Collaborative Economy startups. A few people asked for my thoughts First. Our data shows that the Collaborative Economy movement is here to stay. We see people increasingly adopting sharing behaviors . Startups like Uber are profitable in the United States. And the UK government is offering a tax credit for people who participate in it. It’s not going away but we do need to cull the herd. Tech-Markets-Go-Through-Five-Maturation-Phases-03 Second, signs point to the fermented froth fizzing out as we enter Phase 4 of tech market maturation: Contraction… The Collaborative Economy Market is Changing: Too many damn startups are doing the same damn thing.
Lisa Gansky’s massive directory of startups
In this space tallies at a whopping 9,703 startups. In our latest Honeycomb 3.0, we reviewed 450 startups, but only about 250 made the cut. We found many startups doing the exact same thing as others, often in the same regional area! Take San Francisco’s recent valet app market, for example: there’s Zirx, Luxe, and Poland Number Data Carbon all fighting for me to download their app so they can park my car in the city’s insane downtown area. VC welfare strings are starting to tighten. The Salon article refers to investment funding as “VC welfare,” which gave me a chuckle.it’s true; this market has been funded plenty, as shown in our massive spreadsheet on funding.
In previous years
There’s been a total of $28 billion in VC funding poured into this market. Why is this? VCs wanted to see market traction (even if the startups weren’t in the black), and they were hoping to fund the next “unicorn,” which there are dozens in this market. On my analysis post on VentureBeat, we found that much of the funding centralized last year on the billion dollar unicorns although I’m expecting the Canada Phone Number List rest of 2016 to soften on VC funding. Startups are disappearing or consolidating. There have been quite a few companies that have fallen off the Collaborative Economy honeycomb, including Homejoy, Sidecar, TheStorefront, Zirtual, Spoonrocket, and others listed in the Salon article.