, for example his “lessons” about management:
– Don’t delegate: Do everything you can yourself to make things go faster.
– Don’t get in the way if you’re not adding value. Let the people actually doing the work talk to each other while you go do something else.
– Don’t be a bureaucrat.
– Ideas are more important than age. Just because someone is junior doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect and cooperation.
– The worst thing you can do is stop someone from doing something by saying, “No. Period.” If you say no, you have to help them find a better way to get it done.

It’s really worth reading these two articles and see again how much diversity there is (or not) in Silicon Valley. The last sentences of the articles about Page says: Instead of ending his life destitute and ignored, [contrary to his icon, Nikola Tesla] Page, still just 41, will spend the final half of his life pouring billions of dollars and countless hours into his wildest visions. “Anything you can imagine probably is doable,” Page told Google investors in 2012. “You just have to imagine it and work on it.”

Whereas the one about Thiel ends in a little more mysterious but enlightening way: Of course, when it comes to Thiel, what registers as mystique may simply be practiced opacity. Strauss, the conservative philosopher, proposed that academics and writers often advance their ideas through intentionally obscure prose — a technique in which “the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines,” such that it is legible “not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.” In interviews, Thiel can come across as “Straussian” — opaque, enigmatic, even oracular. He is a master of conversational redirection, and his arguments can be indeterminate. Religious references and allusions lend his ideas about business or globalization a sense of mysticism, as though the truth of his own speech is lurking just around the corner. Online, clues proliferate — about Thiel’s ideas and much else. Sleuths hunt for meaning, and search for signs indicating that they are among the “trustworthy and intelligent.” For Thiel’s fans, part of his appeal must be the endless opportunities he presents for decoding, deciphering, and hypothesizing. He offers readers the anticipation of revelation. Then again, the truth could be much simpler: when money talks, people listen.

Philippe Mustar – Entrepreneurship in Action – episode 3

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Here is episode 3 of my reading Entrepreneurship in Action by Mustar after episode 1 and episode 2.

I would like to mention what I consider an amazing coincidence in comparing two pages of Mustar’s book and the Google following short video.


There Larry page gives tips including:
Tip 2: There is a benefit from being real experts. Experience pays off.
Tip 3: Have a healthy disregard for the impossible. Stretch your goals.

About tip 2: “We worked on Google for many years at Stanford before we started the company. And that was a pretty nice position to be and we understood sort of all aspects in search. We talked about the search companies for many years. We really knew a lot about what’s going on. They can do that pretty cheaply, right? It’s just your labor, right? You can invest a year or two or three years and really learn something very, very well before you start having hundreds of people working on the problem.”

About tip 3: “I went to a leadership seminar once in Michigan where I came from and they have this great slogan which is, “Have a Healthy Disregard for the Impossible.” What this means is that, you really stretch goals that you’re not sure you can achieve but are sort of reasonable. You don’t want completely outlandish goals either. In fact one thing that I didn’t quite realize when I was starting Google is that it’s often easier to have aggressive goals. Now what that means is, a lot of time people take very specific things they want to do because they think they’ll be easier to attain. What happens if you’re being more specific, smaller markets and that kind of thing, you also get less resources.”

which I compare to pages 120-21:

About expertise: “To respond to these multiple questions, the trio meets many actors: “It was also important to speak very quickly to customers and experts in the field.” […] The team conducts a competitive watch to understand the positioning of the three major producers, but also the smallest that share the remaining 20% of the market. “I did all the fairs to understand how the sector works, how prices are fixed, what are the innovations in progress”. The objective for the trio is to differentiate its offer as much as possible from that of its future competitors.”

About the impossible: “During this period, as in the years that followed, many voices tell them that what they plan to do is not possible, that if we could […] the large companies that dominate the market would have already done it, that the development of industrial equipment is long and expensive and that they are subject to a tatillon certification process that the composite materials they hope to use will never pass. Last But Not Least, how young inexperienced and totally ignorant engineers of the sector could succeed in the giants of the sector, their tens of thousands of employees and their armies of experienced engineers.”

A final message from the founders of Expliseat which I find also very interesting: Unlike the entrepreneurship manuals which advise teams of founders to divide up the functions very early on, at Expliseat, during the first year of the project, the three entrepreneurs play all the roles at the same time. “Everyone does everything”. This is the formula they liked to repeat then.

GAFAM do not suffer from the crisis (part II)

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Yesterday I published data in Tesla, Google and Facebook do not suffer from the crisis. and after linking my post to the usual Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, one of my readers (thanks Manuel!) told me it would be fun to add Uber as a comparison. I said I would if/when I find the time and then thought why not AirBnB, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft?

I could only compile data about revenues of these firms and I think it is striking enough:

I wrote yerterday the growth rate was above 100% (doubling every year) in the early years declining to around 40% (doubling every other year) then to 15% (doubling evry five-year). Here are the growth rates of these old and new Titans. It begins again with 100+% for all of them. Too early to say about the future of Uber and AirBnB.
The three others of the GAFAM.
– Microsoft even had a 50% growth in its second decade, Amazon was closer to 30% and Apple struggled with 20%.
– In their 4th decade, Microsoft had an average grwoth of 10% and Apple 30%.

OK Manuel?

Tesla, Google and Facebook do not suffer from the crisis.

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This may not be surprising and it has been said in the media. The GAFAs have generally benefited from the Covid crisis. So, as I was independantly doing in the recent years, I looked again at the growth of Google and Facebook as well as Tesla.

[As a reference here are past articles:
– Are GAFAs threatened? Their growth is still steady: www.startup-book.com/2019/12/28/are-gafas-threatened-their-growth-is-still-steady/
– Facebook Finally Files For $5B: www.startup-book.com/2012/02/02/facebook-finally-files-for-5b/
– Google vs. Facebook: www.startup-book.com/2010/11/12/google-vs-facebook/]

And here are my udpates abour revenue, income and employee growth of Google, Facebook and Tesla:

Revenues and profits are in millions of $. What is undoubtedly the most striking is the similarity of the growths of the three actors and of course the fact that all these numbers are considerable, not to say extraordinary.

Typical of Silicon Valley startups, the growth is often above 100% in the early years decreasing to about 40% after a few years and still above 15% after 20 years. This means respectively doubling the numbers every year, every two years and every five years.

The largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in 2020

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I regularly look at the largest technology companies in the USA and Europe and obviously this year, I had the impact of Covid in mind. Here are the tables I build once a year (and that you could compare to the ones published in January 2020 here or in 2017 here.

I am adding below their PS (price to sales, ratio of market cap to revenues) and PE (price to earnings, ratio of market cap to profits when positive) as well as the growth of the market cap. and revenues. There are 3 new companies I had not studied last year (Airbnb, Paypal and AMD) for which the growth is therefore not mentioned.

There would be many comments to give btu I will be fast:
– The GAFAs are the clear leaders, 4 of them are trillion dollar companies. Facebook is a little surprinsingly not as impressive and Tesla is appearing on top.
– The COVID did not have a big impact, not to say it had a positive impact on technology companies (in financial more than in economic terms)
– Again, looking at averages we see Europe is lagging in market caps, employement, sales and profits by factors close to 10…

The largest technology companies in Europe and the USA in the last 10 years

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It’s just after reading on Twitter that Google had just become a trillion dollar company (In honor of Google becoming a $1T company today), and also after reading Nicolas Colin’s concerns about European technology companies (Will Fragmentation Doom Europe to Another Lost Decade?) that I remembered I used to compare US and European tech former startups.

So here are my past tables and also a short synthesis in the end. The full data in pdf in the end too.

USA vs. Europe in 2020

USA vs. Europe in 2018

USA vs. Europe in 2016

USA vs. Europe in 2014

USA vs. Europe in 2012

USA vs. Europe in 2010

USA vs. Europe: the Synthesis over the decade

If you prefer to download it all and a little more: Top US Europe (in pdf)

Are GAFAs threatened? Their growth is still steady

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It’s by reading Nicolas Colin’s always interesting newsletter, European Straits #149, 10 Tech Giants That Are (Almost All) in Bad Shape that I decided to revisit quickly the growth of 3 tech giants that I have been following for many years now: Google, Facebook and Tesla. And here are their numbers in terms of thousands of employees, revenue and profit in $M.

If you really love numbers, here is a little more: their average growth of 5 years is about 20% for Google, 40% for Facebook and about the same for Tesla (except that they never made a profit). Google is older so it is not a fair comparison. here is a more precise analysis.

So are the three tech giants threatened? I am not sure given this steady growth.