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Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

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Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#11
It is worth pointing out they are using AWS. Gave a really interesting talk at PuppetConf '12 [1]. Talks about the stack and how they use it. Seems they used AWS to their advantage, to keep up/ahead of the hunger for computing power.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU-bCbBq8zs

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#12

I do not understand how the company is being valued at 2.5B. It doesn't look like even the business accounts at Pinterest have any type of fee associated with them. How do they make money? Or is this valuation most likely based on the possibility of making money down the line? EDIT: According to this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254498 , it seems like it is based primarily on potential revenue from data…

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Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#14
post #13

Can someone shed light on how Pinterest and Instagram can be worth billions? But Reddit is only worth 400m?

Pinterest is millions of people freely marketing consumer products to each other. The potential for both referral commissions and data mining is huge. Reddit is a fancy meme and porn sharing forum (the main subreddits dwarf all the 'intellectual' ones combined), which few advertisers are interested in, and which has been unable to produce enough revenue to maintain more than a skeleton staff with self-serve ads and premium accounts.

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#15

I do not understand how the company is being valued at 2.5B. It doesn't look like even the business accounts at Pinterest have any type of fee associated with them. How do they make money? Or is this valuation most likely based on the possibility of making money down the line? EDIT: According to this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254498 , it seems like it is based primarily on potential revenue from data…

Pinning indicates purchasing intent, and mediating purchasing intent is the most lucrative thing anybody has ever found to do with the web (search advertising being the all time greatest example).

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#16

I would love to see the pitch deck they had for this round.

My impression is that most pitches that happen at that stage are simply growth rate followed by revenue projections, no real magic when you're seeing the growth that they are.

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#17

I do not understand how the company is being valued at 2.5B. It doesn't look like even the business accounts at Pinterest have any type of fee associated with them. How do they make money? Or is this valuation most likely based on the possibility of making money down the line? EDIT: According to this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254498 , it seems like it is based primarily on potential revenue from data…

I think the promoted items model like twitter's business model suits them quite well.

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#18

I would love to see the pitch deck they had for this round.

My impression is that most pitches that happen at that stage are simply growth rate followed by revenue projections, no real magic when you're seeing the growth that they are.

$200m is a lot to throw at a company that only has a lot of users.

They have little to no revenue at this point and no current revenue streams that point to being able to generate anything worthy of a $2.5b valuation. I guess my point was that I'd like to know what revenue streams they are anticipating creating that would warrant such a high valuation.

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#19

I do not understand how the company is being valued at 2.5B. It doesn't look like even the business accounts at Pinterest have any type of fee associated with them. How do they make money? Or is this valuation most likely based on the possibility of making money down the line? EDIT: According to this post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5254498 , it seems like it is based primarily on potential revenue from data…

They said the same thing about Instagram when it was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. I'm starting to think that's not a good metric.

Re: Pinterest Completes $200M Funding at $2.5B Valuation

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that most pitches that happen at that stage are simply growth rate followed by revenue projections, no real magic when you're seeing the growth that they are.

$200m is a lot to throw at a company that only has a lot of users . They have little to no revenue at this point and no current revenue streams that point to being able to generate anything worthy of a $2.5b valuation. I guess my point was that I'd like to know what revenue streams they are anticipating creating that would warrant such a high valuation.

That's not how the game works:

The investors at this stage still don't care about revenue. The main question is whether or not they can flip the investment to some other firm later (that is to say, will the picture look rosy enough in the future that someone else will buy in at a higher valuation).

Revenue starts to matter in the last round before the IPO (if it goes that route). If the sequence ends in an acquisition, revenues won't really matter..

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