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Comment by avemuri | Hacker News Reader

They also own close to a majority stake in OYO, with pretty much the same story. OYO is also entering coworking now after Softbank had to scale back on their planned wework investment. The common thread seems to be that real estate has a massive market size, in trillions, making it easier to tell a bigger and bigger story and boost valuations.

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OYO is baffling. They entered the vacation rental (Airbnb) market out of the blue in a massive way via acquisitions and partnerships and it's not clear how they plan to execute.

I'm looking at them and I'm completely at loss.

It certainly feels like the decisions are driven by finance and not value creation. Still, I'm trying to keep an open mind.

It stopped being cool hiring 10 engineers and a nice space in San Francisco, burning $250k / month.

Or maybe there's so _much_ VC money that it's someone's job to invest _all_ of it. And you can't do that $250k at a time.

Someone surely is incentivized to make these investments outside of any long-term payback. Perhaps they fear investors will take their millions back if it stays fallow too long?

I think a reason these valuations "seem" out of line to most people is because there is simply so much money sloshing around. No one has time to write million dollar checks anymore. Almost anyone who has that much capital has so much capital that it doesn't make sense. More and more capital is focused on a smaller and smaller sets of companies.

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