<story><title>Facebook is not worth $33 billion</title><url>http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dhh</author><text>1. Thanks for the word correction, updated.&lt;p&gt;2. Publicly traded companies have instant liquidity on many more shares, which makes using &quot;last share sold&quot; an meaningful metric.&lt;p&gt;3. When only 3% of the money a company is supposedly worth has been moved around, it&apos;s a poor indicator of what the other 97% would go for.&lt;p&gt;4. They haven&apos;t figured out how to make much profit yet. And it&apos;s still questionable whether they will. MySpace supposedly also just needed to turn on the faucet, but apparently the water ran out before they got to it.&lt;p&gt;5. Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)</text></item><item><author>spolsky</author><text>I hate to leap in with what seems like an ad-hominem attack on the 37 signals, but their utter and complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business is starting to grate on me, and I&apos;m wondering if it has anything to do with Chicago. Is the problem that they&apos;re sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies? How else could you explain just how far they seem to have drifted away from basic reality?&lt;p&gt;First of all, David: The word is VALUATION, not evaluation. KTHX.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD that has shares that trade is valued by taking the last share traded and multiplying by the number of shares outstanding. It&apos;s just the DEFINITION of valuation. It&apos;s TAUTOLOGICAL.&lt;p&gt;The whole section &quot;Minority investment evaluations aren’t real&quot; is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don&apos;t even know where to start. It&apos;s like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5&apos; tall boy as 5&apos; tall because he&apos;s often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.&lt;p&gt;Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don&apos;t have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s weird, it&apos;s like in Chicago they don&apos;t have multiplication or something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>spolsky</author><text>2. That&apos;s just not correct. Spend twenty minutes talking to anyone who trades in bonds or equity before you make assumptions about what liquidity you need to get a good price... it&apos;s not much. Facebook trades all the time on sharespost, certainly enough to be liquid and to reach a market price. Google itself only has a tiny fraction of the shares available to the public (10% if I remember correctly)  and far less than 1% of the outstanding shares trade every day. That doesn&apos;t mean that the market doesn&apos;t find a market price.&lt;p&gt;3. Also not correct. When entire companies are bought and sold that had a previous market in the shares, the price for the entire company is usually a PREMIUM ON the the market valuation. &quot;PREMIUM ON&quot; means MORE THAN. Somewhere in Chicago, I understand that there is one market of some sort, I think they trade corn and pig bellies, surely SOMEONE there can explain it to you...&lt;p&gt;4. Also, just not true. They are very profitable and their profit is almost certainly growing at a rate that will make their valuation reasonable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook is not worth $33 billion</title><url>http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dhh</author><text>1. Thanks for the word correction, updated.&lt;p&gt;2. Publicly traded companies have instant liquidity on many more shares, which makes using &quot;last share sold&quot; an meaningful metric.&lt;p&gt;3. When only 3% of the money a company is supposedly worth has been moved around, it&apos;s a poor indicator of what the other 97% would go for.&lt;p&gt;4. They haven&apos;t figured out how to make much profit yet. And it&apos;s still questionable whether they will. MySpace supposedly also just needed to turn on the faucet, but apparently the water ran out before they got to it.&lt;p&gt;5. Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)</text></item><item><author>spolsky</author><text>I hate to leap in with what seems like an ad-hominem attack on the 37 signals, but their utter and complete misunderstanding of all the basics of business is starting to grate on me, and I&apos;m wondering if it has anything to do with Chicago. Is the problem that they&apos;re sitting there in a city without any other Internet industry, stewing in their own witty ideas, listening only to the adoring comments they get from the groupies? How else could you explain just how far they seem to have drifted away from basic reality?&lt;p&gt;First of all, David: The word is VALUATION, not evaluation. KTHX.&lt;p&gt;Secondly, EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IN THE WORLD that has shares that trade is valued by taking the last share traded and multiplying by the number of shares outstanding. It&apos;s just the DEFINITION of valuation. It&apos;s TAUTOLOGICAL.&lt;p&gt;The whole section &quot;Minority investment evaluations aren’t real&quot; is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don&apos;t even know where to start. It&apos;s like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5&apos; tall boy as 5&apos; tall because he&apos;s often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.&lt;p&gt;Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don&apos;t have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;s weird, it&apos;s like in Chicago they don&apos;t have multiplication or something.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>edw519</author><text>&lt;i&gt;It&apos;s weird, it&apos;s like in Chicago they don&apos;t have multiplication or something.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Oh, and New York smells. (take that!)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two of my heroes dragging discourse on hacker news into the toilet.  What&apos;s the world coming to?</text></comment>