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A comment on Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round. Parent comment

Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by mdorazio on Thursday May 26, 2016 @03:57PM (#11780980)
I don't remember that. People thought that Facebook couldn't match Google-level ad revenue, but the monetization model was abundantly clear for Facebook as soon as it became obvious how much personal data they were tracking. Facebook IPO'd in 2012, at which point it already had over $4B in revenue, and had been generating revenue for years before that.

The much better example is Twitter, which people did indeed say wasn't monetizable, still isn't profitable, and has absolutely tanked since its IPO.

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Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by richardking on Thursday May 26, 2016 @04:13PM (#11781121)
There were lots of question on whether they could monetize on mobile when they IPO'd. I think their stock went down 33-50% from their IPO price until they showed they could make the transition.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2012/07/27/fac...

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Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by gjolund on Thursday May 26, 2016 @07:05PM (#11782410)
Exactly.

All the data showed that Twitter wasn't monetizable, yet people still threw huge valuations at it.

There is nothing wrong with building apps and platforms that don't have clear paths to monetization, I just don't see why any sane VC would ever invest in one.

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Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by the_watcher on Thursday May 26, 2016 @08:32PM (#11782979)
Because good VCs make money on the ones that successfully monetize, not on consistent 10% ROI. That kind of return is great, but just be a PE firm if that's your goal.
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Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by gjolund on Thursday May 26, 2016 @09:45PM (#11783320)
If you have the money to play the odds like that then more power to you.

I just don't like the acknowledgement that most of their investments will fail.

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Re:Snapchat raised $1.8B in a Series F round by joslin01 on Friday May 27, 2016 @08:49AM (#11785642)
Naw man, that's just how it goes in VC world. You have to play it like that. It's like a roulette table -- hard to hit a number but pays out 33x. Well, similarly, a very successful start-up can pay out 100-1000x and easily carry the other losers.
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