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There are far more Pointcasts than there are Facebooks.
by okaramian 16y ago
There are far more Pointcasts than there are Facebooks.
- qq66 16y agoBut the existence of Facebooks depends on at least some founders believing that they're Facebooks, not Pointcasts.
- chunkbot 16y agoIs that true? How would you know?
- j_baker 16y agoWhat's your point? How many Pointcasts there are and how many Facebooks there are is irrelevant. All that matters is whether groupon is a Facebook or Pointcast.
- okaramian 16y agoOr somewhere in between, but what really matters is who ends up making money in the transaction. If there are more Pointcasts than Facebooks that would infer that it would be statistically more probable for this company to be overvalued than undervalued. Pointing to outliers and using those as examples of good decisions doesn't seem very wise. Sometimes you get lucky and hit it big, that's how the game works. Sometimes that risk bites you down the road, a la Pointcast.
- j_baker 16y ago"Pointing to outliers and using those as examples of good decisions doesn't seem very wise." It's wise if you are an outlier. And Groupon seems to be an outlier to me.
- chunkbot 16y agoThe implication is that it is far more likely that Groupon is a "Pointcast" than a "Facebook". But the statement that there are "far more Pointcasts than there are Facebooks" is impossible to falsify.
- pg 16y agoI don't think that's true, if you control for time. Can you think of other examples of startups that turned down acquisition offers in or around 2006 and are now regretting it?
- staunch 16y ago1) Digg turned down an acquisition and regrets it. That was probably around 2006. 2) I'm pretty sure LinkedIn could have sold for a mighty sum in 2006. My guess is they're pretty nervous that Facebook will subsume them. They might wish they had sold back then for $1 billion or whatever. 3) Very speculative: Xobni, but that was 2008. 4) Technorati may have turned down an offer in late 2005 that they would definitely take today. I'm not sure these prove anything, I just had fun trying to think of them.
- pg 16y agoI don't know of any offers LinkedIn or Technorati turned down, and I know Xobni doesn't regret turning down early offers. I agree Digg got an offer they probably regret not taking.