They raised 204.5 Million dollars over 9 venture financing rounds. They have approximately 800 current employees. Does any of this seem wild to anyone else?
This honestly sounds pretty reasonable to me. They made a ~5x exit after 10 years of raising funds and developing the site. Glassdoor easily has the most reliable salary and job data for software engineers that exists, even beyond LinkedIn which Microsoft just paid $26 billion for, and that's incredibly valuable. I see this entirely as a smart acqui-hire and data acquisition move. Nothing to do with revenue.
It boggles the mind how a $1B takeover can be described as reasonable while paying absolurely no attention to very basic performance indicators.
Has the world learned nothing from the dot com bubble?
That's the same tired old logic that brought the world the Myspace and Yahoo deal.
Much of the world prefers riding the bubble to FOMO. The frothier it gets, the less need for and meaning held by useful indicators. It's human nature :/
Recruit is kind of a funny setup - itself it's not that large (I think around 800 people) but it owns/controls companies totaling tens of thousands of employees worldwide.
1) It's targeted to a really broad audience 2) It has a profitable but affordable pricetag 3) The grafics still look good and will continue to do so 4) Microsoft has three big platforms where it runs
According to Google, Minecraft made $23M up to 2011.
> Minecraft was worth it.
To Notch it sure did.
2011? In 2011 Minecraft was a very new product compared to where it is now. What Microsoft was purchasing there was a pre-existing virtual world software that already many kids were familiar and comfortable with. It's a world where there's no significant level of concern about inappropriate avatars, and nobody really cares. It's a world focused on construction and design, not on killing off everyone else so that you can be the last survivor. As VR gets better over the next decade, it would be entirely feasible for something based on a Minecraft like world to be a solid base for corporate and educational markets.
Suddenly paying $2.5 Billion in late 2014 starts to make some sense.
You mean expecting that a game that's already a half a dozen years old will keep increasing its revenue for a decade straight?
Does that make any sense whatsoever?
Two years later, they continued to increase sales of the game, selling about 20 million copies in 2016.
It worked.
It's not revenue "for just 2011".
It's revenue up to 2011.
The expected path for startups is: 1) find product market fit 2) build growth 3) build revenue 4) move to a sustainable operating model where at least your gross margins are positive 5) move to cash profitability 6) congrats you've made it and now are a normal sustainable company
Glassdoor was on step #4 and was probably close to #5. Valuing based on net profit would only work on companies in step #6.
Whats the ultimate goal revenue wise? Something like - Hey HR at XYZ. Pay $xxx to see which redacted current and old employees said you were shit. Trim the snitches with Recruit Holdings..
Recruit Holdings is focused on the Job/HR space, so this acquisition makes sense to further fend off Linkedin and Google.