Its funny that lists of top 50 startups basically only include consumer/social startups. Square is the largest business on that list that could be considered B2B, but even then its about as consumer-facing as a B2B company can be. After that you have to wait to Echo in #32, though while selling B2B, its end users are all consumers.

I remember 2010 as the peak of time when all the excitement was about mobile/social/location startups, so I guess its no surprise that a list then only includes that kind of company. SaaS (esp B2B SaaS) [1], is basically completely absent from the list.

I see people making the mistake of thinking consumer companies are the only companies out there, but hopefully people will start to see that SaaS companies are worth discussing in these lists. Investors and public markets are already in love with SaaS, so maybe the 2014 list will be more interesting.

[1] Before any pedants say that all of these are SaaS because the software is hosted and thus delivered as a service, please don't. SaaS as a business model means paying for a service via a recurring revenue model.

There's no question I wrote this with a consumer/social filter. I didn't go into enterprise (like storage, for example), even though I worked 8 1/2 years at a network storage company. There's definite bias toward a Twitter platform that never materialized.

I was careful to say "50 Top" instead of "Top 50". I know it's nuanced, but I didn't want it to be an end-all be-all king of lists. Just "Hey - here's 50 I'm watching."

"50 Top" vs "Top 50" - I didn't realize that, but you're right, it's a subtle yet important distinction. Well said.

I wonder though, if a similar list made today will stack heavily toward B2B SaaS and omit promising social consumer applications, just because the pendulum has swung toward valuing B2B companies more.

#28, Justin.tv, needs an addendum:

Most of the team(including Justin himself) now is working on Twitch.tv, a games streaming platform that is doing extremely well and is under rumor to be bought by Google for $1b, though that deal might have gone away considering it was leaked extremely early.

Thanks for the update. No doubt I didn't give a full bio for every company. I'll add the first bit.

Actually Twitch is a 100% pivot of Justin.tv. We took the entire team working on JTV, the platform, the cap table, etc. and pivoted to a specific vertical that had been promising on JTV. (I'm the CEO)

Acknowledged. Thanks for checking in.

Love the site. Good job :).

This should include a "did they leave their users in the rain" column, ala http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

So you're saying you want this incredibly long post to be even longer? :)

This is a very interesting post. Very few people tend to go back and look at their thought process historically like this. Not just evaluating a single action, but a portfolio of ideas and stand them up to the tests of time. So kudo's for doing that.

Of the fifty companies named, 21 are independent, 19 were acquired, four pivoted, and six are dead. I expected more to be dead, outright, but it shows me many companies in search of an out found a willing corporate partner - be it another startup, or a large company, be it Blackberry, LinkedIn, Yahoo! or eBay. Tumblr sold for more than a billion, and Spotify is valued at much more. Others, no doubt, went for nothing except a handshake. Interestingly, none of these 50 were acquired by Google.

This "soft-portfolio" has something like an 80% "success rate"-- if you count success as independent or exited, or 90% if the criterion is "not dead". Normally those would both count as 'successes', but I think you're right to highlight that resume/grade inflation that may make the data less informative than otherwise.

Thanks. I considered this post would only be of interest to me, and even then, it'd probably be worth it. Glad HN picked it up.

The tweetdeck entry should note that twitter, in acquiring it, threw away their entire product and rewrote it from scratch with less than half the functionality; thus making it less an acquiry and more of a snuffing.

That's still an acquisition. Companies get acquired for a variety of reasons and not all of them are because the parent company wants it to succeed/improve.

The only reason Twitter bought Tweetdeck was that Bill Gross was threatening to make a "twitter rival", and acquiring Tweetdeck would have given him a massive springboard audience and Twitter graph data.

Twitter acquired Tweetdeck to throw it into the toilet, basically, so that someone else couldn't benefit from it. Nothing wrong with that.

I appreciate the detail on the behind-the-scenes bullshit. That said:

> Nothing wrong with that.

AHAHAHA, have a hearty "fuck you with a rusty pipe" from germany.

Lots of the companies acquired had their product changed or killed afterward. This could have been a much longer post.

The original Blippy team is now working on Tophatter.com — http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/tophatter-iphone/

Blippy.com seems to be run by a team unrelated to the original Blippy folks.

Another metric I'd like to see: "total user-hours wasted onboarding, learning, importing, and exporting data". So many of these follow the same dumb pattern: "Make this tool part of your life! We're the solution! Uhhhh… never mind."

"50 top startups" is an unrepresentative sample of the ecosystem. It's not clear what criteria were used to place startups on this list, but almost all had entered the Valley hype cycle, indicating heavy-duty funding and/or a paid PR push. If their funding runway was long enough, and they were able to get follow-on rounds (or be acquired/achieve profitability), it shouldn't come as a surprise that just 12% have hit the deadpool.

Interesting. In particular the long lived startup notion and another difference between this eco system and the one in the 90's. The focus on revenue earlier rather than later has allowed many companies to continue along, whereas in the 90's they were pretty much dead if they didn't IPO or get acquired. So 40% are still alive, only 10% died outright. Much better survival rate than before.

A big number of those in the "Acquired" column were acquihires that saw the product killed shortly after.

Interesting to see. I'd love more explicit measurable predictions and then, like this, observing the results and reflecting.

Then it's not inaccurate.

Yeah, but only very slightly.

And only if we accept a broader more open-minded definition of not-dead, that includes re-incarnation and/or pivoting.

what can we learn from this list? handful has been acquired, most are independent. What does it mean by independent, are they stagnating, dying, growing? Those would be very interesting.

> handful has been acquired, most are independent.

"Of the fifty companies named, 21 are independent, 19 were acquired, four pivoted, and six are dead."

What I learned from this list is that Louis Gray is pretty good at picking promising companies.

I agree, seriously impressive with only 6 companies dead after 4 years. Especially with the ones later in the list -- the big ones naturally would die slowly even if they do.

Sounds good enough to me. +1.

popular startups don't have a high percentage of dying.