Silicon Valley Live / Field Visits / Hot Spots / In-depth Discussion

Two days ago, Silicon Valley Spy pushed out an article titled "Silicon Valley in 2008," which looked back at the development of some iconic tech companies during the tail end of the Web 2.0 era a decade ago. This change made user-driven, content-centered Internet products a new trend in the market, developed new business opportunities, and brought new social problems.

A decade has passed, and the companies derived from technology and the Internet have become richer, and the services they provide more diversified and segmented. Technology and entrepreneurship are no longer new to many people, and concepts like "blockchain," "Internet of Things," and "big data" have reached millions of households.

In 2018, the global situation was complicated and volatile, and the technology industry was also affected. In such a situation, there are still eight unicorn companies successfully listed. Let's take a look at what kind of business these companies are engaged in? And what are their characteristics?

(Source: Eventbrite)

Founded in 2006 in San Francisco by Mr. and Mrs. Hartz, Eventbrite is a website that focuses on event management and ticket sales, with earnings coming primarily from transaction fees generated by paid events on the platform.Eventbrite went public on September 20, 2018, and its IPO was no accident either, and came in large part from investor and market expectations.

Events on Eventbrite are free and paid two kinds of activities, although there is no high technology, but the website user experience is very good, simple and convenient to operate, and no matter whether the enterprise, business or organization can launch the event, sell tickets and booking, counting the number of people on Eventbrite, Eventbrite help them better solve the series of arrangements for the follow-up activities of the co-ordination.

Additionally, the Eventbrite product caters to a younger, mid-market consumer base around the world without competing at the high end or low end of the market.

At the same time, Eventbrite's products are highly internationalized and there is a clear trend of global expansion - Eventbrite acquired Spanish ticketing service Ticketea in April 2018 and Canadian ticketing site Picatic in August, with the aim of merging with third parties. But a close look at the company's most recent financial statements shows that Eventbrite has continued to lose money over the past two years, and that the expansion mode of burning money to capture markets is going to continue for a while.

Ha, I didn't realize that our old "Netflix" friend DropBox went public just last year!

In 2007, Dropbox was founded by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and incubated by the well-known incubator Y Combinator, also headquartered in San Francisco.

Dropbox's main business is a file hosting service, which includes cloud storage, file synchronization, a personal cloud, and client software; and it monetizes its business through both commercial and individual user fees.

DropBox basically has all the conditions for a company to succeed: early time to market, talented creators, high quality core technology, completely free for the average user, a steady pace of business and corporate expansion, and industry and consumer favorites. Secret Agent and many of his classmates around the world are its loyal users. Today, DropBox has more than 500 million users in 180 regions around the world. in 2016, Dropbox was named Startup of the Year by TechCrunch.

(Image source: DropBox)

While Dropbox's earnings have been inconsistent over the last two years, and it has recently posted consecutive losses, its March 2016 quarterly earnings report showed a hefty profit of more than $1.1 billion.

SurveyMonkey ("SVMK"), an app not unfamiliar to people who study and work in North America, is popular for its informational questionnaires, in addition to time-planning questionnaires like Doodle Pool.In 2015, it was named to Forbes' unicorn In 2015, it was named to the Forbes list of unicorns, and went public in September 2018.SVMK provides data analytics, brand management, and marketing solutions for businesses to monetize, in addition to free and paid services for individual users.

Surprisingly, the product, SurveyMonkey, actually appeared back in 1999, and the company didn't expand rapidly until 2009, when Dave Goldberg became CEO of SVMK. (Sadly, Goldberg passed away in 2015. Goldberg saw the future value of "data" early on, and that, combined with his great management and people skills, led to the creation of SVMK's small, smart, and fast-acting team. To this day, the SVMK team is still small - just over 700 people worldwide - but incredibly efficient.

Today, SVMK's business is highly globalized, with products in 190 countries and territories.SVMK was profitable in 2017, but has been losing money in the last year. Given that SVMK's business is related to data receipt collection, it also has a stable of large customers to work with. For its future, the secret agent says: I'm bullish on you, yo!

(Source: Survey Monkey)

Founded in 2007, Zscaler is an information security company that went public on Nasdaq in March 2018 and focuses on automated threat forensics and dynamic malware protection against advanced cyberthreats such as advanced persistent threats and spear phishing.

In detail, on the one hand, Zscaler is much like many companies that traditionally provide security protection, focusing on Internet security, network security, firewalls, sandboxing, SSL inspection, and antivirus vulnerability management services; on the other hand, Zscaler's line of business caters to emerging segments, covering mobile IoT and data monitoring.

More than any other startup, Zscaler is a breath of fresh air among private tech "unicorns". The company is significantly self-funded by its founders, who took the initiative to become "cash flow neutral," which means that revenue and profits are solid. In a world where it's common for startups to rely on rounds of financing to survive, many traditional industries like energy and real estate can't do that, let alone startups.

(Source: Zscaler)

The secret agent believes the company's business is also a great reference for China's Internet industry. After all, security risks and user privacy leaks in the IoT space have become one of the main reasons affecting startup development.

DocuSign, as its name suggests, is a technology company that provides electronic signature technology and digital transaction management services. Founded in 2003, DocuSign went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange last April. Today, DocuSign has hundreds of millions of users, and has packages for individuals, merchants, and businesses.

Secure, easy to use, and customizable to the user's needs ... These features have allowed DocuSign to quickly capture the enterprise customer market. 2012 U.S. media Business Insider reported that about 90% of the Fortune 500 companies have signed up to use DocuSign. secret agent in the company's earnings announcement to see that DocuSign, although the past two years were in the red, but at the end of 2018 there was a turnaround and may be profitable in the new year.

(Source: DocuSign's official website)

Anaplan, also from San Francisco, was founded in 2006 with a focus on enterprise performance management software. The company has more than 20 offices, 175 partners, and more than 900 customers around the world.Anaplan products are utilized in a variety of directions, including finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, human resources, and operations.On October 12, 2018, Anaplan was listed for public trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Anaplan's business focuses on commercial customers. Through its patented Hyperblock multi-tenant data architecture SaaS platform, the product enables dynamic collaboration and intelligent planning; ultimately improving business efficiencies by connecting people, data management, project planning, and real-time planning decisions.Another huge advantage of Anaplan is that its services are completely cloud-based and support the "cloud of ideas". "Another great advantage of Anaplan is that its services are completely cloud-based and zero-deployment, allowing users to connect to the service by logging in to Anaplan on their smart devices.

In the first half of 2018, the market for enterprise cloud services in China was highly competitive, but not for Saas-based performance management software. According to a survey by Northam, more than half of Chinese executives and HR departments in China don't think the investment is worth it, and nearly half of employees don't think it's necessary.

It seems that perhaps the bigger challenge in the Chinese market is getting people to embrace enterprise management products than the technology itself.

Bloom Energy was created in 2001, moved to NASA's Ames Research Center (NASA ARC) in Silicon Valley in 2002, and after 17 years of development, the energy upstart went public on July 25, 2018. The company focuses on regenerative solid oxide fuel cells that use environmentally friendly natural gas and bioenergy and convert them into electricity.

Many of its partners are large corporations in the energy sector and Forbes 500 companies in a variety of fields, and even some North American government agencies. In 2014, Bloom Energy set up the largest fuel cell deployment program ever in the U.S., including 75 commercial facilities in the California, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York areas***. You thought the founders had to be American?

You're wrong! -- Bloom Energy has an inspiring American Dream story behind it.

Image: Bloom Engergy

Its founder, K. R. Sridhar, was born in India and moved to the US in 1982, where he earned a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois. Sridhar is currently the director of the Space Technology Laboratory at the University of Arizona and a professor of aerospace mechanical engineering.

(Source: CNBC.com)

After his involvement, Sridhar worked on a NASA project called Mars Producing Oxygen, which provided environmentally friendly hydrogen for vehicle batteries. Unfortunately, the scientific project was canceled in 2001 with the failure of the Mars Odyssey (Mars-2001 Surveyor Lander) landing. However, Sridhar's journey to translate the Mars battery technology into commercial use was not as rewarding.

Finally, the only foreign company among the eight listed unicorns is China's NIO, which is known internationally as "China's Tesla," and which, given its relative familiarity, we won't go into here.

(Photo: Axios)

Unfortunately, after going on sale last year, NIO's December crash reignited consumer concerns about driverless and electric cars. In our previous CES article, we noted that "Chinese tech" and "drones" have set the tone for 2019 tech developments, so let's wait and see what the future holds for the NIO. How, let's wait and see.

After seeing the eight companies, are you surprised?

The secret agent said his feelings, compared to the unicorns listed 10 years ago, these companies basically each but maintain a safe and efficient core business, in addition to energy startups and automotive, in the cloud services, each has its own unique characteristics; basically, you can make a joke can also be said that they are not cool or showy, the listing is "should be".

Ten years ago, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, unicorns developed around the core of "security and stability"; ten years later, with the advent of the data age, the past 8120 years, I wonder what kind of opportunities and future will be left for us?

Can't get enough? Check out our previous series:

Tell us what you think!