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

16 points by rreichman ↗ HN
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.

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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

5 comments

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Alex3917
To estimate how much each of these companies are worth on Jan. 1st 2020, you'd need to wait until each of them raise their next round after that date or have a liquidity event and then do some kind of regression. I'd say he's on track to win based on this, or at the least even if he loses on a technicality he'll have come incredibly close.
rreichman
I think the bet was agreed to be settled on public information published before Jan 1 2020
benj111
Unless theres a crash.

Be careful not to conflate winning the bet and being right. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and all that.

Having said that the stuff that was being said round about then, he has some balls to offer the bet.

The contrarian in me notes that the unicorn fears seems to have disappeared. Perhaps now is the time to worry?