These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria? from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?
You must not actually believe that the "technical perspective" is the only thing that drives value.
Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
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Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#22Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever used them as an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get relevant gifs, I got back some really bad results. I'll never fully understand why they're so successful short of just dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was astounding given the fact that giphy has millions up…
Do any of these services let you share your own gifs over slack?
Last time I tried: dragging in gifs (or mp4s or webps) resulted in an attachment, not an inline gif, giphy wanted money to upload your own gifs, and gfycat had some kind of slow and inconsistent review process so that your gifs don't show up in search (or in the slack plugin) for weeks to months after you upload them.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#23Congrats to giphy I guess? But I'll be honest, any time I've ever used them as an extension in slack or anywhere, and tried to get relevant gifs, I got back some really bad results. I'll never fully understand why they're so successful short of just dominating the market through sheer popularity. I remember switching our team over to rightgif and the difference was astounding given the fact that giphy has millions up…
They are very very quick at creating integrations with other services and as a result they were able to push their brand alongside the growth of gifs these past 5-8 years.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#24Damnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago since I didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned by startups in the past. Shows how much business sense I have!
If it makes you feel any better, "business sense" is nonsense in situations like that. No need to feel bad about buying the wrong lottery ticket.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#25I've been watching this a bit in other sectors, but I'm fascinated to see if there's a real uptick in "Vulture Buying" as the effects of the financial markets really settle in. This may have been something in the works for a while but you have to wonder as some companies that have likely weathered the storm well start on a spree of discount shopping.
Public markets are low down 15% now. It’s hardly a discount.
I've not been looking really there, most of my thoughts have been around the commercial real estate market and media entertainment private equity companies.
Giphy, could (total spitballing here) could be a company that was a bit overvalued in VC terms, and might not have consistent cash flows and solid fundamentals where an acquisition makes sense to take their money off the table now. There might be others.
Or this marriage has been in the works since December and just got pushed through now. Strange times.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#26Damnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago since I didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned by startups in the past. Shows how much business sense I have!
Statistically you were still right
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#27It’s a Trojan horse play. Giphy is used by all of FB’s competitors, including Tik Tok.
Scummy imo.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#28Per Crunchbase, they raised $150M total, with the last raise being $72M in 2016: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/giphy This might not have been a 10x acquisition. EDIT: The Information is saying the price was $300M + bonus, and a 50% drop from the valuation in 2016. https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/4fbc4a
Most likely because their operational costs are borderline obscene due to reliance on Google Cloud for their ML pipeline and moving all their metadata to dynamodb.
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#29Damnit, I turned down a follow-up interview with Giphy years ago since I didn't think they were sustainable and I had been burned by startups in the past. Shows how much business sense I have!
eh, it's silly to have those kinds of regrets. You can't predict the future, and you made a reasonable decision based on the information you had. I wrote this a few years back when thinking about what it means to regret something: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/science/time/
Re: Facebook to Buy Giphy for $400M
#30These kinds of acquisitions intrigue me. what is valuation crieteria?
from technical and innovation perspective, what part of it is worth millions?