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Comment by hristov | Hacker News Reader

By the way, Peter Thiel already sold the majority of his FB shares around the time of the IPO. See:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/peter-thiel-facebook-...

Notice that at the time the article was written he had sold about 37 million shares and had only 5.6 million left. The prices he got were absolute peanuts compared to the current price -- he sold 17 mln shares for $38, and another 20 million for about $20. The current price is $180.

I am not writing this to criticize Peter Thiel, obviously the stock market is very difficult to predict. And, unfortunately, I did not buy FB at $20, so I cannot say I had a better mastery of the market than him. The point I want to make is that is downright silly to make any conclusions about FBs valuation based on this sale.

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In stock trading, we say that there are a million reasons to sell and only one to buy. Sales aren't a particularly good signal, since they can be very specific to ones' personal situation.

The one reason to buy - because you think it will go up?

Well, you think you can't get a better return on your investment elsewhere.

Just going up isn't enough if something less risky goes up faster.

Going down a little can even be a relatively good bet if everything else is absolutely tanking. Losing 1% of your principle is a pretty good deal if the stock market (and the dollar) go down a lot.

Ha, thanks! I was just curious so took a wild guess.

I mean the price he sold at IPO was way higher then what he bought in at the seed round as one of the first investors, it is one of the best seed investments ever, given he was already one of the longest shareholders by the time of the IPO it made sense to sell

Hindsight is 20:20. I think the most likely prediction for a social media IPO is similar to TWTR or SNAP where it just keeps dropping and dropping. FB is an outlier in my opinion.

... for now.

We just tried to use it to advertise and had exactly this experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

Pulled the plug. Nothing but worthless traffic, no engagement.

This sounds more like an issue with your ad targetting than with Facebook.

First step: only target users in countries that you care about and (sadly) do not target Indonesia, India, Pakistan or anywhere in Africa as these are mostly where the fake profiles are.

I disagree that any specific advice will help an individual marketer...I think the biggest issue is that the economics of acquisition on social (factoring in internet marketing budgets and customer LTV) doesn't work well for brands that aren't already operating at significant scale. Otherwise, Teespring would be a billion dollar company by now ;)

My guess is that social marketing works ok for brands that have a strong competitive position AND healthy margins.

Healthy margins and product appeal moreso than competitive position.

Teesprings product offering is far too broad to benefit specific targeting which really just leads to low user intent, which leads to huge acquisition costs. No one gets excited for tshirts.

Products outside of these hugely saturated markets do amazingly well if you know what you're doing.

Did you watch the video that the parent shared? From the sounds of it, targeting didn't seem to help at all. The video stated that they seem to think that clickfarmers will like -anything- so that a sudden surge of likes from a specific region on a specific page seems less fishy.

That is what we found. Targeting didn't matter.

YMMV of course but we did not find Facebook ads effective at anything but reaching click farms.

tl;dr on that video: You pay Facebook to promote your page to X number of people. The problem is that paid third-world clickfarms spam likes to everything they can find, not just to things they're paid to like, in order to camouflage themselves. Thus, the majority of likes you get by promoting your page are fake and don't actually represent engaged fans. You're paying for nothing.

(Feel free to correct me)

Only on Hacker News would we consider making over a billion dollars "absolute peanuts," and criticize Thiel for not being enough of a visionary to wait.

When you're Thiel, having the money liquid is more valuable than waiting. One way to look at is that he could have 5x'd the money had he not touched it. But I'd bet whatever he did with the money since the 2012 IPO (starting companies, investing in companies, etc) had a much better return than 5x.

Only on Hacker News I can write an entire paragraph explaining how I am not criticizing Thiel and then still get slammed for criticizing him.

The culture here is often contrarian to a fault.

No it's not.

I'll go with maybe.

There's a lot of really weird vicarious worship of the wealthy around here. It's ironic that it's called Hacker News since traditionally hackers came from more of a "fight the man" zeitgeist. At times it borders on sycophancy, like when every single utterance of a VC no matter how banal is analyzed as if it's the words of some venerated guru.

The extreme of this would be the Silicon Valley right and its full and explicit embrace of feudalism and monarchy.

... and no, I'm not criticizing Thiel. The vicarious sycophancy of the HN community is a lot weirder and at times more troubling than the behavior of the actual SV rich.

That’s cause we are all temporarily embarrassed billionaires.

> But I'd bet whatever he did with the money since the 2012 IPO (starting companies, investing in companies, etc) had a much better return than 5x. reply

The top post in this chain says that he sold 17 mln shares for $38 and another 20 million for about $20. The stock is currently trading at $180/share. If he had held on to those shares they would have been worth $6.66B today. According to Forbes his total current net worth is $2.6B.

I certainly won't criticize someone for making a diversification play after having already made such a huge gain (his initial investment was $500k) but in retrospect it very much looks like a mistake.

> retrospect it very much looks like a mistake

Judging decisions based on future knowledge is utterly worthless. "In retrospect, picking the losing lottery numbers was a mistake. In retrospect, picking the winning lottery numbers was brilliant."

It was only a mistake if it was a wrong choice given the information knowable at the time.

That's true enough. But you said that you bet whatever he did with the money since had a much better return than Facebook. You were wrong.

Different commenters. But yes, the original g...grandparent was mistaken.

You’re right. I missed that.

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