In this post, I examined the data provided as training data on the Tableau under the technology section. I used the Startup Venture Funding Data which includes information about companies, investments, and acquisitions from 1960 till 2014 via Crunchbase .
Tableau actually has several incredible data sets for training in their resources section, ranging from Government to Lifestyle to Business. I would highly encourage anyone looking to practice to explore these.
In this exercise I imagined a client would come to me with the following questions:
1. What are the top 15 industries with the highest acquisition price?
2. How vast is the regional difference between biotechnology acquirers and what percentage of the funds did they raise?
3. Which cities are considered Top Investor Cities and what is the total amount raised by each city up to this point?
Answer: All those questions were answered in the visualization below!
Please note that there are further explanations to each question below.
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1. What are the top 15 industries with the highest acquisition price?
As we can see in the visualization below, Biotechnology, by far, is the largest industry of interest. Using the historical data available and transposing it into a bar graph, we are able to see that Biotechnology has accumulated over $1.6 Quadrillion in acquisition prices since the 1960’s. Although Software and Game companies are second on the list, with acquisition prices in the trillions, they still do not come even close to the quadrillion of biotechnology.
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2. How vast is the regional difference between biotechnology acquirers and what percentage of the funds did they raise?
When we think of large companies, we tend to think of Software companies in places like Silicon Valley. However, as we’ve seen above, Biotechnology companies have historically been the most sought after. Therefore, I was curious to see where did the industry flourish.
It turns out that the majority of the top 10 regions for biotechnology acquirers are on the each coast! Boston, Newark and New York City trump the Bay Area and San Diego percentage wise. I also found that the Circles (or packed bubbles) in the visualization below are a nice way to represent the data proportionally! Word to the wise, grow a biotechnology company on the east coast, you’re more likely to find better luck, more money and more resources to turn to!
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3. Which cities are considered Top Investor Cities and what is the total amount raised by each city up to this point?
Given the intriguing information above and that there always seems to be a discord in popular culture regarding which coast is more hospitable to which industries, I was curious to look at cities in particular and to see which cities were more engaged in raising funds to acquire various companies in general. The visualization below is color coded and arranged according to size and the values displayed are in the thousand billions, i.e. trillions of dollars.
This Treemap graph was the best choice to showcase that Menlo Park and New York City are the top investor cities according to the historical data on raised funds. Those giants are truly the top of the top investor cities.
However, entrepreneurs need not be discouraged, for cities like London, Stockholm and even Austin have experience raising trillions more of dollars to acquire many, many companies.
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Overall, this post and this data was a lot of fun to work with! I would love to experiment more with it and I encourage people to explore more questions that this data set could potentially answer.
Some further curiosities include, what are the boom years per industry? When did the West Coast start raising enough funds to rival the East Coast? or has it always been a pretty even battle? How does a top investor city’s proximity to another investor city affect its ranking or its industry focus?
This data is from the Startup Venture Funding Data from the assortment of training data available on Tableau’s website.