Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future business.

I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.

That will be the year of the Linux desktop.

What would that response be, other than refusing to use anything with mainstream adoption?

Maybe insisting that this type of core service get provided by charitable nonprofits, which inherently can't sell to for-profits?

...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.

On the bright side, these users can likely move to another platform if the big fish fudges up.

And now the big fish has spent a massive amount on a worthless product.

Kinda like MySpace.

Sometimes they can, sometimes they can't. Services that came after MySpace aren't like MySpace.

Switching from one dominant service for posting your meal photos to another dominant service for posting your meal photos is relatively easy. But if a web tool you depend on decides to finish their "incredible journey", you're likely to remain without an equivalent replacement (VC subsidies making it easy for few players to suck out oxygen from a market segment), and you end up having to adapt your workflow to whatever remains or comes after.

Slack is valued higher than Kroger, which runs 2,700+ grocery stores in the United Stages.

Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now. Apple is worth 30% more than Saudi Arabia.

> Apple and Sweden have about the same valuation right now

Sweden doesn't have valuation, so you can't compare them.

Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.

I guess one can say "Sweden produces about one Apple's worth in a year", or "Saudi Arabia produces about one Apple's worth in a year and a bit". This however makes owning Sweden/Saudi Arabia look better than owning Apple by a shot.

> Apple has valuation which is measured in dollars. Sweden has GDP which is measured in dollars per year. The units are different, so the numbers aren't comparable.

Of course. I was referring to Sweden's national wealth[1], which is roughly equal to Apple's market cap of $2T. Sweden's GDP of $560B is only roughly twice Apple's FY2020 revenue of $275B.

Apple is worth roughly 2% of the national wealth of the United States, which is $106T.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...

> National net wealth, also known as national net worth, is the total sum of the value of a nation's assets minus its liabilities.

For the little sense that comparing a public company to a nation state makes, one still might be inclined to compare Apples to apples (and not to Oranges).

In this case, one should compare National Wealth (country's assets minus its liabilities) against Apple's assets minus its liabilities. That calculation gives us about 65B dollars, which puts Apple somewhere between Ghana (95th) and Turkmenistan (96th).

This is why I invest in index funds only and never look at individual stocks. It wasn't even 15 years ago in college that I was taught that fundamental analysis and buy-and-hold value-based investing was the way to go for individual investors. The 'discipline of the market' will force companies to improve their fundamentals and by extension, their profitability over time.

That advice seems laughable now, even if you hold for years. Companies are going public while nowhere near profitability. And others are experiencing surging prices on the basis of hype and rosy promises about the future. You can say "that's just tech companies", but it's not 1999 anymore. 'Tech' is not a new and mysterious industry with made-up metrics, they make up the largest companies in our economy.

So are you saying it is worth investing in unprofitable companies (at IPO time) because the market will force the company to improve it's profitability going forward?

I am saying almost the opposite, actually.

The time to invest in an IPO stock is before it goes public, not after. IPOs are priced to extract the maximum possible capital, partly why the prices usually dive within the first trading day. Buying on the secondary market (NYSE/NASDAQ)is putting money in the pockets of the investment bank that underwrote the issue.

Of course once a company has been public for a while and there is sufficient public information about their performance, you can choose to go the value investing path.

Except Apple does about $300B in revenue at like 40% gross margins, which is absolutely insane and means they are valued much more reasonably than Slack.

Apple is also growing faster than Sweden’s economy.

Useful numbers aren’t just scalar quantities you can compare. Market capitalization and GDP are not “worth” or useful for ranking “worth”.