Bengaluru-based Postman, a API management product, has raised a total of $433 million valuing it at ~$5.6B. Its revenue was $171M in 2023. As a comparison, Rubrik with ~ $850M ARR is valued at $6B or about 7 times its revenue. The same metric would put Postman’s valuation at $1.2B. I would argue further that Postman has much lower stickiness and will face higher churn and hence, the revenue multiple would be lower for Postman. ...
The true value proposition of LLMs lies in their ability to convert unstructured data from sources like websites and documents into structured information with reasonably high accuracy. Yet, the real profit lies in the products built on top of LLM technology. Each year, approximately 4 million books are published worldwide. On average, a book contains fewer than 120,000 words, translating to less than 160,000 tokens in LLM (Large Language Model) terms. Imagine if every single one of these books were generated by GPT-4—it would amount to an astounding 640 billion tokens. At $5 per million tokens, generating all these books would tally up to about $3.2 million! Let’s say the book market represents only about 1% of the total LLM text generation opportunity. Even then the total addressable market of LLM text generation is approximately $300 million annually—a modest figure when compared to AWS, which raked in $90 billion in 2023 as the cloud market leader.
Two cryptocurrency exchanges came out early on from Y Combinator. One is 2012. One in 2013. One returned 1500X to early investors. The other one ceased to exist after 2 years. What happened?
The early adopters of Instagram were not VCs.
Then Seed/Angel Series-A Series-B Series-C IPO Now
Consider this email, And now consider this one, Hi Ashish, You signed up for the Orchard beta not too long ago, and we’re excited to finally send you an invite! ( Just to jog your memory, Orchard helps you make the most of your relationships, keeping you up to date on where you’re spending your time and who you need to catch up with. It’s somewhere between a personal CRM and a todo list for your connections.) [Emphasis mine] ...
(Opinions expressed here are my understanding of Vivek Wadhwa’s opinion) “The next Trillion Dollar Opportunities” (in this decade) China’s manufacturing and India’s call center business are saturated. The PC industry is dead, Laptop is flat, and mobile is going up. Next trillion-dollar opportunities Proactive health care Preventive care is much cheaper. Expect sensors everywhere (in the toothbrush, toilet, mirror, etc.) to give info based on spotted symptoms. IBM Watson is being trained on medical data. Soon, nanobots will go inside the body for drug release/monitoring. Manufacturing Robotics taking over ( Baxter - 22K robot - will cost 1-2 $ per hour of work after that). Manufacturing coming back to the USA. America is being automated. 3D Printing Current 3D printers 200 (low end) -1500$ (high end). Expect prices.to go down to 200$ for high-end in 5 years => household goods can be printed at home. Finance Square-like mobile payments exploding Bitcoin carries a negative image, expect government-backed digital currency soon. mPaisa in Kenya - 60% of transactions via sms now (25% of Kenya’s GDP). Transportation Robotic drones going to take over for deliveries Self-driving cars are imminent. Computing Big data Internet-enabled devices augmented by high-speed internet (Google Fiber) New UIs - touch-based interfaces, augmented reality (Google Glass) Synthetic Biology We are taking exponential (and not linear) steps in technology and humans are not good at predicting the impact of exponential changes. ...
Start-up One goal May have multiple products but all products are aimed at a single goal. All teams are working towards the same goal. Diversified Multiple similar goals Have several products (or several parts of a single product) aimed towards different goals. Teams gain by helping each other. The goals to some extent are complementary but (naturally with time) diverge away from each other. The tipping point comes when the goals become orthogonal and thus, any bonding between teams working on (orthogonal) goals goes to zero. ...