Absolutely. I was being at least partly sarcastic here ;) The funny thing about bit.ly is that they take this model to the next level - they are actually build

Absolutely. I was being at least partly sarcastic here ;) The funny thing about bit.ly is that they take this model to the next level - they are actually building to be bought by a specific company which has yet to make any income itself. On the other hand, bit.ly's investors have a lot of pull in Twitter, so it's a unique situation. I don't know enough about VC investments to tell, but the situation where investors in X create Y in order for it to be bought by X - obviously with some profit - is pretty interesting.