Many of these technologies actually implicitly are carbon-related (eg paper, chemicals, plastics, rubber). In a future version, we plan to add estimates of externalities which will include things like carbon impact.
This is great. Makes me want to start a paper company. Just a curiosity, is the $5M threshold meant to capture post-Series A companies? Thinking this would be really useful in my corners of health tech, but would likely want to include the $2m to $5m range seed checks. Thanks again, loved the post.
Yes, the intent was to exclude companies who only raised a smaller amount of money over the last ten years. There are many databases of startup funding (like Crunchbase) where you could try this query!
I like the idea of your opportunity analysis. Kind of off-the-track thinking. What I miss is the argument of growth vs. maturity. Paper is certainly a mature market whereas SaaS is supposed to grow rapidly. Nevertheless, who would have thought that taxi transportation could be an opportunity before uber? Still, the uber story tells us how difficult it is to make money in a seemingly mature market. So, I am curious what your analysis shows next.
Airbnb and Palantir/Anduril are probably better examples than Uber of high growth companies in mature markets. The main problem with Uber is that the only part of the ride business they automated is dispatch, which was already somewhat automated and is an overall small part of the total cost of operating a car service. Robotaxis, once at scale (Waymo getting there, Cruise/Tesla to follow), will be both higher growth and margin.
During the analysis, were there particular characteristics of the high opportunity ratio businesses that might explain the lack of investment up to this point? Often I hear of over regulation in some of the industries stated and I'm curious to what extent the under investment is justified vs not. Would be nice to have some metric that might indicate degree of regulation(length of related CFR), Innovation(filed patents, or some economic constraint to better gauge where the work needa to be done.
Very interesting analysis! Would be interesting to re-run an analysis like this for carbon-related technologies, in the style of Project Drawdown
Many of these technologies actually implicitly are carbon-related (eg paper, chemicals, plastics, rubber). In a future version, we plan to add estimates of externalities which will include things like carbon impact.
This is great. Makes me want to start a paper company. Just a curiosity, is the $5M threshold meant to capture post-Series A companies? Thinking this would be really useful in my corners of health tech, but would likely want to include the $2m to $5m range seed checks. Thanks again, loved the post.
Yes, the intent was to exclude companies who only raised a smaller amount of money over the last ten years. There are many databases of startup funding (like Crunchbase) where you could try this query!
Understood and makes sense. Thanks, Scott!
I like the idea of your opportunity analysis. Kind of off-the-track thinking. What I miss is the argument of growth vs. maturity. Paper is certainly a mature market whereas SaaS is supposed to grow rapidly. Nevertheless, who would have thought that taxi transportation could be an opportunity before uber? Still, the uber story tells us how difficult it is to make money in a seemingly mature market. So, I am curious what your analysis shows next.
Airbnb and Palantir/Anduril are probably better examples than Uber of high growth companies in mature markets. The main problem with Uber is that the only part of the ride business they automated is dispatch, which was already somewhat automated and is an overall small part of the total cost of operating a car service. Robotaxis, once at scale (Waymo getting there, Cruise/Tesla to follow), will be both higher growth and margin.
During the analysis, were there particular characteristics of the high opportunity ratio businesses that might explain the lack of investment up to this point? Often I hear of over regulation in some of the industries stated and I'm curious to what extent the under investment is justified vs not. Would be nice to have some metric that might indicate degree of regulation(length of related CFR), Innovation(filed patents, or some economic constraint to better gauge where the work needa to be done.
Tell us about the Fifty Years company building in an underexplored $1T space that already has 10s of millions in revenue. 😉