This is a very simple prototype of a game to see how good we are at predicting the current and future valuations of existing companies. I'd love any and all feedback and am open to questions.
@buster I love the idea. It seems like it could be a lot of fun. My only issue is that the Twitter auth allows this to post for us? I don't mind sharing things, but I hate writing a blank check to things I may end up not using / liking. I prefer to make the decision a la carte. Any reason why we have to give that explicitly up front?
I usually just don't signup for things that allow themselves to post on either Twitter or FB. Given your position with Twitter, I thought it might be interesting to discuss this with you.
@EAWharton I totally understand. When I set up the token I didn't know if I would want to allow people to tweet directly from the app... but now that I'm not doing that I'll go and change the permissions to read-only.
You think Product Hunt's valuation will be only $30M one year from now, @buster!? Challenge accepted. :)
This is an awesome idea, although I wish we could place shorter term bets, where the "reward" of winning comes much less than 1 year out. Of course the challenge with private companies is that most data isn't public. Any thoughts on this, @buster?
@rrhoover I do hope you beat my prediction. At 12 guesses so far, looks like my guess is the median (that's what the numbers in the gray bar are, which isn't super clear yet)... so it's not just me.
And yeah, I agree that shorter term bets would make for a better engagement loop. I've gone back and forth on ways to make this game move faster... I could make the 1-year time frame something you could change. Would you feel comfortable making predictions in 3 month chunks? 1 month chunks?
I'm open to ideas!
@rrhoover Also... about the problem with the data not being public. That's part of why I built this. There is information out there in many cases (# employees, amount raised, whispers on the streets) that could be reverse engineered into a valuation. Hopefully, by picking the median of the guesses (I haven't started weighing high confidence guesses more than low confidence ones, but will try when there's more data), I think we may actually approach a realistic "best guess" for this data. Wisdom of crowds, etc.
Part of why I'm releasing this super early is so I can see what the data looks like and start playing around with it to find out what it all actually means.
@buster unless you measure something more granular than overall valuation, it may be hard to simple reduce the prediction time from 1 year to 1 or 3 months.
Other tangential metrics to valuation could be number of employees, Alexa ranking, or Mattermark score (cc @daniellemorrill, @SparksZilla).
What do you think about allowing anonymous guesses, @buster? I imagine many VC's would enjoy playing with this but not if their name is publicly tied to their prediction.
@rrhoover Ooh, I like the idea of predicting other more verifiable pieces of data! That's interesting... I'll think on it.
As for anonymous guesses... I think you're probably right, but my own selfish interests in building the game make me want to keep it all public. Putting your name on the line is actually the part that makes this exciting to me (since there's no money involved).
@buster agreed. The same is true for Product Hunt. We could anonymize all upvotes but it would feel less like you're a part of a "tribe" and the community side is of course important.
@nbashaw Ha, good eye. I added that because I had to do that search for our own internal unicorn league so many times and never found any good results. "Build the search results you want to get", right? :)
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