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Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

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Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#11
post #8

These start ups get massive investment, IPO for retarded valuations, and all the venture firms/owners cash out leaving the market and institutional investors holding the rest. Slowly these companies die.. but the original people have already made their money and are on to something else. Classic. For instance, is there any sane reason why a website like rapgenius.com needs to IPO to raise public funds? The answer is…

Nailed it.

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#12
To quote Paul Graham: "Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think."

To put into context, how much do you think a telco company with 26 million US customers is worth ?

If Snapchat is displacing text and calls as the medium of transient communication of the next generation, it could feasibly end up being worth a substantial amount.

(My personal opinion is that it's over-valued; but it's important that someone makes the reasoned counter-argument)

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#13
post #5

While I have no idea what information investors are basing their decisions on, it's probably some evidence that Snapchat is starting to replace Facebook among some bellwether set of users. That could be a reasonable bet, depending on what the evidence is. But I don't know what the evidence is, and without it there is no way I can estimate what Snapchat's valuation should be. (Hint: and neither can The Washington Post…

My thought was exactly this. People are saying Snapchat is just another stupid overnight social app, but they are failing to see that this actually has some great potential. Facebooks problem is you publish things and they are there forever for anyone to see, but Snapchat is a little clever in the sense that you can publish events for 24 hours and then they disappear. Your friends are still in the know about what you're doing, and then it's gone. I would make a bet that there aren't a lot of significant friends of others that need to see something more than once or that go back looking for an event.

This nicely fills the gap of sharing vs history.

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#14

Only $200 million was raised this round for 5% of the company. All that means is that 5% of SnapChat is worth $200 million to a very small number of people. It does not mean that the other 95% is worth $3.8 billion, nor that the other 95% worth of value actually exists. Funding rounds are just deposits on houses. I can put down $40K for 5% of a house today, and choose to never pay the rest if someone gives me that op…

Very wise words.

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#15
These bubbles (housing, social web) are ways for rich people to give money to each other. But it's a zero-sum game (true value-creators like engineers are second-class citizens in the contemporary VC-funded world; they can't even buy houses) so someone is losing.

The lower-middle-class gets strip-mined. The upper-middle-class gets entertainment (cf. Valleywag) to make stagnation bearable.

For more on the underlying change, read here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/vc-istan-4-si...

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#17

Only $200 million was raised this round for 5% of the company. All that means is that 5% of SnapChat is worth $200 million to a very small number of people. It does not mean that the other 95% is worth $3.8 billion, nor that the other 95% worth of value actually exists. Funding rounds are just deposits on houses. I can put down $40K for 5% of a house today, and choose to never pay the rest if someone gives me that op…

[deleted]

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#18
post #17

Only $200 million was raised this round for 5% of the company. All that means is that 5% of SnapChat is worth $200 million to a very small number of people. It does not mean that the other 95% is worth $3.8 billion, nor that the other 95% worth of value actually exists. Funding rounds are just deposits on houses. I can put down $40K for 5% of a house today, and choose to never pay the rest if someone gives me that op…

[deleted]

All startup investments absolutely are options.

You're betting that the limited amount of money that you put into startup will tie you over until the next funding round or until you hit positive cash flow. Runway is a race between the burn rate and growth metrics. You're betting that the fuse you lit is going to blow and not fizzle when it gets to zero.

Re: Investors think Snapchat is worth $4 billion. That’s insane.

#20
It could be true but how come snap chat is worth so much and not what's app. Is it because they have actual revenue model while snapchat's value is speculative?

I don't really understand how valuations work. I read somewhere that they intend to make money by flash sales which I think is a really good idea for low priced products but it is not clear if they will make the money off transaction or allowing the product to be sold on their market place.

It would be great if investors could shed some light on what they think is so valuable about the company in which they are investing so much.

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