Not Only Luck.
An essay by John Melonakos

A Sampling of Market Data from Venture Atlanta

Today was the first day of Venture Atlanta, the biggest annual venture capital conference in our city. One thing that stuck out to me was the valuable market data shared at the conference.

Here’s a sampling of some of the information that was shared:

  • There is $3.1 billion in lost revenue due to long healthcare service wait times
  • US Healthcare Market:  5k hospitals, 800k physicians, 9k urgent care centers
  • 70% of IT projects fail; $63B is spent on loser IT projects in the US each year
  • Customer reward programs at local restaurants increase profitability by 15-20%
  • $1T in student debt in US, yet 50% of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed
  • $3T spent annual on US healthcare; 60% spent on preventable items
  • $79 billion spent on packaged enterprise software last year
  • less than 5% of enterprise software applications are mobilized
  • 1.3 billion mobile equipped workers by 2015
  • $5.6B spent managing meetings and events annually using automated processes; $22B spent using manual processes
  • 1.1% of corporate revenue is spent on coordinating and holding meetings and events
  • 12M victims / year of identity theft
  • businesses lose $100B/year in credit card fraud

It’s inspiring to watch these new companies take the stage to tackle these big markets. Collecting market data is not always easy. Sometimes it requires a good bit of guesswork. I have no idea if the numbers shared by these companies are accurate, but it’s helpful to hear the numbers that other entrepreneurs derive for their markets.

My favorite pitches came from Insightpool and Bitpay who are neighbors at the Village. From Devon of Insightpool, we got the line, “We don’t eat our own dog food. We’re marketers, so we sip our own champagne.” From Tony of Bitpay, I finally understood a rational explanation of why bitcoins are potentially more than a fad:  “Credit cards were never designed for online commerce. Why would you ever give someone the credentials for your $20k line of credit to buy something that costs $20?”

It was a great first day at Venture Atlanta and I look forward to tomorrow’s sessions.

What were your favorite parts of Venture Atlanta?

 

 

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From the conversation

Comments preserved from the original post.

Guest

Hey – do you have a source for the point that ‘less than 5% of enterprise applications are mobilized’?

melonakos

In reply to an earlier comment

One of the companies that was presenting at this event said that. I do not remember which one. You could go through the list of them to try to figure that out if you really wanted and then contact them to see where they got their data. That’s all I can say 🙂