Meituan is not ad-funded. Spotify - eh, that's one's a 50/50. I think more people use the free version of Spotify with ads than people who pay for it.
Also, I love uselessly speculating! So, here's the list with speculation as to whether the unicorn will last in the next 5 years or wither away:
1. Uber - will be alive and be doing extremely well
2. Xiaomi - will be alive and doing moderately well
3. Airbnb - will stay, regulations will put a damp on its operations
4. Palantir - will downsize; other companies will emerge and compete with it
5. Snapchat - (ad-funded) will fail to find a sustainable monetization model
6. Didi Kuaidi - (Chinese 'Uber' clone) will be alive and well
7. Flipkart - (Indian e-commerce site) will be alive and well
8. SpaceX - will fail
9. Pinterest - (ad-funded) will stay just barely, will downsize
10. Dropbox - will fail
11. WeWork - (home:AirBnB::office space:WeWork) will be alive and well
12. Lufax - (Chinese finance marketplace) will be alive well
13. Theranos - will fail
14. Spotify - (~ad-funded) will fail
15. DJI - (Chinese company that creates unmanned aerial vehicles) will downsize
16. Zhong An - (Chinese online insurance firm) will be alive and well
17. Meituan - (Chinese retail service site) will stay but not strongly
18. Square - will fail
19. Snapdeal - (India's shopping site) will be alive and well
20. Stripe - will be alive and be doing extremely well
Dunno too : why would you pay for Dropbox when you have OneDrive if you're on MS ecosystem, iCloud when you're on Apple ecosystem and GDrive when you're on Google ecosystem. They all offer more than Dropbox (better integration, Office suite etc).
I'm not sure I understand how WeWork is anything like Airbnb. They seem like basically a value-added reseller of commercial leases. (We're in a WeWork space in Chicago right now).
Yeah I think you're right, my analogy is bunk. I'll leave it up for context.
For the benefit of others, here's the founder of WeWork himself explaining WeWork:
WeWork takes out a cut-rate lease on a floor or two of
an office building, chops it up into smaller parcels and
then charges monthly memberships to startups and small
companies that want to work cheek-by-jowl with each other.
Also, wow, you work in a WeWork office? I'm surprised. Surprised because you seem like a smart guy who'd have made a really great company that could afford to get the swankiest office available. Or maybe, you have a company that's doing well but you just choose not to spend big money on office space?
Sorry for being intrusive, I'm really just surprised is all! I was visiting some startups in Chicago not too long ago and I saw many spending a lot of money on office space -- some that I felt probably should not have been.
1. We had office space in Oak Park, blocks from where we live, for a cheap 1-year lease, but we rarely used it; we might as well just work from home. But working from home hurt our productivity and quality of life.
2. The WW space we're in is in one of the best and most accessible locations in Chicago --- west loop --- this is a strategic thing with WW: they can buy space in bulk and for long-term commits and thus get reasonable prices in places where we can't.
3. Crucially: WW offers m-t-m leases. The 1-year lease for OP space wasn't a great use of our funds, and a 1-month lease de-risks it for us.
4. There are only two of us actually in Chicago. Matasano would never have used WW space; we had a series of offices in The Monadnock Building in south loop.
5. We have a private office in the building.
6. Office space in Chicago is extremely cheap. The WW space is nicer than any SFBA office space I've been in, includes utilities and Internet, and is price-competitive with the crappy space we leased in Oak Park.
Long story short: WW is much swanker than anything we could rent at the same price. That could change, especially if the space fills up.
The downside of WW is that it's incredibly douchey (ours seems to have a Kanye West theme). I can get over than in exchange for comfortable couches and fast Internet.
So WW comes and buys up space in bulk... and manages that space and gets a nice profit.
And they do indeed seem to be making a nice bit of profit.
Don't you think though that real estate moguls are seeing this and getting tempted? I think pretty soon they will learn and decide to "push out this middleman" and take on some of the responsibilities that WW is doing. Or maybe not, because most real estate moguls are too oldschool and will fail to successfully do what WW is doing.
Serviced offices have long been a thing. I think WW's big advantage is that they're part of the same culture as their clients, so understand what they want much better than your typical office manager.
Spotify: will lose to Google Play and Apple Music. Sadly Spotify is not helping itself. Its desktop application is bulky and difficult to use. And so is the app. Poor integration is also annoying. When you're driving and want to put on a song, you can do so with a voice command, a modern Android phone (with Google Play) or iPhone (with Apple Music) will do a stellar job of quickly finding the song and playing it. Spotify, on the other hand, is a total pain to deal with in such a situation. I really wish they'd do a better job, but every next update is suckier than the last. A lot of people really like Spotify I understand, but they'll gradually part for alternatives in the coming years.
SpaceX is not about to take over the space of Lockheed Martin et al. that easily. Its goals are maybe laudable in some sense, but I don't see it getting an appreciable revenue stream in the foreseeable future.
Dropbox: Reasons to use it are quickly dying. It lost a lot of good will by having Rice on board (and retaining her after the uproar) from a lot of the tech savvy, they don't even do their own storage... they use Amazon's services, Google Drive is getting more and more convenient to use (integration with gmail a big plus), etc. I just don't see it being able to compete. And all of the things they've recently tried to do (creating office software, atempting to be a photo host, etc.) have been pitifully bad. I used to find Drew to be an impressive guy with a great acumen, but after witnessing one mistake after another, not so much.
On a more positive note, I think Stripe is an extremely solid company. It's unstoppable and will keep surprising people with what it can achieve.
SpaceX has a great revenue stream. Unlike ULA, it has a big commercial business. It also has government contracts that ULA can't win due to pricing. If SpaceX didn't take over any of ULA's business, SpaceX would be fine.
Also, I love uselessly speculating! So, here's the list with speculation as to whether the unicorn will last in the next 5 years or wither away:
edit: formatting