Is their site's theme a common, commercially available theme? It looks an awful lot like Envato's marketplace... Their site: http://site.introbiz.com/ Envato's: http://www.themeforest.com Edit: Looks like a ripoff: http://themeforest.net/forums/thread/envato-clone-with-a-mar...
Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
31–40 of 53 posts
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#32My amusing thought experiment is that two startups could easily give themselves billion dollar revenue as follows: 1. Startup A sells 2 twin puppies to startup B at $500M each. 2. Startup B sells 4 hand-drawn logos to startup A for $250M each. Each books $1B in revenue and each also books $1B in expenses so as to avoid tax.
From what I know (and I am not a finance professional), the hot-airiest phase of the dot.com bubble sort of looked like this. You had a ton of startups selling each other things and advertising with each other. It was not planned, but unplanned "emergent" bubbles are the most effective since nobody really realizes what's going on until the bubble is far enough along to keep rising out of greed and inertia. As for wha…
> From what I know (and I am not a finance professional), the hot-airiest phase of the dot.com bubble sort of looked like this. You had a ton of startups selling each other things and advertising with each other. It was not planned, but unplanned "emergent" bubbles are the most effective since nobody really realizes what's going on until the bubble is far enough along to keep rising out of greed and inertia.
Yup. Seattle Times had a detailed story on one of those: http://blogs.seattletimes.com/opinionnw/2014/03/27/naveen-ja... http://seattletimes.com/news/business/infospace/
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#33I am reminded of the efficient market hypothesis.
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#34Their site: http://site.introbiz.com Apparently they're selling the contact information of celebrities, investors, developers, politicians, etc. "At Black Book we provide contact information to world class artists. Upon purchase you will receive a file with the required information to be able to contact the artist." "The information usually includes email and phone numbers to the artist's talent agent, publicist, leg…
Sounds like it could be a bilateral (A/B) extortion game: celebrities pay to be delisted and hidden, and people pay to have access, and the extorter collects from both sides (and favors the "winner").
I'm surprised that some Valley wunderkind hasn't yet created what could be a profitable market (an evil one that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole) for illicit Yes/No auctions, e.g. someone makes some decision whether or not to do something horrible based on whether more "Yes" or "No" dollars get bid, and collects from both sides. Travis Kalanick should get on that. It's a libertarian wet dream.
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#35It's almost certainly a pump and dump operation or a target of opportunity by a pump and dump operation. Assuming it doesn't get delisted by the SEC first, it will continue for a few days and then suddenly lose 98%+ percent of that valuation in a matter of hours. Edit: Yep, see their financial statement. https://www.otciq.com/otciq/ajax/showFinancialReportById.pdf... It's even worse than you would otherwise think.
The total assets $39 bit is quality
I dabbled with pink sheets back in the late 90s. I had a little circle of friends online that I worked with to research the companies. We'd call up the companies and quiz their investor relations people, find everything we could on the backgrounds of the principals, and so on. That only goes so far though, and we narrowly dodged a bullet with a company that had like $140 in their checking account.
That whole world is so strange. It's kind of fun, in a way, but it's super risky.
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#36Is CYNK the new BitCoin? Inquiring minds want to know.
(I'm joking. It obviously is the new BitCoin, so maybe they'll crash and burn together.)
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#37It's almost certainly a pump and dump operation or a target of opportunity by a pump and dump operation. Assuming it doesn't get delisted by the SEC first, it will continue for a few days and then suddenly lose 98%+ percent of that valuation in a matter of hours. Edit: Yep, see their financial statement. https://www.otciq.com/otciq/ajax/showFinancialReportById.pdf... It's even worse than you would otherwise think.
I'm not knowledgeable when it comes to the stock market, but can't you short these guys and make lots of money?
I'm not the one who came up with this quote, but it's a good one: the market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent. If you short it, and it triples in a day, you get hit with margin calls (put more money in the account, or close out in a loss). Margin calls are terrible things to have happen to you. They typically mean, "you lose a lot of money making bad trades where you have no choice in the matter". The meltdown of 2008 was heavily powered by margin calls creating a cascading failure that, while it started in the mortgage-backed derivate market, spread into a much larger set of financial markets.
People went bankrupt shorting the NASDAQ at 3000 in the '90s. They were right, but it didn't matter. Margin calls are bad.
Then, there are the hard-to-borrow stocks (people know it's rotten, and it becomes expensive to short it) and various edge cases that are resolved based on relationships (i.e. out of your favor, unless you sucked the right dicks in MBA school) and while those relationship-oriented, obviously-inefficient corner cases almost never happen with decent liquid stocks (for which the Efficient Market Hypothesis is close to true, unless your timeframe is microseconds) they happen all the time with shitty penny stocks.
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#38My amusing thought experiment is that two startups could easily give themselves billion dollar revenue as follows: 1. Startup A sells 2 twin puppies to startup B at $500M each. 2. Startup B sells 4 hand-drawn logos to startup A for $250M each. Each books $1B in revenue and each also books $1B in expenses so as to avoid tax.
From what I know (and I am not a finance professional), the hot-airiest phase of the dot.com bubble sort of looked like this. You had a ton of startups selling each other things and advertising with each other. It was not planned, but unplanned "emergent" bubbles are the most effective since nobody really realizes what's going on until the bubble is far enough along to keep rising out of greed and inertia. As for wha…
In a word: automation. The promise of automation is that you can trade labor costs for capital costs. In other words, the promise of automation is plugging the "leak" of trickle-down economics. Now, we've got weird rich entrepreneurs spending their money on weird shit made by [computer programs commissioned by] other weird rich entrepreneurs (Yo), and poor laborers wondering where all the money and work is.
The answer, of course, is for all those laborers to start their own businesses selling stupid shit to rich people (Potato Salad.)
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#39Their site: http://site.introbiz.com Apparently they're selling the contact information of celebrities, investors, developers, politicians, etc. "At Black Book we provide contact information to world class artists. Upon purchase you will receive a file with the required information to be able to contact the artist." "The information usually includes email and phone numbers to the artist's talent agent, publicist, leg…
Sounds like it could be a bilateral (A/B) extortion game: celebrities pay to be delisted and hidden, and people pay to have access, and the extorter collects from both sides (and favors the "winner"). I'm surprised that some Valley wunderkind hasn't yet created what could be a profitable market (an evil one that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole) for illicit Yes/No auctions, e.g. someone makes some decision wheth…
I doubt it, they don't claim to sell you contact information for the artists themselves, just their publicist. Big deal.
The information usually includes email and phone numbers to the artist's talent agent, publicist, legal representative, etc.
Re: Company with zero revenue and one employee currently worth 3.8B
#40Their site: http://site.introbiz.com Apparently they're selling the contact information of celebrities, investors, developers, politicians, etc. "At Black Book we provide contact information to world class artists. Upon purchase you will receive a file with the required information to be able to contact the artist." "The information usually includes email and phone numbers to the artist's talent agent, publicist, leg…
Sounds like it could be a bilateral (A/B) extortion game: celebrities pay to be delisted and hidden, and people pay to have access, and the extorter collects from both sides (and favors the "winner"). I'm surprised that some Valley wunderkind hasn't yet created what could be a profitable market (an evil one that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole) for illicit Yes/No auctions, e.g. someone makes some decision wheth…
I had this idea in the 90s where I would setup a .ru domain claiming to nuke any part of the word for a high bid. Pay to destroy, pay to live.