Let’s face it, at times the specifics behind a successful growing business can be boring. Not many people are excited about watching a business slowly build its way up year after year until it has a dominating presence in its industry. Granted, looking back on the stories of slow growing businesses can be entertaining, but who wants to pay attention for the whole ride. The real entertainment lies within venture capital.
You Can’t Spell Adventure Without Venture
Venture capital is a much more entertaining approach to growing businesses that is playing a huge roll in the development of our consumer based culture. For anyone new to the concept, it essentially requires a significant risky investment in order to get a new company on its feet. In a way, it is quite the adventure to watch how a large investment turns around.
Venture investments can either be a complete disaster or a gold mine and you figure this out much sooner than a slow growing business. In this article we will discuss a few successful modern companies that used venture capital to make an impressionistic enterprise.
SquareTrade
As a plugged in culture, our lives are beginning to revolve around the array of electronic devices in circulation. It seems only logical that people would seek protection for their electronics. SquareTrade provides warranty plans for a wide variety of electronic devices and has experienced impressive growth since Bain Capital invested $238 million back in 2012.
If you haven’t hopped on the Pinterest train yet, I would definitely suggest it. The social network has an awesome selection of interesting bits of entertainment that can be tailored to your own lifestyle. Now the site is looking to expand into the business world with new features, which drew in the attention of investors. Several investors including Rakuten, FirstMark Capital, and Glencoe Capital recently teamed up and contributed more than $100m for the sites success.
If we’re going to cover social media we might as well mention the leader of it all. Since its inception, Facebook has grown an enormous amount in the last decade and is now raking in billions of dollars annually. It experienced a major spike in popularity and profit after many different venture capital investors were eager to include themselves in the success. As of right now, Accel Partners has the highest stake of the site, 10% valued at around $8.5 Billion.
Pandora
In case you were wondering, yes I chose to include all the companies that effect the lives of the public on a day to day basis. Regardless of the device you are using it on, Pandora is basically the modern standard for exploring and enjoying music. In order to fuel their massive growth, they have connected with investors like Crosslink Capital, who owns just over 20% of Pandora valued at around $560 million.
Once our society thrived off of a casual social media site, the ingenious minds behind LinkedIn chose to utilize the same concept for professional connections. Since the site was launched in 2003, it has helped to establish countless professional connections and landed many grateful people awesome jobs. Plenty of big names in Venture Capital have contributed to the site including GreyLock Partners with $1.32 billion stake, Sequoia Capital with a $1.59 billion stake, and Hoffman (LinkedIn’s chairman) holds a whopping $1.8 billion.
Clearly, the companies that are experiencing great success in such a short amount of time aren’t using magic. With clever capital investments they have been given an opportunity to grow at a rate that coincides with our hectic world of connectivity. Expect to see a lot of big investments in the near future and remember that one of the quickest (and riskiest) ways to grow a business is with the financial support of venture capital figures.
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