The Instagram/Facebook deal: 30% cash, 70% stock at 75+ billion valuation | Hacker News Reader

The Instagram/Facebook deal: 30% cash, 70% stock at 75+ billion valuation

thenextweb.com

23 pointstilt21 comments

The more these tech bloggers cover trivial apps such as Instagram, the more people will make these type of apps rather than work on hard problems like healthcare or education.

Please don't do that. I'm a tech blogger, and it drives me insane that things like healthcare or education apps don't get the attention from readers that they deserve.

Do things that matter. Please. I will continue to write about them, even if nobody reads it.

It's self-correcting. Facebook can only buy so many Instagrams.

It's the same problem with politics. The coverage is so much about the meta aspects of politics, the daily "he said, she said", not the actual policies that are being proposed. It's easier to employ people to write about the superficial horse races aspects, and because the subject matter is trivial, the audience is larger. It's profiting on the dilution of the media and everybody loses.

But this way smart people can score some money fast and go on to build something with a larger and more lasting impact (vide today's stories about Elon Musk and his space exploration project). While we get a cool product for immediate consumption every once in a while.

People are working on healthcare, education, and other problems like that. It's just they aren't all paying much attention to the audience you're paying attention to. These types of startups also aren't focused on being bought, but actually solving real problems. And this takes time, and energy.

Don't assume that just because you don't read about us on TechCrunch we aren't out there trying to solve real problems.

Education expenditures in the US in 2010: $901 billion

Health care expenditures in the US in 2010: $2.6 trillion

So Instagram was about as valuable as Ducati (sold to Audi recently for 1.1B)?

Yeah right.

I can't believe in 2012 the #1 comment on a topic like this is comparing the valuation of a tech startup to an established brand in a completely different industry, and then appealing to the crowd's incredulity.

Have we not yet learned how terrible this particular argument is, has been, and will continue to be?

Perhaps you can elaborate why this is a terrible argument?

I guess Facebook wanted a hot photo sharing app almost as much as Audi wanted Ducati.

What if someone else (eg, Google) had offered $900m for Instagram? Was Facebook still wrong to pay $1bn?

This looks like a strange and risky deal. I've heard someone in Germany making a similar deal. He sold his company mostly in shares of the buyer's company. Then came the 2000 bubble and the shares had not worth anymore.

The next year the IRS showed up knocking at his door. He owned them the IRS percentage of the selling price of the previous year (year of selling) and not of the current year. Today he is still working as an employee trying to pay back his debts.

If a deal like that is structured even remotely sensibly then it will be a "merger" where the part that's in shares does not qualify as a purchase and does not trigger any taxes until the new shares are sold.

If anything, a story like that, if true, is a demonstration of why you get lawyers involved, nothing more.

Part shares, part cash deals are extremely common.

Does the S-1 and other stuff relating to the IPO state how much cash Facebook has / had?

Yes, as of the S-1, $3.9 billion in cash and equivalents.

So Facebook is about a half a percent of the US GDP: 75000000000/15094025000000 = 0.4969%

Facebook does consume roughly one and a half percent of Americans' waking hours. ( highly rough estimate based on http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/ )

These various things aren't directly commensurate, but it shows a certain level of relevance to Americans. (And, though I shudder to admit it, there are other countries in the world.)

Check your units: GDP is $/year; your Facebook is $; $/($/year) = year. You should end up with a result in years, not in percent (which is unitless)

"The USA produces 200 facebook-equivalents a year" doesn't have the same impact, I guess.

Right, the Facebook number should be change in worth per year for a proper comparison. Which is lower taken over the entire company's lifetime, but higher if you just include the last year.

If the $75 billion was revenue rather than worth, sure. Otherwise you're comparing a static number (FB's valuation) to a per year "flow" (GDP).

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