cloudwalking

Reddit may certainly be worth $1B+, but no acquirer wants to buy them and lose money keeping the site up.

You are certainly right to draw a parallel--they both want to change the world--but Musk literally wants to evolve humanity.

According to Consumer Reports (see linked article), the median car costs about $9k per year for the first 5 years (including the sticker price). That comes out to $0.75 per mile--not an insignificant amount. Driving 30 miles per hour, that's $22.50 in costs.

  - You don't need to seed.
  - Your ISP won't throttle your torrent packets.

I presume this means 327,000 car trips per year.

Companies raise huge rounds when they've nailed their product, their production lines, and their sales funnel. They know what they're doing and need cash to accelerate.

Venture capital is not charity.

Over a few years time, Nest quickly pays for itself, saves you money every month, and reduces your energy footprint.

It doesn't seem like a "massively over engineered pretty device that very few people need" to me.

Fadell has intimate knowledge of Apple's scaling troubles—LaLa, iTunes Store, App Store, MobileMe, etc—and Apple has infinite money. Building truly scalable web services is no easy task, and Google is head and shoulders more capable than anybody else.

Do not look at Nest as a thermostat company. Look at what they could be 10 years from now—the timescale Fadell is surely thinking on—and you begin to understand the real scaling issues they will face.

- Keyhole (now Google Maps)

- Android Inc.

- Motorola Mobility

- GrandCentral (now Google Voice)

- NeXT

- Siri

In general, an acquired company initially became successful by bringing value to consumers. When that company is acquired, it gets more resources to bring more value to customers.

That would be Brian McClendon. He co-founded Keyhole, now known as Google Maps. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_McClendon