Highest funded US Startups from 2006 to 2008
revotra.com
revotra.com
Some of the interesting ones:
Nanosolar: High-efficiency solar cells
Gridpoint: Something to do with power grid management
Plastic logic: Flexible displays
eSolar: Solar thermal power
HelioVolt: More solar cells!
SulfurCell: More solar cells!
GodTube: Christian Videos. Seriously, this one sounds like a joke, but it exists and somebody gave it $30 million.
Fisker: Electric cars.
Admittedly a rather high percentage are still web-based software of some kind. And an awfully large percentage of those remaining are related to energy.
Another interesting (if worrying) trend: I couldn't find any biotech on the list at all (there might be a few, I didn't look at everything but I checked the names for bio-sounding things).
Its the same people who think blogspot needs to be sued because someone made an offensive post on one of their accounts
Now, Conservapedia is ridiculous, but the only people I've seen take it seriously are liberals in search of a caricature to attack.
I guess that'd make more sense.
(http://venturebeat.com/2008/07/14/fast-gene-sequencing-in-tw...)
It seems to me as though the list is not of the companies that raised the most money in the past two years, but rather the a list of companies that raised the most money that TC follows.
I know of several startup biotech companies that have been funded recently. None of their executives blog or twitter, however.
Come to think of it, doesn't this describe Google for the first 2 years of its existence?
CNN seems to like it too, http://www.plasticlogic.com/
a) Sony's "Flexible Full Color Paper Screen"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6bkmPjVF-k&feature=relat...
b) Readius's "Polymervision 3GSM e-paper"
The world market grew by 62% year over year last year.
The virtue of web startups is that marginal costs are effectively zero. So once you've paid off your fixed costs (i.e. have basically any revenue model that actually works), you're profitable. If something like FaceBook, with $150M in revenues, is not profitable, it's usually because they're empire builders and hire many more people than they actually need to keep the site going. That's easily fixed by laying off people.
Solar companies, in addition to having large R&D costs, also have large variable costs. And they're competing against fairly low-cost alternatives, like oil and natural gas. To be profitable, their variable costs need to undercut oil prices, and they need to have enough left over to pay for R&D, overhead, and cost of capital.
"Make something people want" is only a golden rule of startup success in software. For everything else, it's "Make something people want, cheaply".
They're not empire building, they're doing what they need to survive.
The lack of costs on the web is precisely why web startups have some of the highest costs of all. Hosting is cheap, bandwidth is almost free. The only way Facebook avoids being out-done by two college kids in a garage is because they have big money backing them, and are building out like mad.
On the flip side, traditional startups sell something that is of intrinsic worth. Most web apps have very little intrinsic worth, and is easy substituted - they have no patent-protected edge over the competition, and the COST of cloning an innovative feature is FAR less than the cost to reverse-engineer an ingenious new solar panel.
Their fixed costs are high, but usually VCs invest to pay those fixed costs, after the startup has already started getting traction.
The problem is that most web startups don't sell anything. They give their most valuable work away for free in the vain hope that showing ads or selling premium accounts will magically rescue them from inevitable collapse.
If you're not making any significant amount of money off a single user, it doesn't really matter HOW low your marginal cost is, you're still screwed. I have very little faith in companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, and the such - their per-user costs are ridiculously low, but so is their per-user revenue.
I love Yodlee, but 35 MM seems slightly ridiculous.