Quite a jump from the $500 million valuation they were shooting for last week[1].
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/no-filter-required-instagra...
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/08/no-filter-required-instagra...
Those investors in that round had to at least double their money...if the price was indeed $1B, that's all they did. Just 2X. Although, the argument can be made that a 2X return in 1 - 2 months isn't bad...but then again, VC funds don't have a 2 month life, so over the long-term value (i.e. 10 years most-times) of that fund I am not sure how beneficial that is.
Although, I guess they can't be too pissed because it must feel good to be able to at least return something to their LPs in such a short time frame.
Anyway, it's better than 2X, so I guess they can't be pissed.
EDIT: Open mouth, insert foot: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/right-before-acquisition-in...
a) You don't know if the acquisition will actually happen. Therefore if it doesn't, you aren't left with nothing.
b) It gives you a stronger bargaining chip to increase the price of the acquisition because you literally have a strong alternative. Instagram could tell FB to screw off, they are already getting $50M.
It's basically a bargaining chip. Let's look at two different scenarios:
1. Your last round of financing was two years ago and you raised $2M at a post-money valuation of $8M. Two years pass and you're hot, what is you company worth? Look at some comparables (which the acquirer will try and rip apart). Do a multiple of your revenue (which the acquirer will try and rip apart).
2. Now you're hot and you think you might be acquired (or maybe not!), you raise $5M at a $50M post-money valuation. Now when you sit down at the bargaining table, you can say "Well that VC over there thinks we're worth $50M, what do you think we're worth?"
In option 2, you've got a lot more bargaining power.
That being said, this wasn't part of the S-1 and Facebook really has to tell potential investors how this will affect the financials, so presumably there is a revised prospectus or perhaps S-1 in the works.
Unless those economics have changed, but I don't think they have.
It is in that light why I say, it seems a bit precarious. Essentially what would have happened is, these VCs would have contacted their limited partners and said, we have an investment we want to make - send us the money now (this is after the limited partners already committed to giving them that money). The LPs then wire the VC fund the money. The VCs then wire that money to Instagram.
3 months later, Instagram wires the money (assuming it was all cash, which we know it wasn't) back to those investors, which then have to wire the money back to their LPs. So technically, it doesn't REALLY help their portfolio as much as if they got a 10X return in a few years because the money was put to work for a shorter period of time.
Although, if you are 'annualizing' the return properly and assuming a 33% return each month, then the yearly return is actually 29X (compounded), but we digress.
Anyways, there's a excellent blog post that explains this very clearly. It is written for founders to understand the VC's perspective when investing. Does anyone know what I"m talking about?
I been looking for this article for the last few months now.
People through comments saying things like "well, VCs needed to double their investment - this lets them do it in a few months"
Wish I lived in a world where I should have expectations of a several hundred percent ROI on investments.
But more importantly than that, I think it was one of a very few that were good in that fund. I believe that particular fund was particularly bad because it contained remnants of the dot com bust - so only 1 - 3 of their investments in that fund were profitable, and only 1 was enough to pay for the entire fund.
I am not remembering EXACTLY so my numbers may be a bit off...but you can just imagine how annoying it must have been to be a partner in a fund and be telling your LPs that you have essentially lost all their money - and thinking about this for the entire 10 year life of that fund.
Just for at the last minute, almost literally, all of that changes.
People don't think about it, but it's not easy to be a VC.
This buy was just another way for connected Silicon players to cash out on the facebook IPO, since the IPO window for web 2.0 is closed.
I grant that $1B sounds a lot for Instagram and it is harder to see similar commercial value in photos than in videos.
My personal take is that in addition to friend connections, already posted photos could be the strongest lock-in for users that Facebook has against future competitors.
Video has a higher value proposition than photos. Look @ how hard flickr has struggled turning photos into a sustainable business model.
I'm comparing apples to apples. You're comparing apples to oranges.
Certainly that doesn't mean every large acquisition is justified (e.g. Bebo) but it also means you can't just automatically apply the "company X has no clear business model today and so shouldn't have been bought for Y" argument to every such acquisition either.
I fully understand that if I had a $1B offer for a company that I would literally be sick turning them down, but the potential was there for something really big. If I could keep going with $10m in the bank, I would like to think I would try.
And you're cherry picking out one of many Sequoia funds (and still a successful one at that) to point at to call VC life hard? A dot-com period fund as well?
How many other hit funds have they had?
Sequoia estimates that 19% of the NASDAQ’s value is made up of firms they have funded.
I recommend checking out the book 'Venture Deals' by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. They explain the various structures of funds, why they're structured that way, and how it influences the decisions the investors make.
I realize the economics of hedge funds and VC funds are different in that VC's take a shotgun approach and hope that one out of ten investments makes up for all the losers, but on any single investment a 2x return is outstanding. On the surface it looks like the founders got screwed nicely on this one.
That's the point, this isn't what happened. Given the choice between 2x return in 2 months or 10x return in 120 months, there's no contest at all. That initial investment that returned 2x is now out of play for the life of the fund. If the fund's life is 10 years, the return is 1.1x, not 2x.
BTW, you're absolutely right. The 2x return extrapolates to a return of trillions of dollars over ten years, so there really is no contest at all.
It doesn't matter if you run a hedge fund, a VC fund, or a trust fund. A 2x return is a 2x return, and anybody would take it any day. Anybody who wouldn't has no business working in finance. Just because you assign a ten-year time frame to your portfolio does not diminish the return on that investment, so the return on your $50mm is 2x, not 1.1x.
If you guide your investment strategy based only upon what you hope will happen in the best-case scenario and look down upon investments that double your investment, you're making a mistake. The only reason they need a 10x return on their winners is because at least nine other bets are going to lose. Any win adds value to the fund. As a fund manager would you rather the $50 million have been plowed into a business that returned 0% which is what you expect to have happen ~90% of the time? Do you understand why criticizing this investment makes no sense? You're comparing a great investment to the few investments that turn out to be astronomically fantastic instead of the vast majority that lose money.
This is your key misunderstanding. When the fund starts, you lock up the money for a specific amount of time (say, 10 years), and once the money's been in, it can't go in a second time. So if you're near the beginning or middle of the fund, and the fund was < $500MM or so you probably wouldn't take 2x on $50MM today, because that $50M will be out of play for the next (say) 9 years.
In other words, it does diminish the return on that investment, because that $50MM is now out of play. Every dollar gets one shot of multiplying, and when it's done it's done, as far as the fund is concerned.
If the fund is near the end of its life and for some odd reason they still have $50MM sitting in it, then yeah, it'd be a great move.
If I invest $100 into 10 different stocks, and I figure that nine of the ten are going to be losses, then I hope that one of the ten will return me at least $1000, or 10x my original investment. That's very different than saying that any of the ten that returns me less than 10x is a disappointment. On the contrary, if one happens to return me 10x over the lifetime of my portfolio and another returns me 2x, then I am even better off than I anticipated.
Anybody who has taken a finance course knows the simple principle that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. It is NEVER better to make a return of equal percentage later in a fund than early. Instead of having $50 million to invest in the original fund in the same companies as before, you now have $100 million to invest in the same companies as before. The fallacy in your logic is that you are hung up on the required return for that single fund.
The only way what you are saying is valid is if by investing that $50 million in Instagram, they missed out on the opportunity to invest in another company that at some point in the future would have returned more. In a window of about two months, I highly doubt that's the case. Again, once you have doubled your money and gotten it back, you can invest it anywhere you like, including the same companies you may have before. But now you have twice as much money. There is nothing magical about that fund that makes its investments more special than another.
Again, that's exactly wrong. As far as the fund is concerned, that money's gone.
Let me help you understand with this link: http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/08/vc-insanity-economics...
Pay special attention to the section entitled, "They don’t appear to be particularly interested in making large amounts of money."
The purchase price is usually determined based on the latest round of financing.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Google%2B%2CInstagr...
"Mr. Silbermann, Larry Page is on line 1"
Oh, that's right. Revenue doesn't matter. "This time, it's different!"