How To Build A Billion-Dollar Internet Company

Greylock Partners VC James Slavet recently dove head-first into the data, and found that there are only 24 publicly traded consumer Internet companies worth $1 billion or more in the U.S.

Of those 24 companies, two-thirds of them are digital transaction firms, including Priceline, Expedia, Groupon, Amazon, eBay, and Netflix.

"What most people don’t understand is that the best way to create a consumer Internet company worth north of a billion dollars is to build a digital transaction business – a company that connects buyers and sellers so they can more efficiently transact," Slavet writes on LinkedIn.

Still, there are are other ways to build a billion-dollar Internet company. Slavet points to privately held companies like Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, and Evernote, all of which are worth north of $1 billion.

"But the surprising bottom line is that the digital transactions space has yielded a longer list of billion-dollar outcomes than all other Internet sectors combined," Slavet writes.