A year ago, I wrote a post on the 5 Underhyped Companies I’d Invest In At Any Valuation.

Turns out, since that post, some good stuff has happenned to these companies:

Yelp: $1.3B market cap

Tripadvisor: $5.5B market cap, up around 50% since it’s IPO

Dropbox: Raised $250M series B

Pinterest: Raised $27M from A16Z and then $100M at a $1.5B Valuation from Rakuten

Behance: Raised $6.5M from Union Square Ventures

It’s time for me to construct my new list. Honestly, this time, it’s much harder. Most companies that are showing great momentum are heavily hyped, so finding my “under-hyped” list is near impossible.  So forgive me if some of these don’t fit the profile. Also, keep in mind that I am excluding any company that I’ve ever been involved with as an investor.

1. Kickstarter: What started as a funky marketplace to raise money for quirky products is becoming a real force and legitimate funding source for creative projects, some of which are really significant and could have broad appeal. It’s an amazing community – albeit one that is heavily indexed towards the tech/entrepreneurial community.  The company has raised $10M from USV.

2. Eventbrite: Not sexy, not fancy, not even hyper-net. But this company just dominates its category. Definitely an IPO candidate, IMHO. If I were in Silicon Valley and wanted to work for a later stage winner, I’d probably look to work here.

3. Uber: Outstanding execution, beautiful product, excellent customer experience.  It does worry me that it’s a bit of a service only for rich people, and ultimately, this category is probably only so big. But there is at least one more big time money-making round left for this company even at a relatively crazy valuation.

4. GitHub: I’m a little sad that I failed to get this post out before it was revealed that they were raising a round from A16Z. I put this on the list before I heard anything about this, I swear! It’s an incredibly active and valuable community.

5. Oblong Industries: I guess I’m going out on a limb the most with this one.  Consider though that the keyboards we all use for hours each day have layouts that were invented in 1870.  The Qwerty layout also was designed to actually slow down the speed at which we type in order to prevent typewriter keys from jamming. Wow. I think that one of the fundamental infrastructure developments that will propel the next great innovation wave is completely transformative human-computer interfaces. And Oblong is really pushing the envelope here.

There it is!  We’ll see what happens in the next 12 months. Curious what people think. Special thanks to Greg Bettinelli who reminded me about Oblong when I was stuck on my #5.

**UPDATE** I have been feeling like I missed a semi-obvious company the last couple weeks, and it turns out I was right.  So I’ll add a special mention.  Thanks to Ram Ramakrishnan and Andrew Parker for nudging me in this direction.

6. ZocDoc: Even though the company is post DST investment, I continue to think there is a ton of upside here.  Couple reasons.  First, the service is extremely sticky, unlike other lead gen providers like Reach Local or Yodle.  It’s much more like OpenTable with deeper integration into the physician’s business and low churn.  It might cost a lot for the company to acquire a doctor, but then it’s pretty hard for them to rip out.  Second, I do believe that getting into the doctor booking flow and gaining deep market share will lead to a very durable business that has the potential to address other big problems in the healthcare system.  So I see a lot of upside that would justify what will certainly be a nosebleed price for the company’s next round.