Share this :
Post on twitter:
Pick of the week: Building an empire
We can't all have hockey sticks
This is a restart of a semi-regular series of posts that I began when I first joined MaRS. The point then, as it is now, was to highlight some of the more interesting “finds” I came across each week in the course of wrangling data and information for our entrepreneur clients. This week’s goodie is now over a year-old but still worth a look, especially for those of you in the entrepreneur trenches.
If your business plan features a steep “hockey stick” revenue projection — the kind with with a sharp upward tick after one to three years of moderately increasing sales — this post from the Wall Street Journal‘s venture capital blog suggests you may need to revise your thinking.
It reports on research, undertaken by data visualization company Tableau, that shows only 28% of the 100 largest (by market cap) publicly-traded technology companies made $50 million in annual sales in six years or less. Novell, McAfee and Salesforce are some of the companies in this “rocket ship” category. Microsoft, Oracle and other well-know names such as CA Inc., Intuit Inc. and Symantec Corp, however, took seven to 12 years to reach the $50 million sales milestone. Overall, the average time to reach this benchmark was just over eight years.
To read the full post and to play around with the interactive visualization that accompanies this, see: “How Long Does It Take To Build A Technology Empire?” Venture Capital Dispatch/WSJ.com. August 25, 2009
And if you like this, you might like Tableau’s IPO Dashboards blog, which features other related analysis.
Want to make realistic forecasts?
Join us for free on December 8th here at MaRS for our Best Practices session, “Beyond the Hockey Stick — The art of realistic forecasting“, where Charles Plant (always interesting) will tell you how to stickhandle your way to a realistic forecast.
Related Blogs
Helen Kula @ MaRS
Helen Kula sources and delivers market data and intelligence to entrepreneurs, high-growth companies and MaRS staff and advisors. She is an active member of Toronto’s information professional and librarian communities.
Related Videos
Related Articles & Workbooks
