The Objective

This dashboard was built to compete in the Maven Unicorn competition. For this challenge, the task was to illustrate the current landscape of unicorn companies around the globe, presented in the form of a single-page report or dashboard. Link to the challenge

The Data

Private companies with a valuation over $1 billion as of March 2022, including each company's current valuation, funding, country of origin, industry, select investors, and the years they were founded and became unicorns. There is only 1 single CSV table with 1.074 rows, including geo data, Link to the data

The Analysis

This was a dashboard in one-weekend limited in-depth analysis.

I started in Power BI. I made some different cross-sections to see what would be fun to show. To answer my own question I made some changes to the Unicorn Companies table. I made different valuation groups in Billion's, cleaned up the Industry column, and added a Funding year.

Starting analyzing the data, I quickly came across a matrix table that I wanted to show in a wafer visual. This became the main visual. To fill the page I added a few more simple visuals

The Visuals

I didn't like the waffle visuals available in PowerBI and chose to copy them in Excel, save them as an image and import them into Power BI as an image.

Because of the limited time and the better design possibilities, I stepped over to Excel and made the waffle by hand, just creating little squares with think white borders and a pink or light-grey fill as calculated by the Excel pivot table. Ans finally put some text blow the visuals.

The key insights

88% of Unicorns have a valuation between 1 and 5 Billion. They represent 48% of the total valuation. Only 1% of the current Unicorns have a valuation above 25 Billion which is 23% of the total valuation

The design

Unicorn made me think of pink so I did design the dashboard with the pink color as a starting point. I still get happy when I look at this dashboard.

When designing the dashboard, I focused on sleek and clean. Rectangular shapes that lie on top of the background by means of shadows. I consistently chose gray and pink on a white background.

Each visual has a header where bold gray and pink letters have been used to create accents. This WAS ( updated in Power BI beginning of 2023) not possible in the default visual header. An extra textbox has been used (see below the build up of the PowerBI dashboard). I found the top visual too empty and added a text box with a fun fact in it to fill up the white space a bit.

Comments

This is still one of my own favorite dashboards, the pink in combination with white and light-grey and the clean simple visuals make me smile time after time :-)

Link to my submission

Link to the last call overview

Link to the finalists

Link to the winner

Link to the Maven voting you tube video