I'm not sure he's missing the point - more that he's disagreeing with it. There's clearly a few high profile examples of companies with massive user bases who

I'm not sure he's missing the point - more that he's disagreeing with it. There's clearly a few high profile examples of companies with massive user bases who have either found a genuine way to monetise their users, or at least sold/floated their companies in a way that's been massively profitable for the initial investors. But it doesn't automatically follow that it's always going to be easy to monetise them. There's always only ever going to be a handful of social sites that manage to attract huge numbers of users, and even some of those fall flat on their faces when it comes to making real revenue. Even Facebook is struggling to find a way to get actual ongoing profits out of their users, and the longer it takes them to figure out how to do this, the more nervous investors are going to be about big IPAs for future social media companies. Working on the assumption that "because site X has managed to monitise their user base, we will automatically be able to" sounds like the kind of baseless assumption that led to the first dot com crash.