Fat Startup Watch

I'd like to start tracking the best fat startups to see how they do over time. Please email me suggestions of the latest and greatest fat startups. You can also submit suggestions as a comment to this post (which is how I plan to update this list over time). 

To qualify, the company must raise at least $10mm before they achieve product-market fit. For example, companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Zynga would not qualify as fat startups since they raised the vast majority of their funding after they had significant traction. 

In contrast, a good fat startup example is Tom Siebel's latest company, C3, which is still in stealth mode. I believe they raised $10mm in an initial seed round from individual investors. Since then, they've raised a lot more funding from some great institutional investors at much higher valuations which I cannot disclose. 

Here is an article from the Washington Post talking about C3 closing another $26 million in funding and landing Condoleeza Rice on its Board. Such a high profile person joining a tiny company is not a surprise since one of the defining characteristics of fat startups is an impressive roster of "proven" and/or famous people on the management team and board. 

The second fat startup I'd add to the list is Workday, which is founded by Dave Duffield, former founder/CEO of Peoplesoft. To date, they have raised more than $150 million. I believe the last round was at around $400 million dollar valuation. Good for them.

Let's see what happens...