Snap: Too Soon to IPO

medium.com

5 points·ckelly··3 comments

> Going public now isn’t fair to other founders

How is this relevant, like at all?

> and isn’t fair to those who would buy the stock on the IPO.

You can declare something overvalued or undervalued relative to a specific price, but I do not know how giving someone an option to buy via an IPO or otherwise can be "unfair". You can choose to stay out. Why is it not fair? It seems to portray an IPO as something you one-sidedly decide to do and somehow you magically get money, and there is no choice on the other side of the market to buy or not buy.

[I stopped reading right there.]

I feel like you should have read further into the article, where the author attempts to back their claim, instead of jumping to conclusions.

" >Roughly $2.50 to acquire and monetize a new user (and getting more expensive fast with v low and slowing growth) >Each user generates $3 in ad revenue per year >Each user costs them $3.25 in Google data center costs per year to store their pictures (so negative gross margin still at 150M users) >Plus another $1+ per user a year in R&D costs >Plus another $1+ per user a year in G&A costs

Today the more users they get, the more money they lose. If they can double revenue per user, they are making profits. They need to more than quadruple the revenue per user to have the future profit stream to add up to $25B."

I think he is referring to the fact that the people "buying the shares" have invested money with a fund (401k? I'm not American) that will be presumably purchasing the shares."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com