No Apple angle here, just an amazing graphic courtesy of the Wall Street Journal ($).
From Phred Dvorak and Yasufumi Saito’s Silicon Valley Powered American Tech Dominance—Now It Has a Challenger:
A decade ago, nearly three-quarters of the world’s financing of innovative, tech-heavy startups and young companies took place in the U.S., with American investors plowing money into mostly U.S.-based venture firms.
Now, a surge of new money—mostly from China—has helped drive funding totals into the stratosphere and has transformed the venture landscape, according to an exclusive Wall Street Journal analysis of venture funding data…
That tidal wave of cash into promising young firms could herald a shift in who controls the world’s technological innovation and its economic fruits, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars.
Below: a version you can click to enlarge.
My take: The elephant in the room—the last tech bubble—is not addressed in the accompanying article.
UPDATE: Where the money goes, per friend-of-the-blog Dave Emery’s request.
It would be interesting to see a similar graph on “destination”. There’s an implication that ‘origin = destination’, but that’s something worth verifying.
Your wish, my request. See update.
I’d be more concerned if I were European. They’ve gone from 2nd in VC investment as recently as 2013 to 5th.
In many ways, Europe now has bigger problems than that, because, while Europe was “One” before Brexit, I don’t know that one European will now see his or her investment in another European as an investment in “Europe”.
It’s a shame in my not so humble opinion.
I wonder if Japan’s balance of “venture capital” isn’t made to seem smaller by their keiretsu structures. Those may not get counted as “venture” capital, because it is investment in “self”, and not “nation” or “others” (i.e. ventures). That would require better understanding the definition of terms.
“My take: The elephant in the room—the last tech bubble—is not addressed in the accompanying article.”
Good point, PED. But to do that, it might be best to use a chart that shows the comparative segments layered rather than stacked. It’s pretty obvious to me that a big chunk of the “bubble” has been the emergence of the China segment. Pulling out the US data by layering would show some later blobs up and down in US VC, but no sign of an explosive bubble like happened in the .com meltdown.
Actually, as I look at this chart, it looks pretty, like some kind of weird rorschach test rotated around some middle horizontal axis, but it’s also pretty darned annoying, since it buries or makes difficult to access a bunch of information.
Joe writes about the chart: “it’s also pretty darned annoying, since it buries or makes difficult to access a bunch of information.”
To the credit of theWSJ’s graphics department, they present the data from several different angles. I’d post more, but I’m dancing on the edge of fair use as it is.
Thanks! I’ll check it out.
I actually like the chart, but since it’s the first time I’ve seen one in that style, it took me some time to understand it. It’s not good for discerning nominal values, but better for seeing trends.
You’re right of course, Ken. The chart’s showing an overall trend, and identifies who the participants are. Thus we see that the spending level of the dot-com bubble has been significantly surpassed for about the last 4 years, which is in part what PED is observing and focusing on. Is another bubble imminent? Or is something else going on? I’m of the opinion that it’s the latter. The same data in a different chart could help clarify that.