I gave a guy down the street a 5% ownership stake in Rough Type in exchange for a 30 pack of Natty Light. The beer’s worth $17.59, according to the sign in the window of the liquor store downtown, which gives Rough Type a current valuation of $351.80, or 0.0000003518 Twitters.
Have you been reading 37 signals? They have a similar idea here.
Damn. They beat me to it. I really need to get back into realtime.
Interesting to note that the valuation of $1B is in headlines and no one is talking about the finer details about if’s and buts about the 10% stake.
If you are in the business of creating a “bazaar” that feeds on the tweets from people, what can be better than letting general public feel that they are on Rodeo Drive.
I view a big portion of $100 Million as advertising expense rather than real investment
Despite having consumed an ocean of beer in my lifetime, Natty Light doesn’t ring a bell.
So, 19 more cases of beer and Rough Type gets taken over? Hmm…not really into SHARING beer, but put me down for a 10% share.
Natty Light (or Lite) = Anheuser Busch Natural Light. Redeemed only by its cheapness.
I want a figure out a way of making a joke about diluted shares and that swilly beer but I can’t see through one eye right now.
This is all funny but I suspect is even worse than that.
A decent guess is that the recent share purchases in something like twitter come with discounted options or are preferred shares during an acquisition or something along those lines. In other words, while 90% of the shareholders may see, in effect, a $250K valuation (if they are lucky), a minority of shareholders get the disproportionate pay-out and for them, at a $250K sale, it would be *as if* the company were worth $1B and for other less preferred shareholders… not so much.
The reduction of valuation to a scalar value of a pre-IPO or pre-sale corp in the modern environment is utter bullshit.
-t
p.s.: while I think twitter is ultimately a loser I think they have some surprises up their sleeve and are going to turn out to be market makers, somewhere between nasdaq and craigstlist but more real-time, chasing the “long tail”, and leveraging location data. As much as I hate them, I think they have a slender but non-trivial chance to live up to even a $1B valuation. God help us all if they succeed.
Beer for blog, eh… Does this count as crowd-sourcing?