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Comment by dinniwang | Hacker News Reader

There's a saying "follow the money". In this case you just need to follow the people involved in this company and the ones who negotiated this deal from Meta side and you will get the answer why it was acquired and why its valued so high. Financial engineering and social networking at its best.

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Their wiki says they have ARR over 100m. Pretty impressive for a product that's 9 months old. 20x multiple is high sure, but hardly seems like friends giving friends money for ... reasons

My observation is that 100m ARR in this AI economy is impressive but not particularly rare. There's a lot of hype sales and WoM sales going on.

It’s not so hard to get ARR if you don’t care about margin.

Cool, sounds like you discovered a life hack. Build something that can get $100m ARR while losing money, sell it, become billionaire.

Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!

No offense, but you sounds like someone who has never actually had to build a business or product. It's hard to build something people use, even if its free. This isn't moviepass concept where they're literally selling $10 for $5, but even that's hard to sell! There are plenty of companies that try and fail to get tracking with moviepass economics.

If you are having problems attracting users, even when free, consider that maybe your product doesn't offer much value to them. I say this as someone who has bootstrapped a 7 figure software business.

Correct, it's very hard to provide value, which is my point.

As someone who bootstrapped a 7 figure business, would you say getting to 9 figures ARR is easy as long as you don't care about margins?

Well, it helps I don't care about getting to 9 figures. As long as I make enough to live a comfortable lifestyle, I'm not going to sacrifice my family or my sanity to become some kind of unstable unicorn.

> Build something that can get 1k users. No in fact, build something that can get 100 users!

Sam Altman has entered the chat

The first R in ARR stands for "Recurring".

A 9 month old company has no evidence to support a claim of any ARR.

This is so obvious yet it totally got over me (and not only me, it seems).

It really does seem like friends giving friends a piece of the pie before it all blows up.

Congrats, you have summarized the majority of SV startups.

Sounds like I need better friends, but my moral compass wont let me stoop that low.

Thats why you should recruit a CEO.

Manus and Kortix seem to be rare in the way how you interact with them. It looks like that every "chat" is running its own Linux box.

And instead of chat, you can define the results form - table, markdown text, pdf etc. I have tried it and Manus seems to deliver more organised results.

Should be the value of transaction so high? Idk.

But I remember WhatsApp situation… feels the same.

Whatsapp had almost 0.5b users at the time of acquisition, and it was (still is) wildly popular in emerging markets and europe.

I think both aquisitions have little to do with the product, and make a lot of sense when you look at the numbers and broader strategy.

WhatsApp had a very clear value at the time of aquisition. It had 450 million users, growth of over 1 million users a day, and was in direct competition with one of Facebook's main products (Messenger) [1].

They did pay $4 billion cash + $15 billion in shares, which is a lot, but overall a not too unreasonable $8 cash + $33 in shares per user to join forces with it's biggest messaging competitor. It not only covered a flank, but catapulted Facebook to own worldwide private messaging overnight.

Manus apparently has "millions of paying users" already [2]. although Manus hasn't been around very long, it's developed by a company that's been around since 2022 [3]. Millions of paying users sounds like a good way for Meta to set foot on the consumer AI product space, which it doesn't seem to be capturing too quickly [4]. It's also based in Singapore and has a lot of Chinese ties, so there might be some strategy there.

[1]: https://about.fb.com/news/2014/02/facebook-to-acquire-whatsa...

[2]: https://archive.is/ykBOm

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manus_(AI_agent)

[3]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/meta-ais-app-downloads-and...

If two $1B companies 'merge' and the surviving entity gives the acquired entity $1B in shares, it didnt 'cost' the acquiring entity anything.

Facebook's stock was up 20% later in the year after the acquisition.

Facebook was worth $134.2-139.2B end of 2013 and $217.5-218.5B end of 2014.

I would say it is misleading to say it cost them $15B in shares if the remaining shares FB kept ended up more valuable after the transaction.

The data labeler has been instructed to build products, so he splurges on a company, which, unlike 95% of AI startups, at least has a functioning website.

He is also hiring in Singapore:

https://www.ft.com/content/1bf28a2f-4778-4a83-8276-eaa19d888...

I have never heard of manus.ai before. I hope he checked if the revenue is circular. It does feel like friend/FOMO acquisitions in 1999.

Go on.

Consider the possibility that the people who make these decisions aren't actually all that smart and are easily manipulated by marketing and the sycophants/impostors they surround themselves with.

You're telling me the folks who brought us the metaverse that revolutionized our lives are making dumb investments? That's a bold claim.

Who are you in this scenario though? Are you ManusAI getting bought for a giant pile of money? Are you a vendor that supplies Meta for their VR hardware that's getting paid in money? Are you an employee at Meta getting paid in money and Meta shares to build the Metaverse? Are you a shareholder of Meta who's stock is up? Like, sure, we can sit back and laugh at no legs, but Meta spent money they had on a thing they wanted to do. Sure, it didn't pan out, like that time I tried to pick up scuba diving, but when you have that much money, you can afford to try things that don't work. What's better, to try and fail, or never try because someone might make fun of you? If I just sold a company for half a billion, you could call me all the names you want, I wouldn't be able to hear you over the engines of my private fighter jet.

I understand what they are arguing, but they are just lobbing insinuations at the crowd. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed they had specific insight into the people and relationships inside the transaction that could be shared.

There is a lot of dumb money chasing AI related anything at this time. And there are people who know how to play the game.

Could you elaborate on this?

You should elaborate on this more.

Please continue

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