<story><title>Airbnb closes $500M round of funding at a $10B valuation, led By TPG</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/18/airbnb-has-closed-its-500m-round-of-funding-at-a-10b-valuation-led-by-tpg/?ncid=rss</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>tptacek</author><text>Parroting Andreesen from Twitter last night:&lt;p&gt;The valuation number is misleading. You&amp;#x27;re looking at the snapshot price of a relative small fraction of Airbnb&amp;#x27;s equity at a particular moment in time; just as 1,000,000 shares of XYZ will likely trade at a lower price than 1 share, so too might the valuation be lower for the whole company.&lt;p&gt;More importantly, these aren&amp;#x27;t common shares; they&amp;#x27;re shares with privileges attached to them, and thus command a higher value.&lt;p&gt;Finally, VC&amp;#x27;s perspective towards share valuation is different than that of a &amp;quot;value investor&amp;quot;; a VC looks at the shares as if they were options, with a limited (1x investment) downside but an uncapped upside.&lt;p&gt;These aren&amp;#x27;t my insights; they&amp;#x27;re taken from a bulleted list Andreesen twerped last night. They sound convincing to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Airbnb closes $500M round of funding at a $10B valuation, led By TPG</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/18/airbnb-has-closed-its-500m-round-of-funding-at-a-10b-valuation-led-by-tpg/?ncid=rss</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dylandrop</author><text>Just out of curiosity, what could this possibly be spent on? Assuming it is going to be used to build out in foreign markets, is this mostly advertising&amp;#x2F;marketing costs? It already seems like they have a pretty good foothold in foreign markets. I can&amp;#x27;t imagine with $250M&amp;#x2F;yr in revenue they really need that $500M for hiring people. Also - how much does this leave the founders with in terms of %?&lt;p&gt;One speculation I have that might answer my first question is that they&amp;#x27;re going to spend this on lobbying and legal battles.</text></comment>