A new trend in Silicon Valley: social networking as a life-form entrepreneur pursuing income generation

Beijing time March 27 afternoon news, Silicon Valley technology incubator Y Combinator today held a business idea review, more than 500 investors and 47 start-up companies attended the meeting. Don Dodge, investor Tang Dauchi, said the review would reflect a social-networking boom that has begun to fade and more entrepreneurs are starting to pursue how to generate revenue.

Today, more than 500 investors gather at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in California (Computer History Museum) to review the new ideas of a group of young entrepreneurs who have just completed the Y combinator start-up training camp. 47 of startups are showing off a variety of entrepreneurial ideas, ranging from "kayak insurance" to "helping people get divorced peacefully."

Some investors in Y Combinator say the value of the start-up companies they invested in began to slide after a year of rapid growth. Startups targeting social networking have been bullish a year ago, but the value of Groupon, social-gaming developer Zynga and the world's largest social networking Facebook has been disappointing, making the values of such startups questionable.

Some investors said Combinator, the hottest start-up in Y, two years ago, valued as much as $20 million trillion, and today the highest valuations are about $10 million trillion. In addition, the financial terms of investment transactions are more likely to be of interest to investors.

"Today's startups are more focused on generating income than ever before, and they use a lot of charts that reflect the trend of revenue growth when they introduce projects to investors," says Dodge. In the past, entrepreneurs preferred to display indicators such as the number of users.

Dodge also notes that it is refreshing to note that there are no social networking related projects on the show. He said: "Social networking entrepreneurship has gone through the glorious course, and now entrepreneurs will focus on how to generate income." ”

Felicis Ventures Partner Aidin Senkut, a venture capital firm focused on early investment, said that, overall, with more and more people, it is difficult for today's technology start-ups to launch visionary products, but to produce "marginal" entrepreneurial ideas, But they are not unique.

He says Y Combinator's entrepreneurial ideas are diverse, such as the "MYO" arm ring developed by Thalmic Labs, which generates electrical signals to manipulate equipment through arm muscle movement, and has sold 25,000 units, with sales of $3.7 million.

Startups selected by Y Combinator will receive a 20,000 dollar initial investment, but need to assign 6% to 7% of the shares to Y Combinator. The investors of Y Combinator include the well-known investors, Anderson Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz) and investment company Maverick Capital, etc.

To date, Y Combinator has successfully hatched a home rental website Airbnb, online storage services Dropbox and A/B testing Service website optimizely.