Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?
The elusive unicorn is no longer a myth in the U.S. startup world, with over a thousand private startups reaching a $1 billion valuation in the last 25 years.
While some of these startups eventually go public and go on to become household names, it’s also common for founders to exit through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), by selling their startup to another organization. In fact, over half of the 1,110 unicorns in the U.S. have made some sort of an exit—either through an IPO, a direct listing, a SPAC or an acquisition—since 1997.
Ilya Strebulaev, professor of finance and private equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, brings us this visualization featuring the companies that acquired the most unicorns over the last 25 years.
Strebulaev’s database lists 137 private and public companies along with PE firms who’ve acquired at least one unicorn since 1997, totaling 177 acquisitions.
The Biggest U.S. Unicorn Acquirers
In total, 27 companies have acquired two or more unicorns, accounting for nearly 38% of all acquisitions. 110 companies have acquired just one unicorn.
Who Made the Most U.S. Unicorn Acquisitions Since 1997?
The elusive unicorn is no longer a myth in the U.S. startup world, with over a thousand private startups reaching a $1 billion valuation in the last 25 years.
While some of these startups eventually go public and go on to become household names, it’s also common for founders to exit through mergers and acquisitions (M&A), by selling their startup to another organization. In fact, over half of the 1,110 unicorns in the U.S. have made some sort of an exit—either through an IPO, a direct listing, a SPAC or an acquisition—since 1997.
Ilya Strebulaev, professor of finance and private equity at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, brings us this visualization featuring the companies that acquired the most unicorns over the last 25 years.
Strebulaev’s database lists 137 private and public companies along with PE firms who’ve acquired at least one unicorn since 1997, totaling 177 acquisitions.
The Biggest U.S. Unicorn Acquirers
In total, 27 companies have acquired two or more unicorns, accounting for nearly 38% of all acquisitions. 110 companies have acquired just one unicorn.
In today’s fast-paced world, companies need to adapt if they want to stay relevant. Even the Big Tech giants can’t get too comfortable—to remain competitive, large corporations like Google and Amazon are constantly innovating and evolving.
This series of graphics by Truman Du illustrates the income statements of five of the world’s biggest companies—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Alphabet—and shows how their financials have evolved since the date of their very first public disclosures.
Editor’s note: Click on any graphic to see a full-width version that is higher resolution. Also, because these companies are in some cases 10,000x the size they were at IPO date, the two visual financial statements are not meant to be directly comparable in sizing.
Visual Income Statements: From IPO to Today
Let’s start with Apple, the first company to go public, and the biggest in the mix:
Back in 1998, Apple went by the name “Apple Computer,” because at the time, the company only sold computers and computer hardware kits. However, over the next decade, the company expanded its product offerings and started to sell various consumer tech products like phones, portable music players, and even tablets.
Apple’s consumer tech was so successful, that by 2007 the company decided to drop “Computer” from its name. Fast forward to today, and the company also generates revenue through services like Apple TV and Apple Pay.
While computers are still a core part of its business, the iPhone has become the (Read more...)
Visualized: The Top Feeder Schools into Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is one of the largest and most prominent tech hubs in the world. It accounts for about one-third of America’s national investment capital and it houses the headquarters of over 30 companies in the Fortune 1000.
Given its world-class reputation, it’s the dream of many tech workers to land a job in a Silicon Valley company. But what’s the best route for getting there?
While there is certainly no clear-cut path, one way to try and answer this question is by looking at the universities and colleges that Silicon Valley employees graduate from.
This interactive map by Stephanie Cristea shows the top feeder schools to some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley.
A Look at The Top 30 Schools
The data for this graphic comes from a study by College Transitions, which looks at the top feeder schools for 12 different companies with employees in Silicon Valley, including Twitter, Alphabet, DocuSign, Meta, and eight other large businesses.
Using publicly available data from LinkedIn, the study looked at more than 70,000 entry level engineers and IT employees at these 12 different companies, and identified where they received their undergraduate degree.
Here are the findings of the top 30 feeder schools across all 12 companies:
The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022)
The 10 largest public companies in the world had a combined market capitalization of nearly $12 trillion as of July 2022.
But two decades ago, the players that made up the list of the largest companies by market capitalization were radically different—and as the years ticked by, emerging megatrends and market sentiment have worked to shuffle the deck multiple times.
This racing bar chart by Truman Du shows how the ranking of the top 10 largest public companies has changed from 2000 to 2022.
Market Cap vs. Market Value
Before diving in, it’s worth noting that market capitalization is just one of many metrics that can be used to help value a company.
Simply put, a company’s market cap measures the combined price of a company’s outstanding shares—in other words, it’s the price someone would pay if they wanted to purchase the company outright at current stock prices (theoretically speaking).
But while a market cap provides insight into what equity is worth at a given time, calculating the market value is far more complicated and nuanced. After all, a price paid might not reflect the actual value of a business. To get a measure of value, other metrics like a company’s price-to-sales (P/S) ratio, price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, or return-on-equity (ROE) may be considered.
The Largest Public Companies by Market Cap (2000–2022)
Over the last two decades, investor sentiment has shifted as different trends have played out, and the types of companies buoyed up by the market have changed as well.
For instance, tech and telecom companies were big in the very early 2000s, as investors got excited about the seemingly endless potential of the newly-introduced World Wide Web.
Largest Companies by Market Cap (January 1, 2000)
Rank
Company
Market Cap (Jan 1, 2000)
#1
Microsoft
$606 billion
#2
General Electric
$508 billion
#3
NTT Docomo
$367 billion
#4
Cisco
$352 billion
#5
Walmart
$302 billion
#6
Intel
$280 billion
#7
Nippon Telegraph
$271 billion
#8
Nokia
$219 billion
#9
Pfizer
$206 billion
#10
Deutsche Telekom
$197 billion
In the middle of the Dotcom bubble, investors were pouring money into internet-related tech startups. As PC and internet adoption picked up, investors hoped to “get in early” before these companies started to really turn a profit. This overzealous sentiment is reflected in the market capitalizations of public companies at the time, especially in the tech or telecom companies that were seen as benefitting from the internet boom.
Of course, the Dotcom bubble was not meant to last, and by January 2004 the top 10 list was looking much more diverse. At this time, Microsoft had lost the top spot to General Electric, which had a market cap of $309 billion. Then in the late 2000s, energy companies such as ExxonMobil, PetroChina, Gazprom, and BP took over the list as oil prices spiked well over $100 per barrel.
But fast forward to 2022, and we’ve come full circle, with Big Tech back in the limelight again.
Largest Companies by Market Cap (July 1, 2022)
Rank
Company
Market Cap (Jul 1, 2022)
#1
Saudi Aramco
$2.27 trillion
#2
Apple
$2.25 trillion
#3
Microsoft
$1.94 trillion
#4
Alphabet
$1.43 trillion
#5
Amazon
$1.11 trillion
#6
Tesla
$707 billion
#7
Berkshire Hathaway
$612 billion
#8
United Health Group
$485 billion
#9
Johnson & Johnson
$472 billion
#10
Tencent
$435 billion
Four of the five largest companies are in tech, and Tencent also cracks the list. Meanwhile, Tesla is classified as an automotive company, but it is thought of as an “internet of cars” company by many investors.
Big Picture Trends in the Top 10 by Market Cap List
Year
Description
Top Company (Market Cap USD)
Top 10 Description
2000
Dotcom Bubble
Microsoft ($606B)
Multiple tech/telecom companies in the mix
2004
Post-Bubble
GE ($309B)
Diverse mix of companies by industry
2009
Financial Crisis
PetroChina ($367B)
Six non-U.S. companies make the list
2014
$100 Oil
Apple ($560B)
Last year of oil-dominated list; tech starts ascending
2022
Big Tech Era
Aramco ($2,270B)*
Tech accounts for 80% of Top 5 companies
*As of July 1, 2022. Since then, Saudi Aramco has been re-surpassed by Apple due to a reversal in oil prices.
Trending Downwards?
Amidst rising interest rates, crippling inflation, and political issues like the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, signs point towards a potential global recession. Tech companies fared well during the COVID-19 pandemic, but will likely not be immune to the impacts of a generalized economic slowdown.
It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out in 2023, and which companies (if any) will manage to stay on top throughout the turmoil.
In 2021, the Big Five tech giants—Apple, Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Meta, and Microsoft—generated a combined $1.4 trillion in revenue.
What are the sources of this revenue, and how does it breakdown?
Below, we’ll dive into the main ways that these big tech giants generate revenue, and take a look at how much their revenues have increased in recent years.
Breaking Down Big Tech’s Revenue Streams
As we’ve mentioned in previous editions of this graphic, there are two main ways that big tech companies generate revenue:
They either sell you a product
Or sell you as the product to advertisers
Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon fall into the first category—like most traditional businesses, these companies offer customers a physical (or digital) product in exchange for money. More than half of Apple’s revenue comes from iPhone sales, Azure cloud services generate almost a third of Microsoft’s total, and Amazon’s online stores account for nearly 50% of the company’s revenue.
On the other hand, Meta and Alphabet do things a bit differently. Rather than selling an actual product, these two tech giants make most of their money by selling their audience’s attention. Nearly 98% of Meta’s revenue comes from Facebook ads, and 81% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising on various Google products.
However, despite their varying ways of generating sales, these companies all have one thing in common: revenues have soared in recent years.
The Pandemic Has Sped Up Growth
Amidst rising unemployment and pandemic-induced (Read more...)
Imagine a shop window containing large pieces of cheese.
If the value of that cheese rises over time, the price may move beyond what the majority of people are willing to pay. This presents a problem as the store wants to continue selling cheese, and people still want to eat it.
The obvious solution is to divide the cheese into smaller pieces. That way, more people can once again afford to buy portions of it, and those who want more can simply buy more of the smaller pieces.
The total volume of the cheese is still worth the same amount, it’s only the portion size that changed. As the infographic above by StocksToTrade demonstrates, the same concept applies to stock splits.
Like wheels of cheese, stocks can be split a number of different ways. Some of the more common splits are 2-for-1, 3-for-1, and 3-for-2. Less common splits can take place as well, such as when Apple increased its outstanding shares by a 7-to-1 ratio in 2014.
Why Companies Do Stock Splits
Of course, stocks aren’t cheese.
The real world of the financial markets, driven by macro trends and animal spirits, is more complex than items in a shop window.
If companies want their stock price to continue rising, why would they want to split it, effectively lowering the price? Here are a some specific reasons why:
1. Liquidity As our cheese example illustrated, stocks can sometimes see price appreciation to the point (Read more...)
From Greek to Latin: Visualizing the Evolution of the Alphabet
Over the course of 2021, the Greek alphabet was a major part of the news cycle.
COVID-19 variants, which are labeled with Greek letters when becoming a variant of concern, normalized their usage. From the Alpha variant in the UK, to the Delta variant that spread from India to become the dominant global strain, the Greek alphabet was everywhere. Seemingly overnight, the Omicron variant discovered in South Africa has now taken the mantle as the most discussed variant.
But the Greek alphabet is used in other parts of our lives as well. For example, Greek letters are commonly used in mathematics and science, like Sigma (Σ) denoting a sum or Lambda (λ) used to represent the half-life of radioactive material.
And the study of linguistics shows us why using Greek letters in English isn’t completely farfetched. This visualization from Matt Baker at UsefulCharts.com demonstrates how the modern Latin script used in English evolved from Greek, and other, alphabets.
It’s All Proto-Sinaitic to Me
Before there was English, or Latin, or even Greek, there was Proto-Sinaitic.
Considered the first alphabet ever used, the Proto-Sinaitic script was derived in Canaan, around the biblical Land of Israel. It was repurposed from Egyptian hieroglyphs that were commonly seen in the area (its name comes from Mount Sinai), and used to describe sounds instead of meanings.
Of the millions of apps available around the world, just a small handful of the most used apps dominate global internet traffic.
Everything connected to the internet takes bandwidth to view. When you look at something on your smartphone—whether it’s a new message on Instagram or the next few seconds of a YouTube video—your device is downloading the data in the background.
And the bigger the files, the more bandwidth is utilized. Here’s a breakdown of the most used apps by category, using Sandvine’s global mobile traffic report for 2021 Q1.
Video Drives Global Mobile Internet Traffic
The biggest files use the most data, and video files take the cake.
According to Android Central, streaming video ranges from about 0.7GB per hour of data for a 480p video to 1.5GB per hour for 1080. A 4K stream, the highest resolution currently offered by most providers, uses around 7.2GB per hour.
That’s miles bigger than audio files, where high quality 320kbps music streams use an average of just 0.12GB per hour. Social network messages are usually just a few KB, while the pictures found on them can range from a few hundred KB for a low resolution image to hundreds of MB for high resolution.
Understandably, breaking down mobile downstream traffic by app category shows that video is on top by a long shot:
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Which Companies Belong to the Elite Trillion-Dollar Club?
Just a handful of publicly-traded companies have managed to achieve $1 trillion or more in market capitalization—only six, to be precise.
We pull data from Companies Market Cap to find out which familiar names are breaking the 13-digit barrier—and who else is waiting in the wings.
Footnote: All data referenced is as of August 17, 2021.
The Major Players in the Game
Apple and Microsoft are the only two companies to have shattered the $2T market cap milestone to date, leaving others in the dust. Apple was also the first among its Big Tech peers to ascend to the $1 trillion landmark back in 2018.
Company
Valuation
Country
Age of company
Apple
$2.48T
U.S.
45 years (Founded 1976)
Microsoft
$2.20T
U.S.
46 years (Founded 1975)
Saudi Aramco
$1.88T
Saudi Arabia
88 years (Founded 1933)
Alphabet (Google)
$1.83T
U.S.
23 years (Founded 1998)
Amazon
$1.64T
U.S.
27 years (Founded 1994)
Facebook
$1.01T
U.S.
17 years (Founded 2004)
Facebook dipped in and out of the $1T+ club in July 2021, (Read more...)
Microsoft
NTT Docomo
Nokia
Deutsche Telekom
Saudi Aramco
Tencent
