Kevin Rose Passed On Pinterest At A $5M Valuation | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Rose Passed On Pinterest At A $5M Valuation

techcrunch.com

19 pointsbarredo25 comments

I don't understand why any investor would be worried about missing an opportunity like Pinterest at this stage. Yes, they have a lot of traction and a nice valuation, but if you're an investor in Pinterest you have effectively nothing to show for it right now. If they go public successfully or sell for a large chunk of money, then you can kick yourself for passing it up; as it stands, you made a logical decision with the info you had, and that may have turned out to be the wrong one, for the right reasons.

The last round of investment valued Pinterest at $1.5B. If an angel investor from an early round wanted to cash out at that point they could have.

From $5M to $1.5B in two years. That is a hell of a return.

That does not mean you get the money. Nobody is going to pay out 1.5B to any investor.

They closed a round at a $1.5B valuation. What are you trying to say?

Probably true, but with secondary markets you could probably sell a small portion of your stock for 10x your total investment, and be left with an immediate 10x return and huge upside with the remaining stock.

I agree with you, there is still a lot for Pinterest to figure out. But if you are an early investor and don't believe in the company's future, there are many others who would be happy to buy up your Pinterest shares on the secondary markets. See here: https://www.secondmarket.com/company/pinterest

Just one way to get your 300x return (assuming return on $5 million valuation to current $1.5 billion valuation) if you wanted it right now.

The liquidity and value of an asset are orthogonal questions. Not that Pinterest stock is even necessarily illiquid (I have no idea).

This is coming from someone who has never used Pintrest before, but how does it make money?

I don't believe they're making money as of yet. But they drive a lot of traffic to eCommerce sites and they can find a way to monetize by promoting products. Just like Twitter/FB are doing sponsored posts, they can do something similar.

Affiliate programs and injecting ads into people's news feeds are two complete different and largely unrelated ways of monetizing. If pinterest goes the route of sponsored pins (or whatever they might be called) instead of affiliate commissions on product links, they'd be out of their minds and hopefully be laughed out of existence. This sponsored crap is the best way I've yet seen to piss off your users (and in twitter's case, alienate third-party developers, although that's because they've made some poor choices).

Ads work on google because there's intent to buy (or at least learn about a product category) Samsung buying ads against the iphone5 trending topic on twitter is supposed to make me want their latest and greatest? Good luck with that.

Pinterest just needs to tag links with affiliate codes whenever possible. I'd bet amazon alone could make them serious money with zero detriment to the user experience.

Why is this guy still in the press at all?

Why wouldn't he be in the tech/startup press? He's usually in the middle of it in someway.

Digg failed; he threw his employees under the bus.

He went to form milk, that failed and he took money from people. Oink failed.

He got acquired to work on G+, very quickly after got booted to Google Ventures - and apparently didn't do too well there.

A lot of people have put him out there in good faith, figuring he was not a one-trick-pony - and that he had more in him, yet, now, we are talking about how he failed at investing in a runaway success.

So, really, why? This guy is like the valley's version of Kim Kardashian where Digg was his sex tape.

Look - I appreciate that he has done well for himself. But he has not created anything amazing, nor done amazingly well for others.

After all this, his best accomplishment is interviewing Musk, perhaps.

Its a waste of energy. let me know when Kevin really innovates.

I really have to disagree with you here.

    Digg failed

Yes, it did. It had been starting to fail for some time though, and they tried to reinvent it. It didn't work. It was mismanaged, but you see this thing all the time. Hell, Microsoft is doing it with Windows 8 right now. It's hard to know how something will go until you try it.

    He went to form milk, that failed and he took money from people.

Milk was acquired my Google, how is that "failing"?

    Oink failed.

Oink did well but not well enough. The initial plan was to "fail quickly", and they did.

    He got acquired to work on G+, very quickly after got booted to Google Ventures - and apparently didn't do too well there.

I don't know anything about this, so I will not comment. But as far as I know Kevin is still doing just fine at Google Ventures. Why do you use the term "got booted"?

I mostly take issue with your post because of the overtly negative tone, and not providing a single source for your claims. I used to see Kevin as a bit of a schmuck, but I think he's turned into somebody to watch now rather than somebody who just got lucky. He picks companies well, and I think he's in the perfect spot right now.

> let me know when Kevin really innovates.

Digg created social news. The company ultimately failed because of some missteps, but the concept is still thriving on the Web today and can be seen with Likes, Retweets, Upvotes, and others. Digg Labs was cool, they had a great API, and while I'm not going to claim it was the first website to feature this, it was at least the first time I'd ever seen a website with an RSS feed of search result pages. Getting an RSS feed (when feed readers were cool) for any search query you wanted to amazing as it allowed you to follow any topic you wanted to.

Overall, the early execution of Digg was brilliant. They just thought too big.

I feel like I have to say thank you. Execution and all....

Maybe fail is too harsh a term. But my poin being that the idea that Kevin is some sort of visionary worthy of the level of hype he gets is clearly a delusion.

Digg was great early on, and very quickly became muddled and ruined. To the point where it died completely and was sold for practically nothing.

Overall, it's all pointless to keep saying "hey! Look what Kevin's doing now!"

> This guy is like the valley's version of Kim Kardashian where Digg was his sex tape.

This is epitaph material, right here.

This guy is like the valley's version of Kim Kardashian where Digg was his sex tape.

I got my comment of the month right here :)

And I +1 your post -- great summary!

Because he's an angle investor and quite successful at that.

He's got an angle, alright.

Why is Pinterest such a shining example when it doesn't have a fully developed market model yet and hasn't shown a single profitable quarter? What makes it more than just another overvalued company waiting for the next burst?

Theory of the case: if the stuff is the focus of the experience, as opposed to communication (FB, twitter), it is a better marketing situation (less annoying, generallY).

It's popular therefore it must be valuable, right? That metric worked well the last time the net got frothy.

It's got a user demographic similar to FarmVille. Female, late 20s to late 30s, well off. I'd guess some have decided based on FarmVille that this is a good demographic to grab the attention of.

This is be no means a scientifically valid survey, but based on the experience of my married friends when they got smart phones or tablets in their families, women buy, men seek free.

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