Tag: valuation

Happy $100 Billion to Mark Zuckerberg Productions !

Heres to an expected $100 billion market valuation to the latest Silicon Valley Legend, Facebook- A Mark Zuckerberg Production.

Some milestones that made FB what it is-

1) Beating up MySpace, Ibibo, Google Orkut combined

2) Smart timely acquisitions from Friend feed , to Instagram

3) Superb infrastructure for 900 million accounts, fast interface rollouts, and a policy of never deleting data. Some of this involved creating new technology like Cassandra. There have been no anti-trust complaints against FB’s behavior particularly as it simply stuck to being the cleanest interface offering a social network

4) Much envied and copied features like Newsfeed, App development on the FB platform, Social Gaming as revenue streams

5) Replacing Google as the hot techie employer, just like Google did to Microsoft.

6) An uncanny focus, including walking away from a billion dollars from Yahoo,resisting Google, Apple’s Ping, imposing design changes unilaterally, implementing data sharing only with flexible partners  and strategic investors (like Bing)

FB has made more money for more people than any other company in the past ten years. Here’s wishing it an even more interesting next ten years! With 900 million users if they could integrate a PayPal like system, or create an alternative to Adsense for content creators, they could create an all new internet economy – one which is more open than the Google dominated internet ; 0

 

Why LinkedIn and Twitter are up for grabs in 2012-14?

Given Facebook’s valuation at $60-$100 billion , Apple’s $100 billion cash pile, Microsoft’s cash of $ 52 billion, Google’s cash of 43 billion $ , there is a lot of money floating. I am not counting Amazon as it deals with its own Fire issues.

But what is left to buy. In terms of richness of data available for data mining for better advertising- it is Twitter and LinkedIn that have the best sources of data.

and LinkedIn is worth only 9 billion dollars and Twitter is only $8.5 billion dollars. Throw in a competitive dynamic  premium, and you can get 50 % of both these companies at 13 billion dollars. if owners dont want to sell 100%, well buy a big big stake.

Makes a good case- buy the company- buy the data- sell them ads- sell them better products.

What do you think?

Facebook IPO- Do you feel lucky?

2 Jan 2011 dealbook.nytimes.com

Facebook has raised $500 million from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor in a transaction that values the company at $50 billion

29 Jan 2011 -www.bloomberg.com-$82.9-billion

14 Jun 2011-CNBC———————-$100 billion

27 Jun 2011 -news.cnet.com———-$70 billion

27 Sep 2011-Venturebeat.com——-$82.5 billion

100 billion valuation divided by 1000 million subscribers

=100 $ net present value of ad profit (note if 80 billion valuation with 800 million subscribers it is the same)

=250 $ net present value of ad revenues (assuming 40 % profitability)

=2500 $ net present value of online purchases by Facebook ad clicking customer

(assuming advertisers dedicate 10% of revenue to advertising by Facebook)

and the lucky Russian Investor who invested at 50 billion valuation only to see it double in six months, where else has he inVested

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/01/facebooks_russian_investor_hel.html

Digital Sky Technologies co-founder Yuri Milner, who co-invested in the Goldman-Facebook deal, enviably poised in the middle. DST has been investing early and aggressively in some of the biggest names in the tech bubble boom like Facebook (DST first invested in May 2009), Zynga (the company that makes Farmville and Cityville for Facebook), and Groupon (the dudes that just turned down Google’s $6 billion).

NOTE -Both groupon and Zynga IPO  investors lost money as they are now below IPO price.

http://openchannel.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/05/5771129-russian-facebook-investors-have-sparked-us-concerns

More on Digital Sky Tech and Yuri Milner and the free internet in Putin’s Russia

Digital Sky got particular attention because of its broad control of the Russian Internet. DNI noted that the company is “a dominant force in the Runet,” owning the most popular Websites in the former Soviet Union, including Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Armenia as well as others in the Czech Republic and Poland. By some estimates it reported “over 70 percent of all page views in the Russian-language Internet are on its companies’ Websites.”

 

 

From Wall Street Journal-

May 1, 2011

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/wsj-facebook-growth-exceeds-expectations-100-billion-valuation-justifiable/1306

Last month, a private-market transaction of 100,000 shares of Facebook Class B Common Stock priced at $32.00 apiece gave the website a valuation of $80 billion. Two months ago, Facebook was valued at $65 billion, when investment firm General Atlantic reportedly bought 0.1 percent of Facebook by purchasing roughly 2.5 million Facebook shares from former Facebook employees. Three months ago, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) invested $38 million in Facebook, which was only worth 0.00073 percent of the social network, but still resulted in a valuation of $52 billion.

 

related-

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/facebook-5/

 

Something is gotta give?

Go ahead and  Please. Buy Facebook Stock !

Do you feel lucky?

 

 

 

 

Does Facebook deserve a 100 billion Valuation

some  questions in my Mind as I struggle to bet my money and pension savings on Facebook IPO

1) Revenue Mix- What percentage of revenues for Facebook come from Banner ads versus gaming partners like Zynga. How dependent is Facebook on Gaming partners. (Zynga has Google as an investor). What mix of revenue is dependent on privacy regulation countries like Europe vs countries like USA.

2) Do 800 million users of Facebook mean 100 billion valuation ? Thats a valuation of $125 in customer life time in terms of NPV . Since ad revenue is itself a percentage of actual good and services sold- how much worth of goods and services do consumers have to buy per capita , to give $125 worth of ads to FB. Eg . companies spend 5% of product cost on Facebook ads, so does that mean each FB account will hope to buy 2500$ worth of Goods from the Internet and from Facebook (assuming they also buy from Amazon etc)

3) Corporate Governance- Unlike Google, Facebook has faced troubling questions of ethics from the day it has started. This includes charges of intellectual property theft, but also non transparent FB stock option pricing in secondary markets before IPO, private placement by Wall Street Bankers like GoldMan Saachs, major investments by Russian Internet media corporations. (read- http://money.cnn.com/2011/01/03/technology/facebook_goldman/index.htm)

4) Retention of key employees post IPO- Key Employees at Google are actually ex- Microsofties. Key FB staff are ex-Google people. Where will the key -FB people go when bored and rich after IPO.

5) Does the macro Economic Condition justify the premium and Private Equity multiple of Facebook?

Will FB be the next Google (in terms of investor retruns) or will it be like Groupon. I suspect the answer  is- it depends on market discounting these assumptions while factoring in sentiment (as well as unloading of stock from large number of FB stock holders on week1).

Baby You Are a Rich Man. but not 100 billion rich. yet. Maybe 80 billion isnt that bad.

Should you buy Zynga or Wait for the FB IPO

I am going to make a case for whether to buy or not buy  Zynga, and waiting to buy Facebook instead. Of course if Mark Pincus offers you a deep discount, and Mark Zuckenberg totally goes over the top with his P/E multiple, all bets would be re-valuated.

In the interest of your time, and my personal happiness, I am going to use a fairly standard way to measure attractiveness of both these companies- notably the Porter’s Five Forces Model. I will also review the recent experiences of Groupon and LinkedIn valuation to underscore what subtle differences in culture, and reputation of founders can affect the eventual value creation or destruction in an IPO.

(to be continued)

Free Software is Dying Out

When nearly everyone offers products for free (besides Microsoft) or just as downloads, for ad revenue.Linked In has been a pioneer not just in professional social networking , but in its pricing strategy. This has enable it to keep it a very loyal base, beat off lots of challengers , and command a 1 Billion valuation.

I find that sometimes people who charge you a transparent fixed fee , are better than people who sell your identity to lots of advertising companies but charge nothing. Both free pricing (with zero privacy) and expensive monopolistic /early bird premium pricing are bad pricing strategies for retaining customers . Here is much more renowned blog that argues that google analytics is much more expensive despite being free (http://www.mymotech.com/google-analytics-can-be-more-expensive-than-webtrends/)

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