A Massive $75 Million Round Streams Into Ustream. | Hacker News Reader

A Massive $75 Million Round Streams Into Ustream.

techcrunch.com

30 pointsaresant8 comments

They raised $20M, not $75M: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020210-softbank-pays-u...

First it was Zynga and now it is Ustream. Who said raising funds is difficult? No seriously, I have difficulty understanding how can such exorbitant amount of funding is justified during a VC round.

It's really not that much money if you consider the cost of running a dedicated data center.

Most interesting part of this article is that the money is raised mostly by Japanese banks, earmarked for Japanese / Asian scaling.

Interesting to me because $75m+ buy you a lot of technical talent overseas to build your own - what is it about ustream that makes it so compelling as an investment target vs. a new start-up buildout?

Ustream is a top 600 site. If you started from scratch, not only is there no guarantee that you'd even reach that level(market now is saturated) but even if you did, it'd take you 3-4 years to get there.

Japanese VC is a little quirky. Imagine companies with great big piles of money and no effective pipeline to get it to twenty somethings. I worked at a technology incubator and essentially the only option for startups was friends & family, government microcapital programs, and (for the very lucky) angel funding from local entrepreneurs. This funding environment turns out very, veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery different companies than Silicon Valley does.

Things are probably different in Tokyo, which is essentially a whole 'nother country which shares a long border and some people with Japan. (I'm only half joking.)

what's the startup/tech/funding scene like in Tokyo?

I really don't care about Ustream anymore. Not since, like so many places, they went 'super kid friendly'.

I used to love the service as I could watch artist friends create works in real time and watching an artist draw/paint is just.. wonderful. Except, occasionally, they'd draw or paint tits.

And get banned extremely fast.

So, fuck ustream.

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