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This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the im

This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing. The real problem is: these companies start to operate from the perspective of "having" those millions of dollars. This is why they hire too many people for too much money. They spent hundreds of thousands on marketing. But in the end, you know what? They need to beg for money to pay their debts. They need to lay off dozens of employees because they don't have the money to pay them. What if SoundCloud would have kept a small, yet highly skilled engineering team of maybe ~20 people, some marketing and sales, and try to not outgrow themselves? Probably they'd be having a huge surplus each year because their costs would be small and sustained. When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank.

manmal 9y ago
Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of <10% per year. At that rate, my money is safer in the bank or some kind of low risk portfolio. If you have an 80% chance of losing the money, then you better expect at least a x5 return rate when selling your shares. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need investors, period. Of course you could say - well, just don't make a product that nobody pays for; but obviously there is a market for such products, on the investor side.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Staying small != don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity. Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook. Human captial spent is actually the most expensive even comparing space rental if you add up salary, bonus, and benefits. I also will not recommend startups in their early stage (or even until they can break-even for a long time) to flu candidates over. There is really no reason to fly people over until you want to hire that person. Flying and hotel adds up big time too. Google can offer this because spending a couple millions doesn't matter to them.
  - elmar 9y ago
    > But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook. A much better example is WhatsUp with 55 employees at the time of aquisition.
    - GarethX 9y ago
      Or Instagram - they had 13 employees when they were acquired.
      - elmar 9y ago
        Yes, but you could argue that WhatsUp is even more impressive because it can be considered much latter stage and aquisition value also reflects that being 19x more than Instagram.
        the-dude 9y ago
        Where do I sign up for WhatsUp ? Sounds cools.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        brandizzi 9y ago
        I guess they mean WhatsApp (http://whatsapp.com/ http://whatsapp.com/). Not sure you're going to get a lot of fun with it if it is not widely used around you but it is a behemoth in many countries.
  - vertex-four 9y ago
    The issue is that the investment market seems to be partially built on selling the idea that you're doing something so new and different that you need all these fancy architectures and hundreds of developers. If you don't sell that idea, you're just another CRUD company so why should anyone invest?
- kristopolous 9y ago
  The x5 return takes partial responsibility for the 80% failure. These foolish business pivots trashes the brand. If there's only one high-return idea in the room and it's clearly hazardous and unlikely to work - there should be no obligation to take it; an investor didn't drop millions to be squandered foolishly.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    VC is an entertainment industry. It's about the drama and the excitement. The entire industry is an RPG played with real people and real money. Sometimes returns happen, but in many cases they seem to as much by accident as careful design.
    - manmal 9y ago
      At those insane risk rates (at least for early rounds), it better be as exciting as going to a casino. Nobody in their right mind would provide seed funding with anything but gambling in mind. [Except for those who want to change the world by supporting an idea, of course.]
- shadowmint 9y ago
  The irony is that the maths stays the same for a more modest 1.2x if you can get 80% of your investments to pay off. ...but when you have an 80% loss rate, you have to play the game more than a hundred times to reliably make your money back. ...but I doubt you're investing in hundreds of companies; which means, you're probably walking away with nothing. Remeber, those numbers only work at scale; in small numbers 80% failure for 5x return = you get nothing. Just like the soundcloud investors will.
- psyc 9y ago
  Having a reason to do a foolish thing doesn't make it reasonable, especially when the reason is also foolish.
thinbeige 9y ago
> Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? This reminds me of the current ICOs and the token economy. Early adopters try to push new currencies like crazy to cash out once popularity peaks. SoundCloud was never thought as a real business. Everybody involved in the music industry should have known that it's not possible to build a solid business based on the oligopoly of three music labels and with Spotify having a headstart of 50m users and being still not profitable. But still all these VCs with USV leading the way told us it's the next billion dollar unicorn. Old-school pump and dump.
- rrdharan 9y ago
  Traditionally pump and dump meant taking advantage of unsophisticated retail investors. I don't think this qualifies as pump and dump unless you mean the earlier stage VCs somehow managed to cash out at the expense of some later naive shareholders? In this case sounds like everyone (except maybe Ljung) lost out..
  - thinbeige 9y ago
    Technically you are right. Still it's a long-term pump and dump game. VCs praise their investments to the utmost (which is their job and because their believe in their investments) but mainly to attract more investors (pump) and at some point to find potential buyers (dump) where you can exchange retail investors with dumb corporations.
    - pas 9y ago
      Intent matters. If they promote it, and honestly believe in it, and want to cash out at an IPO, then it's just good old investing. You don't have to think it's the best thing ever. Or that it'll surely work. But you can still think that it's a pretty decent investment, high risk, high expected payout.
      - gcb0 9y ago
        not really. they will have to prove they could see a profitable exit. which in this case is dubious since there were other companies doing what they promoted years ahead of them and all had the same outcome. I could try to sell you a magic goose and I can really believe it will lay golden eggs any time now. interested? I even have ten of them myself!
elmar 9y ago
personally I think if they had focus on monetizing the artists side of the business and keep it small as you say they could have a great business not at the scale of Spotify but sustainable.
Myrmornis 9y ago
No, it shows us that our economies make it very hard to maintain a valuable and beautiful cultural/artistic ecosystem as a commercial entity.
- WJW 9y ago
  I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes. (almost by definition) So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days. I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though...
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
    - WJW 9y ago
      I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users. I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.
jopie 9y ago
How does this compare to Spotify which has 3000+ employees, debt financing of over a billion dollars, and an insane valuation? What does the future hold for that company whether it IPOs or not?
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  Good grief, what the heck does Spotify do with 3000+ employees?
  - fs111 9y ago
    burn money?
  - Kurtz79 9y ago
    Definitely NOT making a mobile app with decent UI. Jokes aside, having to negotiate with tons of artists and their labels/managers, I imagine their legal/business department is significantly bigger than that of most tech startups.
    - bogomipz 9y ago
      They negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly. The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway: https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-still-holding-out-on-streaming/ https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-sti... Using Pink Floyd as an example, the decision was there's and not their record label EMI: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-arrives-on-spotify-20130617 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-ar...
  - glogla 9y ago
    Last time I checked, Spotify had 70 million users. That's one employee per 23333 users. Is that too much? How many thousands users should you have per employee? Because if they want to have support at all (unlike, say, Google), they need quite a few employees.
logicallee 9y ago
>Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing. I was curious if this was true, so I asked a genie to see if you (as a bootstrapped founder) would trade $20 to own SoundCloud. Well it turns out the genie ran the experiment and concluded that not only is it worth $20 to you, but way more - in the genie's experiment you'd actually trade both $20k and even $200k for SoundCloud! So I looked at your comment in which you say SoundCloud is worth "nothing" to you, like a bad black and white photocopy of a hundred dollar bill, and the truth is you value it at hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Logarithmically, your valuation (10^5.3, which is all the genie tested up to but for sure you accept) is closer to a billion (10^9) than your stated valuation (10^0 - 1). So after reading your analysis the billion dollar valuation seems more reasonable than the analysis you offered. (Of course, that does not make it reasonable.) /s On a serious note: what I mean is that the next time you make an argument about valuations being "ridiculous", don't be "ridiculous." EDIT: received several downvotes but I am keeping this. $0 is not reasonable.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank. When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank. Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade. For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. That means any competitor that chooses to grow quickly will trounce one that moves slowly.
- codegladiator 9y ago
  > For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. Making up your own definition of startup ? A start-up is just a newly established business.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Actually, I'm using http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html That's like calling a newly established barber shop a startup. It's not. The GP is working on a podcast hosting company. The market for people who want to host podcasts is miniscule. Large enough to sustain a company, sure. But that's not a startup.
    - dkersten 9y ago
      While I personally buy into that definition too, it IS very much a valley centric definition that much of the rest of the world doesn't follow. At least, not to the letter. So be aware that you may be speaking to people outside of your bubble when throwing around black or white definitions like this, because they may have their own differing definitions. Besides, there have been multiple "podcast startups" (by the valley-definition of startup) in the past.
cJ0th 9y ago
> This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. It's more like company valuations are the best approximation possible. Of course the value can turn out to be way off.
wvh 9y ago
I mostly agree with the grandiose self-delusion of modern valuations, but I guess it also depends on what kind of service you're providing. If there's a social element, i.e. you share things with others, "community", you might lose to faster moving companies who take your audience; and if there's an ecosystem involved, you might not reach the critical mass to sustain it. Perhaps you're not in a critical mass sort of industry?
jamesrcole 9y ago
> This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. A single case never proves any generalisation. (I'm not taking any position here on what such valuations mean in general - it's not something I know much about).
- overcast 9y ago
  Ok, I'll give you essentially all of the 2001 dotcom crash companies. Is that enough examples?
  - jamesrcole 9y ago
    Did you read what I wrote?

manmal 9y ago

Once you have investors, they want their money to grow, and this is not possible by staying small. We have invested in a startup we work with, and given the high risk of failure, I would not be happy with a meager growth rate of <10% per year. At that rate, my money is safer in the bank or some kind of low risk portfolio. If you have an 80% chance of losing the money, then you better expect at least a x5 return rate when selling your shares. I'm a big fan of bootstrapping myself, and it's the best model IFF you can get by without investors. If you, like SoundCloud, have a product that does not break-even, then you will need investors, period. Of course you could say - well, just don't make a product that nobody pays for; but obviously there is a market for such products, on the investor side.

yeukhon 9y ago
Staying small != don't grow business. I would never hire crazy so people in the startup can imagine spinning up new projects new microservice new crazy revolutionary database/big data/ new KV store/new cache layer out of curiosity. Till one point, when the business is so big, growing engineering team to over 100 is inevitable. But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook. Human captial spent is actually the most expensive even comparing space rental if you add up salary, bonus, and benefits. I also will not recommend startups in their early stage (or even until they can break-even for a long time) to flu candidates over. There is really no reason to fly people over until you want to hire that person. Flying and hotel adds up big time too. Google can offer this because spending a couple millions doesn't matter to them.
- elmar 9y ago
  > But plently of really successful tech companies did not overgrow their team size for a number of years. E.g Facebook. A much better example is WhatsUp with 55 employees at the time of aquisition.
  - GarethX 9y ago
    Or Instagram - they had 13 employees when they were acquired.
    - elmar 9y ago
      Yes, but you could argue that WhatsUp is even more impressive because it can be considered much latter stage and aquisition value also reflects that being 19x more than Instagram.
      - the-dude 9y ago
        Where do I sign up for WhatsUp ? Sounds cools.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        brandizzi 9y ago
        I guess they mean WhatsApp (http://whatsapp.com/ http://whatsapp.com/). Not sure you're going to get a lot of fun with it if it is not widely used around you but it is a behemoth in many countries.
- vertex-four 9y ago
  The issue is that the investment market seems to be partially built on selling the idea that you're doing something so new and different that you need all these fancy architectures and hundreds of developers. If you don't sell that idea, you're just another CRUD company so why should anyone invest?
kristopolous 9y ago
The x5 return takes partial responsibility for the 80% failure. These foolish business pivots trashes the brand. If there's only one high-return idea in the room and it's clearly hazardous and unlikely to work - there should be no obligation to take it; an investor didn't drop millions to be squandered foolishly.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  VC is an entertainment industry. It's about the drama and the excitement. The entire industry is an RPG played with real people and real money. Sometimes returns happen, but in many cases they seem to as much by accident as careful design.
  - manmal 9y ago
    At those insane risk rates (at least for early rounds), it better be as exciting as going to a casino. Nobody in their right mind would provide seed funding with anything but gambling in mind. [Except for those who want to change the world by supporting an idea, of course.]
shadowmint 9y ago
The irony is that the maths stays the same for a more modest 1.2x if you can get 80% of your investments to pay off. ...but when you have an 80% loss rate, you have to play the game more than a hundred times to reliably make your money back. ...but I doubt you're investing in hundreds of companies; which means, you're probably walking away with nothing. Remeber, those numbers only work at scale; in small numbers 80% failure for 5x return = you get nothing. Just like the soundcloud investors will.
psyc 9y ago
Having a reason to do a foolish thing doesn't make it reasonable, especially when the reason is also foolish.

thinbeige 9y ago

> Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? This reminds me of the current ICOs and the token economy. Early adopters try to push new currencies like crazy to cash out once popularity peaks. SoundCloud was never thought as a real business. Everybody involved in the music industry should have known that it's not possible to build a solid business based on the oligopoly of three music labels and with Spotify having a headstart of 50m users and being still not profitable. But still all these VCs with USV leading the way told us it's the next billion dollar unicorn. Old-school pump and dump.

rrdharan 9y ago
Traditionally pump and dump meant taking advantage of unsophisticated retail investors. I don't think this qualifies as pump and dump unless you mean the earlier stage VCs somehow managed to cash out at the expense of some later naive shareholders? In this case sounds like everyone (except maybe Ljung) lost out..
- thinbeige 9y ago
  Technically you are right. Still it's a long-term pump and dump game. VCs praise their investments to the utmost (which is their job and because their believe in their investments) but mainly to attract more investors (pump) and at some point to find potential buyers (dump) where you can exchange retail investors with dumb corporations.
  - pas 9y ago
    Intent matters. If they promote it, and honestly believe in it, and want to cash out at an IPO, then it's just good old investing. You don't have to think it's the best thing ever. Or that it'll surely work. But you can still think that it's a pretty decent investment, high risk, high expected payout.
    - gcb0 9y ago
      not really. they will have to prove they could see a profitable exit. which in this case is dubious since there were other companies doing what they promoted years ahead of them and all had the same outcome. I could try to sell you a magic goose and I can really believe it will lay golden eggs any time now. interested? I even have ten of them myself!

elmar 9y ago

personally I think if they had focus on monetizing the artists side of the business and keep it small as you say they could have a great business not at the scale of Spotify but sustainable.

Myrmornis 9y ago

No, it shows us that our economies make it very hard to maintain a valuable and beautiful cultural/artistic ecosystem as a commercial entity.

WJW 9y ago
I feel it is also a culture thing: Some artistic subcommunities seem to revel in the image of the 'starving artist' and making a lot of money is often regarded as 'selling out'. Certainly anything liked by the mainstream immediately loses its appeal for the groups that like to think the have exquisite tastes. (almost by definition) So, websites like soundcloud find themselves in a bind: on one hand they can't start making lots of money because they would lose their artistic street cred, on the other hand their servers and bandwidth cost money. Blaming this lack of money for artistic on the economy seems a little bit off, this has basically been the case since Roman days. I feel sites like github have a nice middle ground, charging a little bit to professional users while offering the service for free to open source users. It doesn't lead to billion dollar valuations quite as fast as an advertising model though...
- Myrmornis 9y ago
  I agree, GitHub is a nice comparison, and has been transformative in promoting a hobbyist's ecosystem while also being a viable commercial entity. However, I think you are being a bit unfair and leaning towards characterizing the artists as valuing obscurity and non-mainstreamness per se. The point about SoundCloud is that it provided access to the people making music from their bedrooms, the hobbyists of github. Arty music types were attracted to the platform not (only) out of a pretentious desire to avoid the mainstream but because many, most even, of our culture's musical gems are surely to be found in the long tail of not-(yet) commercial music.
  - WJW 9y ago
    I think you are right about the musical value in the long tail, but what I was driving at was that the monetary value is concentrated in the 'top', in a power law fashion. Since soundcloud has to pay for its employees and servers it needs money, but most of the ways of actually getting that money will chase away users. I think a self-hosted soundcloud where people host their own music but use the network for discoverability might be one of the few use cases where decentralization actually makes a lot of sense, because since the users are not (mainly) in it for the money the economies of scale from centralization don't matter as much.

jopie 9y ago

How does this compare to Spotify which has 3000+ employees, debt financing of over a billion dollars, and an insane valuation? What does the future hold for that company whether it IPOs or not?

DigitalJack 9y ago
Good grief, what the heck does Spotify do with 3000+ employees?
- fs111 9y ago
  burn money?
- Kurtz79 9y ago
  Definitely NOT making a mobile app with decent UI. Jokes aside, having to negotiate with tons of artists and their labels/managers, I imagine their legal/business department is significantly bigger than that of most tech startups.
  - bogomipz 9y ago
    They negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly. The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway: https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-still-holding-out-on-streaming/ https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-sti... Using Pink Floyd as an example, the decision was there's and not their record label EMI: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-arrives-on-spotify-20130617 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-ar...
- glogla 9y ago
  Last time I checked, Spotify had 70 million users. That's one employee per 23333 users. Is that too much? How many thousands users should you have per employee? Because if they want to have support at all (unlike, say, Google), they need quite a few employees.

logicallee 9y ago

>Is SoundCloud worth a billion dollars? Well, it might be on paper or in the imaginations of the founders, but what does it really mean? To me, it's worth nothing. I was curious if this was true, so I asked a genie to see if you (as a bootstrapped founder) would trade $20 to own SoundCloud. Well it turns out the genie ran the experiment and concluded that not only is it worth $20 to you, but way more - in the genie's experiment you'd actually trade both $20k and even $200k for SoundCloud! So I looked at your comment in which you say SoundCloud is worth "nothing" to you, like a bad black and white photocopy of a hundred dollar bill, and the truth is you value it at hundreds of thousands of dollars more. Logarithmically, your valuation (10^5.3, which is all the genie tested up to but for sure you accept) is closer to a billion (10^9) than your stated valuation (10^0 - 1). So after reading your analysis the billion dollar valuation seems more reasonable than the analysis you offered. (Of course, that does not make it reasonable.) /s On a serious note: what I mean is that the next time you make an argument about valuations being "ridiculous", don't be "ridiculous." EDIT: received several downvotes but I am keeping this. $0 is not reasonable.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank. When I read stories like these, I actually feel good about my bootstrapped, down-to-earth startup. We don't make millions, we don't "disrupt" the industry, yet we solve our customers' problems and delight them. We won't ever run out of money, as we carefully check each and every expenditure, and have growing savings in the bank. Then it's not a startup. A startup is designed to grow quickly. Everything we associate with startups stems from the fact that the successful ones do make millions within a decade. For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. That means any competitor that chooses to grow quickly will trounce one that moves slowly.

codegladiator 9y ago
> For it to be a startup, you have to have a large target market. Making up your own definition of startup ? A start-up is just a newly established business.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Actually, I'm using http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html That's like calling a newly established barber shop a startup. It's not. The GP is working on a podcast hosting company. The market for people who want to host podcasts is miniscule. Large enough to sustain a company, sure. But that's not a startup.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    While I personally buy into that definition too, it IS very much a valley centric definition that much of the rest of the world doesn't follow. At least, not to the letter. So be aware that you may be speaking to people outside of your bubble when throwing around black or white definitions like this, because they may have their own differing definitions. Besides, there have been multiple "podcast startups" (by the valley-definition of startup) in the past.

cJ0th 9y ago

> This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. It's more like company valuations are the best approximation possible. Of course the value can turn out to be way off.

wvh 9y ago

I mostly agree with the grandiose self-delusion of modern valuations, but I guess it also depends on what kind of service you're providing. If there's a social element, i.e. you share things with others, "community", you might lose to faster moving companies who take your audience; and if there's an ecosystem involved, you might not reach the critical mass to sustain it. Perhaps you're not in a critical mass sort of industry?

jamesrcole 9y ago

> This shows us, that company valuations are ridiculous and actually mean nothing. A single case never proves any generalisation. (I'm not taking any position here on what such valuations mean in general - it's not something I know much about).

overcast 9y ago
Ok, I'll give you essentially all of the 2001 dotcom crash companies. Is that enough examples?
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  Did you read what I wrote?