The AlwaysOn 250 (2003 to 2015)

A look back at the top companies of Web2, where smartphone-friendlly cloud-based consumer and enterprise apps led the way to $20 tillion in new wealth.

Tony Perkins, Chamillionaire, MC Hammer, and Mistah and the annual Summit at Stanford on July 24, 2008, where the AO250 was announced each year between 2003 and 2015.

The core Cryptonite research team working on the Cryptonite 300 has a history of picking top private companies that reward their venture investors with the highest equity returns. From 2003 to 2015, we published AlwaysOn 250—representing the most promising Web2 private companies with excellent results. Out of the 1,483 unique companies that made the AO 250 list, 572 companies were successfully acquired, and 193 companies went public, representing a 52 percent exit rate to date. These results don’t even include more recent exists, including Instacart’s IPO this Summer, which made the AO250 list in 2015.

The complete list of 1,483 private Web2 companies we bet on can be viewed here. If we have missed any positive return exits, let us know. :))

YouTube CoFounder Chad Hurley is trying to answer our question on how he expected YouTube to make money at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford on July 26, 2006, just seven months after he and John Chen had founded the company. After pondering for a while, Chad eventually said he didn’t know and was quite satisfied with his answer.

When Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.7 billion after only a little more than a year in business, an event widely perceived as the mark of the top of the Wed 2.0 bubble, which turned out not to be the case.

We achieved this success by staying close to the streets of the global Silicon Valley and being in contact with the top VC investors and technology company-focused investment banking teams to gain their insights and nominations.

Cryptonite is on record as predicting that Web3 represents a $100 trillion opportunity over the next 20 years—and we are hoping for similar results with our recently announced Cryptonite 300 competition. But we will only prevail in the Web3 era with your help, so please nominate your favorite companies to us @ TheEditors@CryptoniteVentures.com. We will be announcing the top Cryptonite 300 companies at our annual Cryptonite annual gathering in Silicon Valley next Summer.