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SlideShare acquired by LinkedIn
- aditya 14y agoWow. 3MM raised, 119MM exit. 40x return, and they made that 3MM last 4 years from 2008-2012 with revenue. Congratulations!
- byrneseyeview 14y ago40x refers to the return to the investors. If investors own e.g. 30% (I am making this number up and have no knowledge of the situation), their return is ~12x.
- diego 14y agoIt's probably more like a 10x to 15x return, unless investors owned 100% of the company :)
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThe good news is that since the employees owned some we can be sure that they saw some of that 119M$. That being said their site died :-) [1] Random note: It seems to me that that KK would be the appropriate unit for millions (thousand-thousands) and MM would be Million Millions or (10^12, or trillions.
- sjtgraham 14y agoMille, i.e. Latin for a thousand. Thus MM = 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000. I rarely see MM used to denote a million outside the financial world. I have never seen a job, for example listing remuneration as "circa 120M" meaning 120,000
- brudgers 14y agoIf you do the math, very few employees will retire. FU money @ $7 million requires about 6% ownership. And that's assuming their wasn't a high multiple liquidation preference for any of the investors. [Investors here: http://www.slideshare.net/about/investors http://www.slideshare.net/about/investors] That's not to say a couple of hundred thousand dollars for being an employee isn't bad. But the chef isn't going to become a millionaire.
- gordonbowman 14y agoKeep in mind the upside of LNKD stock. Still probably not enough to retire for most but the upside is substantial.
- fennecfoxen 14y agoThe upside potential of LNKD? Depends who you ask. http://caps.fool.com/Ticker/LNKD.aspx http://caps.fool.com/Ticker/LNKD.aspx 856 'Underperform' to 196 'Outperform'? Sounds like somebody is bearish! (disclaimer: as i'm sure is quite obvious the Motley Fool community KNOWS EVERYTHING and is NEVER WRONG. coughcough)
- nikcub 14y agothis would have cleared any liquidity hurdles, easily. it is a kick-ass outcome for the founders. the investors probably got 10x over 4 years.
- wtvanhest 14y agoI don't know about you, but if I made $500,000 on a company sale then got another job, that $500,000 would go a long way in helping me save for retirement or cut down bills. There is absolutely nothing wrong with shooting for a massive exit, but I don't think it is reasonable to hate on a multimillion dollar exit.
- gordonbowman 14y agoA big pay day for Venrock. They were the only institutional investor on the deal. Roughly 15x return on their $2.7mm in.
- nikcub 14y agoeither the founders accepted a really shitty investment offer or you don't know how to calculate returns
- paraschopra 14y agoWhat's your source of 3MM revenue for 2008-2012?
- gsharma 14y ago3M is not the revenue, how much they raised in total. His point is that they lasted 4 years with just raising 3M (+ whatever revenue they generated)
- rhizome 14y agoDoes LinkedIn own a Webex yet? If they're going from a recruiting site to a full business-communications type model (archiving, in this case) they're going to need it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mynegation 14y agoWebex is owned by Cisco for a long time already I did not hear anything about their intentions to sell.
- rhizome 14y ago"A" Webex, as in a service similar to what they do.
- dm8 14y agoCongrats to team SlideShare. Good product! Wondering whats the goal of LinkedIn for this acquisition? It is not a people acquisition. And SlideShare is already integrated with LinkedIn's platform. So I'm curious!
- oacgnol 14y agoIt seems like a strategic acquisition. LinkedIn looks poised to be expanding more into business operations/communications, especially given their previous acquisition of CardMunch. I can definitely see them trying to position themselves as an indispensable communication tool for industry and business professionals.
- tylerrooney 14y agoI don't know what the cash/stock split was, but it's worth mentioning the LinkedIn's IPO raised $352M* so buying SlideShare was just under 34% of all the money they raised. * http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/linkedin-raises-352-8-million-in-ipo-as-shares-priced-at-top-end-of-range.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/linkedin-raises-352...
- jayp 14y ago45% cash, 55% stock according to LinkedIn press release: http://press.linkedin.com/node/1191 http://press.linkedin.com/node/1191
- ajross 14y agoLinkedin has revenue though, they're not just burning cash. Wikipedia tells me they grossed $243M last year, so a purchase like this doesn't sound unreasonable.
- justincormack 14y agoThey would never have paid that much of their cash. As others have mentioned they have much more cash than that, plus some was shares.
- trequartista 14y agoCongratulations to the Slideshare team. Very inspiring to all the women and minority entrepreneurs (and to everybody else of course)
- adeelv 14y agoThis is incredibly good news - no not because it's another acquisition but rather it is an acquisition of a quality and worthwhile business that has a defined set of competitive advantages to sustain itself in the long-term. Love it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- debacle 14y agoI just looked at LinkedIn's P/E. It's almost a thousand. How is anyone valuating the company in such a way that could even assume they would increase their revenues 50 times over in the next few years?
- earl 14y agoLinkedIn is the world's premier social network for professionals. I'd imagine there's a lot of ways to make money off that besides their current scheme of basically charging recruiters a ton of money. Just to throw wild ideas out: build more tools for recruiters. Own the whole software stack that runs the recruiting pipeline (coincidentally, jobvite is a piece of shit.) Create classes and certification programs that help replace college degrees. Cross company calendaring integrated with my gcal and work calendar (eg I want to have drinks with friends, and I want all my calendars to sync. I don't want my work cal to necessarily say that I'm having drinks or with whom, but I want the time to be unavailable.) Steal the job search market from indeed and simply hired. Do meetups tailored to professional activities like user groups. Do message boards and mailing lists for professional groups that don't suck (unlike their current offering.)
- paul 14y agoWhy would someone assume that revenue needs to increase 50x? Perhaps you're assuming fixed margins (which are currently close to zero). If they doubled their revenue without increasing expenses, they would have a P/E closer to 20.
- jcampbell1 14y agoP/E is market cap divided by profits. Your comment about increasing revenues by 50x is non-sensical. Consider a company with $100M in revenue, $1M in profit, and a market cap of $1B. PE is 1000. Now say this company has a shot at doubling revenue in the next few years without incurring additional cost. They will then have $200M in revenue, $101M in profit, and the PE will be 10. Just looking at P/E in isolation is like judging a programmer by how fast they can type. You need to take a broader approach to reading financials and understanding the underlying business. I haven't followed LinkedIn close enough to have an opinion on the current valuation. You may be right that it is overvalued, but the PE ratio isn't a very good indicator in isolation of expected future earnings.
- prayag 14y agoOne of the stars of the New Delhi start-up circuit! Kudos to the team.
- blahbap 14y agoThis makes total sense to me - slides and enterprise are like bread and butter