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Comment by volandovengo | Hacker News Reader

i couldn't help but think about this article when news broke of the 3 billion dollar snapchat offer.

Really? You think that spending 6B on an absolutely untested idea with great risk is somehow comparable to a 3B acquisition of a mature startup that will immediatly bring business value to a company?

You can call me a old fuddy-duddy, but I'm just not sure that a company with zero revenue qualifies as "mature."

I've specifically said 'mature startup' to address this type of concern.

I can't say that that really addresses that concern.

Company != startup. They dont have revenues, but they have 25M users audience that will be instantly monetizable as soon as it is plugged in the FB or other company advertising system. And that makes them a perfectly fine target for acquisition, even if they don't have revenues of their own. Does this address a 'mature' company concern?

It might make it a logical target for acquisition, but it doesn't follow that it's worth ~4% of Facebook's market cap when Facebook has 100x the users (including virtually all the Snapchat userbase...) and could trivially clone Snapchat's tech.

Not to mention that Facebook's own profit figures from their more diverse and mature advertising platform suggest it would take a very long time to accumulate $3bn in advertising revenues off 25m users.

Or half the cost of the Hyperloop? And it was turned down.

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