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Comment by wsr | Hacker News Reader

World Startup Report team here. It's awesome to see our data on HN!

One interesting point to note is that out of the top 7 countries, none of them are from Europe. To put into context, the biggest internet company in Europe is merely 1/40th of the size of Google.

HOWEVER, Europe dominates the unicorn club (companies over $1b in valuation). Nearly half of 30 countries on the unicorn club list are European.

This prompts the question, is European market big enough but fragmented in such way that you can easily build mini-billion dollar companies, but never anything truly massive?

We'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.

Also, AndriusWSR (lead researcher behind this research) will be joining us shortly to answer a few questions. Please feel free to ask away.

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-The whole common internal market thing is taking it's time.

-While it's much easier than elsewhere to live and work in another country it's still a hassle and there's lingual and cultural issues in the way as well.

-Crucially, the jungle telegraph usually ends at borders. News of great startups or whatever don't really spread well because of language issues and the fact that people tend not to have cross-border social relationships. There are programs like Erasmus that try to alleviate the issue, but not everyone goes on exchange, especially asocial types and the Brits.

It seems important in a report such as this to distinguish between place of control vs. operation.

As a South African who wants to leave for better opportunities overseas, it was a bit odd to see South Africa as 3rd on the list given my personal experience. I've been presented with opportunities at both the 1st and 3rd largest South African companies on that list and rejected them for what appeared to be better opportunities elsewhere. Seeing them here had me second-guessing myself.

Looking closely, it's clear Naspers is the reason for South Africa's position. Yet only 54% of their revenue comes from Internet-based business -- nearly all of which represents foreign-based acquisitions [1].

What is the objective of the report? As you point out, Europe dominates the 'unicorn club', and being closer to whatever magic makes that possible seems more appealing to me as a person seeking business opportunities, but this conclusion is not obvious from the presentation of the data.

[1] http://www.naspers.com/pdf/financials/provisional-results/20...

Is it desirable to be an environment that focuses on being absolutely massive rather than just huge? Lots of smaller companies might imply better competition (or companies being bought up before they get even bigger...)

Interesting data! Thanks for sharing. Two questions:

1. Do you have more data on eg US?

2. What do you mean by the unicorn club?

Unicorn club = companies over $1b in valuation.

We've been tracking all of the billion dollar (unicorn) companies around the world. Here is our internal list of all 212 unicorns that we've found:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhQqM-Mu96XQdDN...

Please note, we stopped updating this list since January 2014 because the list got too long. If anyone wants to lead this community effort moving forward, we'd love to speak to you!

email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com

Very surprising you couldn't take the time to ensure that markers are not directly obscuring other markers. Right now in my browser the US has exactly two items shown as do many others due to this obvious flaw.

So in summary it seems many are saying the data is flawed and the presentation is clearly flawed.

Perhaps it was a little premature to expose this to the world?

Couldn't see Switzerland in that list. Am I being blind?

No, it appears to be missing.

Hi all -

The World Startup Report team aimed for 100 countries for this research, but we settled for 50 as we didn't have enough local support from the smaller countries.

If your country is not on the list, and you would like to join us for the next World Startup Report research as a representative for your country, please email us: hello@worldstartupreport.com

We'd love for your help to participate in this community research!

Why not try a chart corrected for country GDP?

What do you mean by unicorn club?

unicorn club = companies over $1b in valuation.

Could be this?

1) We found 39 companies belong to what we call the “Unicorn Club” (by our definition, U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors). That’s about .07 percent of venture-backed consumer and enterprise software startups.

2) On average, four unicorns were born per year in the past decade, with Facebook being the breakout “super-unicorn” (worth >$100 billion). In each recent decade, 1-3 super unicorns have been born.

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/unicorn-...

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/02/welcome-to-the-unicorn-club...

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