The Big50-2017, featuring the top startups of the year, will launch tomorrow morning right here on Startup50.
The Big50 has undergone some big changes for 2017. First off, the report will not be. . . well, a report. Instead, Startup50 will feature Big50 winners one by one on this site. For those of you who prefer the sector-by-sector analysis of the 2016 report, don’t worry. You’ll see that coverage elsewhere on-site.
For the Big50-2017, the competition started with more than 160 startups.
Startups that earned their way into last year’s report received byes past the first-round challenge, but they had to show my team they were meeting their milestones by raising money, rolling out new products or services, announcing new customer wins, and/or adding to their leadership team.
Several startups eligible for byes ended up moving on to bigger and better things, whether through acquisition (Hexadite, Niara, Stringify) or via IPO (Cloudera).
A few other Big50 alums, such as Elastic and Docker, made moves in 2017 that, to us anyway, indicate these startups are in the final push towards an IPO. In other words, they’re already too big and established to fit comfortably in a report like this.
However, we do have returning startups that are transforming into behemoths right before our eyes. A few of these previous Big50 winners have raised VC rounds of $100 million or more.
In April 2017, Snowflake closed a $100 million Series D round of funding. Illumio locked down a $125M investment in June 2017, and that same month, Cybereason closed a $100M Series D.
With startups like that returning this year, startups new to the Big50 had their work cut out for them. The new startups had to fight their way through three rounds of challenges.
The Fundamentals Matter
The first thing the Startup50 team looks at when evaluating new startups is your fundamentals.
Have you raised sufficient funding to build out your business and used that money to attract a solid team? Have you developed a viable business idea that tackles a real-world problem? Do you have on-the-record customers, are you targeting a viable market niche, and have you launched an MVP that’s moved the needle?
New Big50 startups prove selves through online voting and social media engagement
Second, newcomers had to make it past the online voting and social media engagement challenge. This challenge shows us whether or not you can drum up interest in your startup.
If you can’t motivate your team and your existing social media followers to vote you into round 2, you’re just not ready to be featured alongside high-octane startups like those mentioned above.
The voting and social media challenge weeded out more than half of the newcomers.
Content is King
In the final round, the content challenge, startups had to pitch story ideas to the Startup50 team. We had several startups ask, “why do our story pitches get weighed so heavily?”
Simple. We’ve found that the ability to articulate a story idea in a way that attracts the eye of journalists and editors correlates well with future success. After all, if you can’t tell a story that we in the media find compelling, what makes you think you can effectively sell to prospects?
The startups with the best story pitches were interviewed, and those stories will be featured later this year on a sister site.
That left us with 55 startups. That’s right, the Big50 is following the trail blazed by college sports conferences by adding 5 extra startups beyond the title amount. Hey, it’s our report. We can add 5 extras if we want to!
Lastly, the majority of the startups cut in that final round were simply too new to match the firepower of the Big50. But the majority of these remaining startups also have a ton of upside. We’ll want to keep an eye on them in coming years because they could be close to breaking through to real contender territory.
We will be creating a 2018 Watch List for young, high-upside startups after we roll out the Big50. The Watch List startups will get a head start on next year’s Big50, and they’ll enjoy other benefits, which we’ll tell you more about as the Big50 marches on.
But, first things first: Come back tomorrow morning, and we’ll introduce you to the first startup in the Big50-2017. The first 5 startups up are all return winners from last year, and each startup featured this week will be one that raised a big VC round in 2017. Stay tuned. . .
