<story><title>Pinterest Raises $100 MM at $1.5Bn Valuation</title><url>http://allthingsd.com/20120516/exclusive-japans-rakuten-wins-the-heart-of-pinterest-founder-in-funding-race/?mod=tweet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Well I&apos;m going to head off the predictable and boring &quot;bubble&quot; comments and say this:&lt;p&gt;Pinterest has real value and a clear path to monetization through affiliate and/or advertising revenue. It&apos;s really a stupidly simple idea (essentially scrapbooking on the Web) executed incredibly well.&lt;p&gt;Is it worth $1.5B? I don&apos;t know. I would say it&apos;s definitely worth more than Instagram for whatever that&apos;s worth (not a lot). I guess we&apos;d need stats on number of active users, engagement and revenue to make that determination--something we&apos;re not likely to get.&lt;p&gt;The only concerning point to me is that that it&apos;s foreign money, only because foreign money seems to be less discerning, at least based on DST and similar investments.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, congrats to the team. They&apos;ve done exceptionally well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stroboskop</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Well I&apos;m going to head off the predictable and boring &quot;bubble&quot; comments and say this&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Saying that predictably gets you upvotes for sure. But it&apos;s not about &quot;bubble&quot; comments being &quot;boring&quot; or not. The question is whether bubble claims have any substance. If they have, the bubble won&apos;t simply go away just because some people wish it would.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Is it worth $1.5B? I don&apos;t know. I would say it&apos;s definitely worth more than&lt;/i&gt;...&lt;p&gt;Comparisons like this are inflationary. It seems you really don&apos;t care about bubbles. But a bubble would affect many people here at HN.&lt;p&gt;It doesn&apos;t matter whether bubble comments are boring or not, it&apos;s about the importance of a bubble.</text></comment>
<story><title>Pinterest Raises $100 MM at $1.5Bn Valuation</title><url>http://allthingsd.com/20120516/exclusive-japans-rakuten-wins-the-heart-of-pinterest-founder-in-funding-race/?mod=tweet</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cletus</author><text>Well I&apos;m going to head off the predictable and boring &quot;bubble&quot; comments and say this:&lt;p&gt;Pinterest has real value and a clear path to monetization through affiliate and/or advertising revenue. It&apos;s really a stupidly simple idea (essentially scrapbooking on the Web) executed incredibly well.&lt;p&gt;Is it worth $1.5B? I don&apos;t know. I would say it&apos;s definitely worth more than Instagram for whatever that&apos;s worth (not a lot). I guess we&apos;d need stats on number of active users, engagement and revenue to make that determination--something we&apos;re not likely to get.&lt;p&gt;The only concerning point to me is that that it&apos;s foreign money, only because foreign money seems to be less discerning, at least based on DST and similar investments.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, congrats to the team. They&apos;ve done exceptionally well.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strlen</author><text>The other interesting part about Pinterest is that they mostly gained traction outside of the traditional early adopter segments.&lt;p&gt;Not sure any what&apos;s the right way to value this kind of company: obviously if it was an established public company, a $1.5b figure might be scary (as far as I understand Pinterest does not yet have revenue). However, it isn&apos;t: venture capitalists valued it this high, in the hopes that there&apos;s a realistic (compared to similar companies, funded at the same stage) chance that they will have a $7.5b-$15b exit.&lt;p&gt;It _would_ be a sign of bubble if Pinterest were to go public without revenue (which has happened during the 1990s) , with pension funds (that have a very different risk/reward  profile from VCs) buying the shares. You could say &quot;it&apos;s 1999 again&quot; if as a result Sun (hey anyone remember them?), Cisco, and Oracle stock rose exorbitantly as a result of Pinterest buying a record number of servers, routers, and commercial databases (hey, remember when companies used to do that?) and their shareholders expecting (with great certainty) that there will be more and more companies like Pinterest sprouting up, i.e., that sales will keep growing.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve only caught the tail end of the bubble (I had an internship in a startup junior/senior year of HS, 2000-2002 -- and participated in SVLUG, meeting folks who worked for Webvan, RedHat, Va Linux, et al).&lt;p&gt;I still remember just how differently it felt from today: for starters you couldn&apos;t drive from Sunnyvale to Fremont (over the bridge) without being completely stuck in traffic (as early as 3pm, and as late as after 8pm), and without driving past at least 3 or 4 Sun campuses.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays: there is still commercial real-estate in that area that is empty (including the former Sun East Bay campus, where manufacturing happened), the Dunbarton Bridge is fairly traffic-free even during the rush hour.</text></comment>