💥Unicorn Hubs, How to Plan Headcount, B2C Metrics, GTM Engineers & More
Digesting Insights From the Data
👋 Hi, I’m Andre and welcome to my newsletter Data Driven VC which is all about becoming a better investor with Data & AI. Join 35k+ thought leaders from VCs like a16z, Accel, Index, Sequoia, and more to understand how startup investing becomes more data-driven, why it matters, and what it means for you.
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You had the best intentions when you bought all those data sources like Crunchbase, Dealroom, Pitchbook, and Harmonic. You thought everything gets logged with that powerful CRM called Affinity. You wanted to connect it all to ChatGPT and start asking questions.
But then you realized that you’re missing the middle layer between your data and your LLM that connects the data siloes, eliminates the duplicates, and normalizes the data swamp.
This is why you need an “entity resolution” data infrastructure, aka the glue. But do you build it or buy it?
The Top Metrics for Consumer Businesses
CJ Gustafson at MostlyMetrics highlights why consumer metrics diverge from B2B and which ones matter most, using data from companies like Airbnb, Spotify, Pinterest, and Roblox. The piece emphasizes funnel health, active user counts, and the balance between organic and paid growth as critical signals for long-term durability.
Funnel Health and Acquisition Mix: Pinterest, Headspace, and Airbnb illustrate strong organic acquisition channels, while heavy reliance on paid is flagged as a red flag. Investors like John Connolly see acquisition mix as the single most important indicator of consumer business resilience.
Monthly Active Users (MAUs): Pinterest reported 537 million MAUs in Q3 2024, up 11% year-over-year, and Spotify reached 678 million MAUs in Q4 2024, up 12%. MAUs highlight audience scale but must be paired with monetization metrics to capture real business health.
Daily Active Users (DAUs): Snap had 453 million DAUs in Q4 2024 (9% growth) and Roblox hit 85.3 million (19% growth). The DAU/MAU ratio, or stickiness, is a more meaningful measure of engagement than either number in isolation.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
Consumer businesses live or die by their ability to generate organic growth, retain daily engagement, and monetize large active user bases. MAU and DAU growth impress on earnings calls, but the true differentiator is how efficiently platforms convert attention into sustainable economics.
How to Plan Headcount
Carta released a fresh 2025 guide on how startups can use headcount planning not just as a budgeting exercise but as a strategic tool to manage equity, align with business goals, and build investor confidence. The article emphasizes the dual cost of hires (cash and equity)and guides forecasting, modeling, and avoiding common pitfalls.
Equity and Ownership Impact: Hiring decisions affect not just salaries but also dilution. Carta notes that every equity grant reshapes the cap table, making equity management central to long-term planning and investor readiness.
Retention and Strategic Alignment: By March 2025, only 65% of employees hired in 2023 and 84% from 2024 remained in-role. This turnover underscores why each role must be tied directly to milestones such as product launches, ARR growth, or compliance needs.
Forecasting and True Cost Modeling: Effective planning requires forecasting staffing needs 12–18 months ahead and modeling both salary and equity dilution. Carta’s tools aim to show the full ownership cost of each hire in real time, reducing risk and supporting board alignment.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
A headcount plan is a strategic roadmap that links hiring to business outcomes while managing the financial and equity costs of growth. Startups that forecast thoroughly, align hires to milestones, and model dilution build stronger investor confidence and reduce the risk of reactive, costly decisions.
Top US Unicorn Hubs
Recent research by Ilya Strebulaev and the Stanford GSB maps where unicorns are most concentrated in the United States, comparing both absolute numbers and relative odds. The data shows dominance of established hubs but also highlights emerging regions with outsized unicorn formation rates.
San Francisco Bay Area Leads: San Francisco counts 467 unicorns and Silicon Valley adds 127, together nearly 600 companies, far ahead of New York (220) and Boston (105).
Relative Odds Highlight Utah: Salt Lake City’s 30 unicorns give it an odds ratio of 1.9, meaning startups there are 90% more likely than the national average to become unicorns.
Other Notable Hubs: Los Angeles (80), Seattle (45), Austin (39), Washington D.C. (36), Chicago (34), San Diego (33), and Denver (31) are significant. Southern cities like Miami (23), Dallas-Fort Worth (19), Atlanta (12), and Houston (11) are growing but smaller.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
The Bay Area remains the clear center of unicorn creation in absolute numbers, but odds ratios show that newer hubs such as Salt Lake City are increasingly fertile environments for high-growth startups.
M&A Activity in 2025
New data from Peter Walker shows that 502 startups were acquired in the first half of 2025, equal to 1.2% of all US startups on the platform. Excluding pre-seed, the acquisition rate rises to 2.1%, signaling one of the strongest M&A periods in recent years.
Stage Breakdown: Pre-seed had 138 acquisitions out of 26,114 companies (0.5%). Seed saw 113 of 6,485 (1.7%), and Series A had 150 of 6,006 (2.5%).
Late-Stage Percentages: Series B reported 54 of 2,673 acquisitions (2.0%). Series C recorded 29 of 1,142 (2.5%), while Series E+ was highest with 10 of 357 (2.8%).
Where Most Activity Happens: The largest absolute number of acquisitions occurred in the Seed and Series A stages, but late-stage companies posted strong relative rates that suggest buyers are still active across the spectrum.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
Acquisitions in H1 2025 were relatively strong across stages, with the bulk of deals at Seed and Series A. The high late-stage percentages point to a healthy M&A environment, though the true quality of these exits remains unclear.
GTM Engineering: Hype or the Next Big Role?
Kyle Poyar at Growth Unhinged explores the uneven rise of GTM engineering, a role meant to automate go-to-market processes across sales-led and sales-assisted funnels. Despite growing buzz, actual hiring remains limited compared to more established RevOps and SalesOps functions.
Hiring vs. Hype: Only 45 GTM engineer job posts appeared last month, 128 in the past three months. By comparison, that’s one for every 14 RevOps roles and one for every 92 SDRs.
Agencies Fill the Gap: About 45% of those with a GTM engineer title work in agencies or consulting. Clay’s partner directory alone lists more than 120 agencies, triple the number of monthly new job openings.
Convergence with RevOps: GTM engineering overlaps heavily with RevOps and RevTech, but adds ownership of outcomes tied to automated GTM plays. Many startups instead redeploy internal staff or upskill existing teams rather than make a dedicated hire.
✈️ KEY TAKEAWAYS
The GTM engineering role is growing in visibility but not yet in scale. Companies are experimenting with agencies and internal reskilling, while the long-term trajectory suggests eventual convergence with RevOps or RevTech functions.
Thanks to Jérôme Jaggi for his help with this post.
Stay driven,
Andre
PS: Check out Foresight - the solution I would’ve loved to see in the world before we spent 7-figures to build our own infra. Now “the glue” for your messy data stack is available off-the-shelf ;)
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