@patel0phone asked if i'd share the thought process behind the visual. challenge was to find an arresting way to bring users into the data within the limitations of a browser. (we removed the viz on mobile)
i went through several iterations of charting forms -- treemap, bubbles, bars, scatterplot w.different metrics as well as looking at a collection of graphics that i find visually interesting.
we landed with this bar chart arrayed around a circle.
a lot of what i try to do with my work is to push traditional charting forms into fresh presentation. if you're new to dataviz i'd recommend you learn the traditional charting forms first and understand those deeply before you try this at home.
it important to note this chart lives in context of all of the data -- including a straight bar chart within the table.
That's a really interesting way to display that trend. I'd love to hear about the thought process that led to using that semi-circle visual. Any WSJ designers/devs lurking HN? Also, has anyone seen something like this used with other data sets?
When we built our own infographic to highlight "The Rise of Coding Bootcamps" there was much debate on the best way to visualize this information. While I'm happy with the result[1], there's definitely much room for improvement.
Kabam is worth a billion? Their business model is buy good underground games, then squeeze every last cent out by making it pay2win. There is no good on this earth.
Can you guys seriously redefine what startup means ? Eg. Flipkart started ~8 years ago, employs 15,000+ employees. What/How can it be called a startup ? If acquisition of funds is the only definition of startup then all companies are startups as at some point they all needed to raise funds.
these are venture funded companies that haven't gone public.. the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.
> the readers of wsj are brokers that might take them public, investors that might invest pre-ipo, vcs, pension fund managers that might be investing in vc funds, private equity guys looking to acquire companies.
There are 300k brokers in the US. [1]
WSJ has 2.5 million daily subscribers. [2]
Can someone explain to me how Theranos is worth $9 billion? Everytime I hear about them, their "technology" sounds so sketchy that it's hard to think it is not a scam. Is there so much promise behind closed doors that I'm just missing something that's worth that much?
I can believe that their technology works. I've been hearing about this sort of stuff for ten years before I first heard of Theranos. Search for "lab on a chip." There are grad students working on this sort of stuff at every major research university.
However, the $9 billion valuation feels bubblish. Consider that Quest and Labcorp are both $10 billion companies, and Theranos is talking about driving down the price of testing. They need a lot of elasticity in this market to make the numbers work out.
Blood testing is ideally (and realistically) something EVERYONE should have access to, and should probably be done yearly. The potential market is anyone who receives health care.
And for any non-Americans around here, a [reasonably] complete blood panel in the US will carry a ~$1000 price tag, which insurance may or may not cover.
A complete blood profile in uk from a private clinic (completely non NHS) is £95.00 + say £160.00 for hormone screening. So yea, that still doesn't make sense.
It's hard to put a number on it. I can get the basic screen at a doctor in the US for $200.
Throw in some more specific stuff, it goes up to $1500 or so. I have a medical condition that requires a blood test every 4 months in that price range. Thankfully insurance covers it, but checking one box on the list of things to test increases the price 800% for reasons that I don't understand.
Maybe the idea is much higher profit margins than labcorp + potential for larger demand(painless blood tests,fast results, and general trends in medicine) + potential overseas ,since it's basically a tech company, not a services company.
But with lab-on-chip having moore's law like economics, won't competition come sooner or later, and crush the market?
One employee listed and a whopping sized board of directors, most of which come from the government or the military. Smells like something straight from the military industrial complex.
It really looks like their biggest malady is a junior web PR team. A lot of the web site looks and reads like someone had a lot of good ideas but hadn't really run/written for large projects (like a major corporate web site) before.
To be fair to BusinessWeek, Rose did get a $200 million offer from Google. That $60 million wasn't wrong; Rose was.
To be even more fair, Digg collapsed because it made mistakes, but the field it pioneered - crowd-curated news - is now a multi-billion dollar business.
In the case of JustFab, they excel because they fixed the problems, and they are running a profitable service their customers want.
That article is from two years ago, and they've clarified their checkout process since then. I just tried it and there's a big "VIP Membership Program" checkbox which you can un-check to buy a single item, or check to buy a subscription, which explains that you'll be shipped and charged for an item every month. There's a 24/7 phone to cancel. It's all above the fold and doesn't come across as shady.
In any case, step back and think. Deceiving your customer base might work for the short term, but wouldn't for the long term.
Yes it does. One very large factor in people trading with other people is reputation. Whether we're talking 1910 or 2015. See: eBay (or a dozen other obvious examples).
Maybe you're smarter when it comes to business than, say, Warren Buffett. His theory is that having a good reputation is immensely important in business.
Businesses suffer or die all the time in the free market due to poor reputations. You see those consequences at a small town level, and you see it at a very large level.
To easily test your theory: try setting up a business in a small town. Proceed to cheat or otherwise perform dirty tricks on all of your customers. See what happens.
It's valid until you find a solution to this problem.
A solution can be to accept to suffer and die abruptly after making a load of money in a short spark.
Or you can get a maximum of money and influence in a very short spike and use your position then to block concurrents from catching up while your reputation goes down the hill.
Or you can grow the company responsible on good bases, make sure you won't get displaced/disrupted, and then go full shady.
Or you go full shady from the start but have some entity protect you from the consequences and let you grow untouched.
A good reputation is a business advantage, but it's just one among others, and you can compensate for it if you have other strong cards to play.
Plaxo is still in business, as are any number of dark-pattern-using and outright user-hostile companies who do not have good reputations among people who are not their customers. Certain dirty tricks may also enjoy a perverse incentive in that they don't directly affect their customers, but market share or other B2B forces.
Surely a good reputation is better than a bad one, and Mr. Buffett is successful in light of the reputations in which he invests, but this is not the sum total of companies enjoying capital success.
This is what I mean by capitalism not discouraging dirty tricks: it may encourage not using dirty tricks, but using dirty tricks is not a disqualifier for success, nor do dirty tricks always result in a universally poor reputation that would kill companies in other contexts.
Agreed. Unfortunately, today's globalized world is very unlike a small town. So, a lot of crooks can scam a whole bunch of people before they are blacklisted as such.
That has always been true. ~130 years ago, crooks went from small town to small town selling snake oil cures - and they had to promptly leave in a hurry, they were almost always run out of town by their horrible reputations.
It doesn't guarantee perfect or instant protection, it drastically increases the odds of eventual consequences. The reason for that is, human knowledge (eg about someone's reputation) isn't acquired or shared instantly, it's a process requiring time. It's a 95% good enough premise, but not a 100% guarantee. Historically it works incredibly well over time.
The modern examples at a large scale are plentiful as well. Costco for example has a tremendous reputation, and I would argue it has substantially aided it in, essentially, besting Sam's Club. Costco proved you can defeat even the largest of incumbent in the market by doing things better for customers and employees.
On the other hand globalization has made it much harder to scam in many ways since information about scams spread instantly. Back in the days you could use any simple trick and people would buy it over and over again since they had never heard of it before. Nowadays the scammers need to be much more inventive.
I don't know if I agree. MLM companies need to put some serious effort into combating all the bad press they get on the internet (efforts which are inventive indeed!). Without globalization it would be a walk in the park.
First, your premise is invalid, because your definition of a free market is wrong.
The concept of a free market does not require perfectly equal distribution of knowledge or capital, such that in the absence of that said free market ceases.
"Free market" != perfectly equal distribution of resources.
Second, your premise is invalid because it rests on the notion that both capital and information are static quantities, when in fact they can be created and accumulated by new entrants very easily, and historically this is exactly what occurs.
If you were right, the silo would act to vigorously prevent new entrants. The exact opposite proved to be true under Capitalism in the US: the US became the greatest business / startup creation engine in history precisely due to its original highly free market orientation.
I've an alternative hypothesis regarding the US and business/startup creation: it is the most resource-rich country on the planet that is also almost entirely unscathed by the ravages of decades or centuries of war.
It wasn't until after WW1, and in reality after WWII--which left basically the entire rest of developed civilization in a shambles--and lots of government intervention in the "free market" that the US became the economic power that it is.
The US became the economic power that it is today, after the Civil War, due to industrialization and vast business creation. Between 1870 and 1900 it became the world's largest economy (and for those decades was consistently the world's fastest growing economy, by far). By WW1, the US had arguably a more powerful economic position than it does today (and it already had as great a share of global GDP as it does today).
It's also worth noting, what largely made the US the world's largest economy between 1870 and 1900, was value added manufacturing and not merely possessing vast natural resources (obviously possessing those resources made it far easier to manufacture; but many other resource rich nations did not accomplish the same outcome). As that Quora link references, the US was producing more steel than the combined output of Germany, France and Britain. The US was one of the primary leaders of the technology + science revolution that we refer to as the industrial revolution. By the time WW1 rolled around, the US was already the dominant manufacturing power.
Sure, let's go with Merriam Webster, given they're a very prominent authority on definitions. We can look at other prominent resources too, since their definitions are all similar enough that you should have no problem rebutting my position: that a free market does not require equal distribution of resources among participants, and that incumbents can create their own new information and capital (ie information and capital in a free market are not static resources).
Ok, well now we've gone from two ill-defined terms to a handful of ill-defined terms: "economic market or system", "prices based on competition", "private businesses", "control", "government", "market economy", "supply and demand", "little".
I don't think these definitions are that rigorous or well-founded, however I will accept that they represent a colloquial understanding of the terms however "incorrect" they may be. I say "incorrect" because I'm not sure you could use those definitions to point to real-life instances of what my understanding (and what I believe is implied in this thread/forum) of a "free market" is:
Entities exchanging *things*, free of coercion.
>you should have no problem rebutting my position
Ok, so you've already signaled defeat...
> that a free market does not require equal distribution of resources among participants
To be clear, I never claimed that it does. I claimed that free markets don't really exist. It is actually very easy to disprove my claim, it merely requires one to produce a counter-example, that is, point to an instance of a free market.
If you can provide a counter-example, I will respond, as I believe I will be able to show you a market that is (likely) rife with coercion.
What I claimed is that existing markets are typically extremely asymmetrical in regard to how information and resources are distributed among the participants. Most participants in the "free market" that is the USA have comparatively no information or resources vs. the largest participants. Additionally, many of those who lack information and/or resources are survivally dependent in some way on the largest participants which is typically where the coercion is allowed (or designed) to creep in. Some research[1] has found that even seemingly small amounts of asymmetry lead to large systemic effects. In the cited case, it was found that those who update their market strategy (who to bid against and at what price) fastest will cyclically be able to achieve much higher values of money than those who update their strategies at a slower rate. When you map these results to their real-world analogues, it is established participants (corporations) that are able to update their strategies faster (analytics, espionage, acquisitions & mergers, political purchasing) while individuals are unable to update as quickly. For example, I can't really negotiate with and/or continually swap between competitors of: PG&E/AT&T/NBCComcastUniversal/TimeWarner/Verizon/etc/etc. To some extent I can swap (update my strategy), but not at the same rate that they are able to update theirs (for example, an airline can change prices on demand, multiple times per day). Typically I can't even access historical market pricing, while the incumbents have access to (and exploit) almost all historical market data.
Also it's visually misleading, the area of these segments doesn't matter, it's only the radius in a linear fashion.
Assuming the perceived value is most commonly interpreted as area: the larger numbers look even bigger than they are by a magnitude since the area scales with r²/2 (circular sector area) while the actual value r is only growing linearly.
Simplified calculation (no doughnut, no offset):
linear area
a 11 => 60 units
b 46 => 1058 units
difference in value b/a
x4.2 => x17.6
That is not how their value would be accounted for from any actual accounting or tax standard that has ever existed in the US.
Using your premise, feel free to try arguing with the IRS that your billion dollar company is worth only $100 based on you having sold one share for a penny.
The value of wealth 'at rest' isn't too important from a tax point of view in the US (except for real property) since there isn't a wealth tax in the US. Transactions are taxed, and if you sold a share for a penny the cap gains you paid would be based on that price. (Of course, the IRS would be suspicious of that kind of economically implausible transaction)
It's always difficult for me to view Chinese companies as a fair competitor. The Chinese government plays favorites, and startups (more or less) have to have connections and be supported by the party. If they aren't supported, they wont be around very long.
Point being, it seems mildly disconcerting to me that Chinese companies are compared to U.S. counterparts.
Excluded from this list are companies that were
majority-controlled by an institutional investment
firm at one point.
I presume this is why Supercell ($3B valuation) is not included, because they were at one point 51% owned by Softbank. But I can't understand why that matters.
So is that the total list ? Is it possible that there is a company valued over 1b that they could have missed. I am seeing lots tech companies, but not much non tech companies.
> Note: This chart only includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and have at least one venture-capital firm as an investor.
There are definitely companies missing (I have personal knowledge of a few). In particular, it will underreport for profitable B2B companies that haven't raised in a while or at anywhere near their present valuation.
Am I the only one really surprised to see Razer pop in there somewhere?
And really, how many of those are we still able to call 'startups', in my opinion almost all of these 'startups' have transcended the 'startup' phase and now are simply 'companies'.
i went through several iterations of charting forms -- treemap, bubbles, bars, scatterplot w.different metrics as well as looking at a collection of graphics that i find visually interesting.
we landed with this bar chart arrayed around a circle.
a lot of what i try to do with my work is to push traditional charting forms into fresh presentation. if you're new to dataviz i'd recommend you learn the traditional charting forms first and understand those deeply before you try this at home.
it important to note this chart lives in context of all of the data -- including a straight bar chart within the table.
hope this helps. best of luck to you all!