aclements18

Agreed. Also there are typically legal repercussions for misrepresenting your business that are outlined in deal terms.

In this analogy you seem to believe the trajectory for this toddler is set in stone. The reality is at it's infancy (which is where Space X is in the grand scheme) it can look very promising but turn out very bad, or a competitor can drastically outpace. Any valuation should discount for the level of risk.

A lot can happen over time. 10 years ago MySpace was by far the dominant social network and Blackberry was the mobile powerhouse. Seemed like neither would fall with so much momentum behind them but we see how that played out.

For better or worse, the "someone" who will offer the bundle will likely be Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Their entire business model is based on bundling content to provide it at lower cost than an a la carte.

It's unlikely things will change for them just because they move away from a cable box to apps. In essence that is what they are already doing. Even today you need a cable subscription to access at least a third of the content on Apple TV.

First off Ryan, I think its a great platform. As a very frequent visitor to the site I would have to reiterate that it is frustrating that I can't really participate in the conversation where there is an aspect of the product that I would like to ask the founder more about. Hopefully you guys can create a way that doesn't result in spam, but feels a little more inclusive.

IMHO, a good way to do the comments would be to focus on Q&A with the founders (or someone affiliated with the product) address the question. As a visitor I would like to easily be able to see which questions have been answered instead of scrolling around to piece together the conversation.

Certainly looking forward to seeing what you have planned for PH.

Not to take anything away from this young man (and Maker Studios) success here, but I thought it might be a good time to point out how YouTube math works. If his channel generates $4 million in ad revenue, Google/YouTube keeps about 45% and issues a check to Maker for the remaining $2.2m. Maker then takes another 10-30%.

Still a substantial sum in the end, but I felt the title may potentially be misleading.

They didn't lose $645 million in spending, it was a one time recognition of the stock they already allocated.

They also got rid of the person leading that deal and the Twitter Music app that they shut down. They appear to be taking a new approach that goes beyond what is trending.

Well Twitter made about $665 million last year, with much larger projections for this year. I would say that qualifies as "decent".

It still costs money to acquire new users. It's easy to think when something becomes a household name there is no need to keep spending to bring new users on. As with most social sites the bigger the network is the harder it is for competitors to come in and steal their position. Pinterest user base is still "only" around 50 million. Thats 5% the size of Facebook.

Additionally the markets are not treating tech stocks so well right now, this might last another three months, and it might last a year and a half. What you know for sure is that you don't want to go out and try to raise money when the market is really down. You'll be terribly diluted if you're even able to raise money at all. They get what you can now, because they don't know how long it will be until the IPO.

These are only a couple of the considerations, if they are planning an IPO very soon then there's a completely different motivation. Hope this helps.

You also basically described the movie The Game (with Michael Douglas). If you haven't seen it I suggest you check it out.

I always thought this was a cool idea. I'd imagine this couldn't effectively be done for less than a couple hundred thousand considering the number of people who would have to be working on this full time.

Amazon 2012: $61B revenues and $39M loss.

To say, net income may not be the best indicator of success for high growth tech companies. They reinvest every dollar to continue to spur growth.

This is a solid venture backed company that has been generating quite a bit of revenue for some time now. This exit will provide its investors with a solid return. Odd how little attention a company like this gets from the tech community.

Bernie Brenner, the guy who heads up their business development, wrote The Sumo Advantage which one of the best books I've read on BD. He very clearly identifies the role of BD and how it is distinctly different than sales. I'd recommend it for any startup looking to partner with large established businesses to spur growth.

I would actually argue that there are more top tier Stanford CS grads than there are startups with Snapchat's engagement numbers. The value of the student should be discounted more than the value of snapchat from a competition standpoint.

In either case the point was to illustrate that, all risks considered, snapchat is still worth a lot of money. I have yet to see anyone (HN commenters, tech press) argue about what their valuation should be, which seems like the reasonable follow up to "It should not be $3 billion".

We can agree that its not zero, then what basis can we use to agree that $3 billion is inaccurate?