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0/1 resolved calls right
1 scored · avg 0
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companies · 29 data points
A major private tech company like Facebook or Twitter will stumble and see its stock trade at half its private market value within the next 12 months.
What happened: Neither Facebook (Meta) nor Twitter experienced a collapse to roughly half of their pre‑IPO private valuations; both companies remained publicly traded and performed well rather than stumbling.
Verify at source ↗I don't think on the revenue side it is. I mean I don't Yes, there is certainly already been talk about how they're going to put advertisements there and you know maybe there is a species of human beings somewhere on the planet that doesn't mind having huge advertisements blasted at the home screen of their um smartphone, but it's certainly nobody I know.
I think it's going to be sideways and sideways meaning very volatile up and down as people get excited about different things. To me, the big issue is is they went public very late. They were a very mature company. They already had a 50% operating margin. Their revenue growth was starting to decelerate rapidly and they were making this big transition from desktop to mobile. Normally when a when that starts to happen, a stock that has been a momentum stock that has done nothing but go through the
there's always a chance that they pull a rabbit out of a hat, some huge new product that they roll out to a billion people and the stock goes to the moon, but I I think more likely. We're just in this long-term consolidation period.
they're trading at about 45 times earnings. You look at Google is about 17. Apple is at about 10. They're just valued incredibly highly relative to a lot of other mature companies.
To me, the big issue is is they went public very late. They were a very mature company. They already had a 50% operating margin. Their revenue growth was starting to decelerate rapidly and they were making this big transition from desktop to mobile.
the most impressive attribute that he has a lot of people have vision a lot of people have great ideas a lot of people are incredibly smart very few people have as long-term a commitment and vision as he does and he had it right from the beginning and another thing that he does that is so helpful for companies is he will take a huge amount of flak over the near term and he will have his stock price beat up and he will have people talk about how the company can't make money and all these other th
they're perfectly within their rights to do it I think based you know the next thing can they build a real business out of it certainly anecdotally it seems like it's working well but again as I said before there there's still only a slice of the of the market and the brand is completely Mass market and yet people try it they don't know what to do with it they drop it and Twitter's got to solve that problem
the key next challenge for Twitter is finding a way to really become a mainstream technology and part of that is you be finding ways to radically simplify the service the fact that you have to figure it out figure out who to follow and there's still all these inside jokes and things like that it's it is a addictive but it's addictive for a very very information intensive consumer and most just aren't
I think first it's it's always amusing to me to listen to people say a company is completely screwed because their service goes down because the demand is so great for it that they can't keep up with it high class problem exactly it happened to AOL late 90s it happened to eBay I mean obviously some companies get killed Myspace got killed because they could or friender really got killed because they couldn't they couldn't manage it but temporary outages companies can deal with that and it's a sig
that's why Google has gotten so aggressive about keeping people
why is Google not doing the same thing I that's hard to say at this point they have not been incredibly aggressive about buying other companies except when those companies are about to be bought by somebody else so wait to see maybe Facebook or maybe Microsoft is suddenly about to swallow LinkedIn suddenly Google may get interested
they have not stumbled on a revenue model like Google that it turned out to be the best advertising mechanism in the history of the world
I think on Google Google was priced perfectly and there was a a small first a discount wasn't huge traded up and then it was Google that delivered quarter after quarter of just astonishing performance
Google um did the auction seemed to be right pricing right it didn't do an amazing pop the first day it went up a little bit
look at the hottest company on Earth Apple is trading at about 15 to 16 times trailing
well look at Amazon Amazon was losing money in the early years all these idiots said they're going to go out of business it's just a book they can't make money turned out all those people were totally wrong I I completely agree with that but there's one huge difference here which is that Groupon is going out at a $25 billion valuation Amazon went out at a $500 million valuation
the reason there was such a big pop in LinkedIn was that they only sold a very few shares ... I have a huge problem with that argument I just think it's completely wrong
if you're at LinkedIn and you're trying to hire some key folks and your stocks trading in the 80s and you're granting them options at that price
so wait to see maybe Facebook or maybe Microsoft is suddenly about to swallow LinkedIn suddenly Google may get interested
I think the stock can trade at 75 80 it should price at about 60 it definitely has to be a discount
LinkedIn left an awful lot of money on the table if if the stock had been priced correctly or closer to correctly in my opinion it would have been priced at $60 a share
I think that the underwriters actually blew the pricing I think they drastically underpriced it
I certainly would feel uncomfortable paying where the stock is trading now and I'm surprised that people are very risky at this level but again not inconceivable that it can be worth that
I wouldn't have touched the stock the first few days it was an extreme valuation but there are scenarios that could support that valuation
I think the anybody who actually looks at LinkedIn and tries figure out what the company's worth is faced with the problem which is how big is it going to get over the next 5 to 10 years and that's always very hard to tell
I don't mean to suggest that LinkedIn wasn't overpriced when it traded on the first day I think it obviously was
Groupon is going out at a $25 billion valuation Amazon went out at a $500 million valuation let's say they both have huge opportunities you can say you know Groupon hits the ball out of the park you understand how far out of the park they've got to hit it for you to have an amazing return starting from 25 billion versus Amazon hitting it out of the park starting from 500 I mean it's it's like hitting a 500 yard touchdown I mean that's right the goal posts have been moved very very far so the ups
I think that particular argument is preposterous this company is is less than three years old how could they have any idea what the lifetime value of a customer is in their mature markets it in fact looks like people are purchasing less who started early it's just way way way too early to say look at us before marketing expenses especially given how gigantic those marketing expenses are and also given how they're going up as they try to penetrate deeper and deeper and as they now have more and m
I I think it's both in the case of Groupon they're going to raise some money but they're also a lot of selling shareholders you've got the companies that have gone public now LinkedIn and Groupon going public at a much more mature stage than companies did in the 1990s so although people are instinctively appalled by the idea that Founders are selling on the IPO these are very mature companies even though in the case of Groupon they're very young so it's not strange that Founders would take some