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Comment by TimSchumann | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at someone actually taking the other side of this bet as I thought Sam was _very_ conservative on his projections.

1) Any one of those companies (besides Pinterest IMO) could conceivably achieve a market valuation of $200B by Jan 1, 2020.

2) Again any one of those companies (besides Teespring IMO) could conceivably achieve a market valuation of $27B by Jan 1, 2020.

3) Easy win for Sam.

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Seriously? As I write this, Microsoft, the largest purveyor of enterprise software in the world, is worth roughly $340 billion. Oracle? Less than $200 billion. Hell, Amazon, the company that Dropbox runs on isn't worth $200 billion.

You honestly believe that any one of those companies, none of which has been around for more than ten years, could reach a market cap of $200B within 5 years? Either you are incredibly bearish on the dollar or we are officially in bubble times.

Yes, seriously. Which company is anyone's guess, and some are more likely than others, but it's conceivable a single company from that list could achieve a $200B valuation on a 5 year time scale.

My point isn't really to take anything away from those companies. They're all very impressive. It's more that I am surprised that people don't seem to think that $200B is an incredibly large amount of money. It's more than three Ford Motor Company's. Or $80 billion more valuable than Cisco Systems, in many ways the backbone of the entire internet. It's just an incredibly large valuation to achieve for any company let alone in a five-year time frame.

Major difference between public market valuations vs private market valuations.

Particularly, liquidation preference & anti dilution.

There is no such thing as a $200B private market valuation. For a company to have that large of a valuation, it pretty much has to be a publicly-traded company by definition.

If the argument is that somebody bought 0.001% of the company for $2,000,000, therefore 100% of the company is worth $200B, that's just a bridge too far.

> You honestly believe that any one of those companies, none of which has been around for more than ten years, could reach a market cap of $200B within 5 years?

That's not the bet. The bet is that they will, in aggregate be worth $200B.

    "Proposition 1: On January 1st, 2020, these companies 
    will be worth at least $200B in aggregate."

Edit: Can't read. The parent is in response to the grandparent, not the bet.

He was referencing my statement above, not the bet.

Thanks for the correction. Edited to reflect that.

1) Do you really think Dropbox, with all the big co competition, can grow past its current valuation? Snapchat would have been a better choice in this list.

Dropbox would have been my next closest to the bottom on that list, and while I think a $200B valuation on its own for Dropbox is a bit outlandish, it's conceivable.

I thought about it like this...

Would I bet that every company on this list will do worse than doubling their valuation over the next 5 years?

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