The state of Sam Altman's Bubble Bet, 1 year before deadline

16 points

7 years ago

TL;DR It seems likely that Sam Altman will lose his 2015 bubble bet, with mid-stage companies growing like crazy but early-stage and late-stage companies growing a bit slower than he expected. A big IPO for Uber and big fundraising round for Gitlab could still give Altman the win.

In March 2015 Sam Altman published his Bubble Bet blog post (https://blog.samaltman.com/bubble-talk), in which he decries the talks of a tech bubble and proposes a bet on the future of tech valuations. His proposition is that by January 1 2020: 1. The top 6 US companies (Uber, Palantir, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, and SpaceX) which at the time were worth just over $100B, will be worth at least $200B. 2. A group of mid-stage YC-backed companies (Stripe, Zenefits, Instacart, Mixpanel, Teespring, Optimizely, Coinbase, Docker, and Weebly) at the time worth $9B will be worth at least $27B. 3. The YC Winter 2015 batch - worth at the time around $0—will be worth at least $3B.

One person, Boston-based VC Michael de la Maza, agreed to bet $100,000 against Altman, with the loser agreeing to donate the money to a charity of the winner’s choice.

One year to the deadline, what’s the status?

I checked the known public valuation of the mentioned companies, using news sources and company announcements. Another tool was YC’s valuation list (https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/). If you have better data, I’m happy to edit accordingly.

1: Top US (100->200) Uber: 72 Palantir: 20 Airbnb: 31 Dropbox: 7 Pinterest: 12 SpaceX: 30.5

Total: 172.5

2: Mid-Stage (9->27) Stripe: 20 Zenefits: 2 Instacart: 7.6 Mixpanel: 0.865 Teespring: 0 Optimizely: 0.386 Coinbase:- 8 Docker: >1.3 Weebly: 0.365

Total: 40.516

3: YC Winter 2015 (0->3) GitLab: 1.1 Equipment Share: Somewhere between 0.2-0.6 (based on neighboring companies on YC list) Atomwise: 0.1-0.2 (based on Scribd valuation on YC list) Razorpay: 0.1-0.2 Qventus: 0.1-0.2 GrubMarket: 0.1-0.2

Total: 1.7-2.5