Your humble News team grew from two full-time folks at the end of 2017 to five at the end of this year.聽 Who joined? The excellent data and venture-focused 聽when the year began, along with , who not only writes some of our most interesting stuff but also leads our weekend email. 聽climbed aboard later in the year after a stint as our most prolific聽contributor. She’s amazingly good.

We’re adding more staff in 2019, and a few other things that I’ll tell you about soon. But that’s next year. What did we get done in 2018? A lot!

Posts

This year News more than doubled its output, publishing over 1,000 articles. Looking at some preliminary聽data, we averaged over 600 words per piece, so we comfortably shipped north of 600,000 words in 2018. And a lot of charts and graphs.

Next year we’re not going to work to post more in terms of volume, but we’re going to write longer stuff. So, if you like graphs and detailed dives into what we’re seeing in the venture market, we’ll have a lot for you. (You are , right?)

Thinking about individual posts, we had some hits that were about well-known trends (why uber loses money, top family investment offices, how to read an S-1, construction startups, AI startups), and some concerning topics a bet less famous (universities and H-1b visas, Google and DuckDuckGo).

Our leading topics in the year were Startups, followed by Business, Venture, Public, Data, and Liquidity. That mostly makes sense, thinking about what happened in the year. Crypto聽and Proust and Diversity came next. There’s work to do in our output, scanning the order of the list, which makes me even more excited about 2019.

In terms of readership, we grew on-site traffic to our work by about around 285 percent in 2018. Putting up 385 percent as many pageviews in 2018 as 2017 is a bit of a faff as we didn’t start publishing until March of the earlier year, but it still felt great. Thanks for reading.

Podcasts

We did more than write聽in 2018. Our two podcasts hit nice milestones during the year. , a TechCrunch show that we help host, reached its 100th episode this year聽and . It’s going to break two million downloads in January.

Our podcast with the San Francisco Chronicle reached its 50th episode in the year, closing off its most recent season as the year came to a close. Our work with the Chronicle, called , has always been dual form, hybridizing a weekly written series about local startups and the show.

Check them out if you haven’t, and a big thanks to our co-hosts (, , , , and ) and our production team (, , and ), not to mention , , and at TechCrunch who keep Equity on the rails. Additional thanks to for coming back on 补苍诲听 for being the first-ever guest on Startups of the Week. (And former co-hosts , , , and ).

Miscellanea

It’s hard to cram a year’s work into a few hundred words, but here are a few more highlights.

Jason and Holden both went on Cheddar ( and ), which was a treat; Savannah ran hard with our Proust series; Mary Ann wrote some of our longest features to date; and we climbed , reaching 39th on its “Presence” leaderboard.

A bunch of folks that we respect also linked to us and some of our research got picked up by the New York Times and made the front page of the Business section in print.

In 2017, we tested the idea that an independent news team could be built inside of a data-focused startup, and it worked. In 2018, we pushed to grow our little publication a hell of a lot. Next year we’re doubling-down on the sort of longer-form work that we think is our best, but there will still be plenty of startup looks, venture interviews, area profiles, and jokes.

It’s going to be great. See you next year.

Follow SA国际传媒 News on

The company, as we previously聽reported, initially targeted a $26 to $29 per share price range for its IPO. The company has since boosted those figures to a far higher $33 to $35 price interval.

From low-to-low and high-to-high, the new prices are 26.9 percent and 20.7 percent higher, respectively.

The repricing of Elastic’s range is impressive and marks yet another bullish signal for companies that are not profitable when they go public.

Results Reminder

Elastic is growing quickly and losing more money over time. The company lost $52 million in its fiscal year ending April 30, 2017 off revenue of $88.2 million. The next fiscal year saw Elastic’s revenue surge 81.4 percent to $159.9 million. The company lost just a smidge more during the period, inching up to a $52.7 million loss. That’s the good news.

Elastic turned in $56.6 million in top line during its most recent quarter (ending July 31, 2018), up from $31.6 million in the year ago period. However, during those two quarters, the firm’s losses grew from $10.0 million to $18.6 million. The same story repeats when looking at the preceding quarters (ending April 30, 2018 to April 30, 2017). Elastic’s losses grew from $11.8 million to $21.4 million.

But as we’ve seen, profitability taking a firm backseat to growth. Elastic isn’t even the first company in recent memory to raise its range and then price high while losing money.

Follow SA国际传媒 News on

The company will begin trading tomorrow morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “NIO.”

NIO has yet to refile with the SEC, thus giving us final share counts. However, the company had previously indicated that it will sell 184 million shares at the most, inclusive of the underwriter’s option. At that count, the firm will raise $1.15 billion for its business.

The Shanghai-based automotive upstart 聽while private, including money from Sequoia China, Baidu, and Tencent, giving it a mostly Chinese capital base with an American twist.

As SA国际传媒 News reported when NIO initially filed to go public, the firm’s history as a business is shockingly short. The Tesla-competitor has only sold a handful of vehicles, meaning that for most of its operating history it has only lost money. As such, it’s difficult for investors to parse the firm’s trajectory.

But its immature business didn’t hamper NIO from going public, raising over a billion in the process. What the company’s impending debut does tell us, therefore, is that the IPO window is still quite open. That’s good news for unicorns at home and abroad.

After all, even the improved 2018 IPO cadence won’t manage to get more than a fraction of the unicorn cohort liquid.

As 2017 came to a close, the biggest story in the world of cryptocurrency and decentralized digital assets wasn’t bitcoin, whose price had fallen and failed to quickly bounce back. Instead, it was the rapid appreciation of XRP, the token , an “enterprise blockchain solution for global payments” .

Follow SA国际传媒 News on &

Ripple’s massive run value above the worth of Ethereum’s ether coin. It was heady stuff.

(There’s ample work out there already tucking into whether or not Ripple’s boom is reasonable; that’s not our goal here and I have no particularly strong perspective either way.)

But something that Ripple did while appreciating greatly was cut bitcoin’s share of the crypto pie. As the , bitcoin is nearly back to all-time-lows in regards to its share of the aggregate value of its asset class:

There’s a lot of nuance in the above chart which is missed on a quick glance. But who needs that on New Year’s Day? Instead of digging into details, I wanted to ask a question.

Bitcoin is slow to process transactions that cost quite a lot, a fact that has made its聽hopes of becoming a leading digital currency seem damp. But bitcoin has held its worth as market sentiment shifted towards viewing it as a store of value; it’s valuable because it’s valuable and thus it has value and may appreciate as people think of it as a valuable thing. Or something like that.

But what might happen if bitcoin falls to a low enough percentage of the crypto market that it’s no longer an obvious store of value in comparison to rival offerings? And then it doesn’t do really much of all that is useful.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about last night. Hope you are well and welcome to 2018.

From The聽:

• The SA国际传媒 Daily is back tomorrow!