Above the Crowd

Attached are my thoughts on the Facebook S-1 along with some quick stabs at valuation.  Brief disclosure, Benchmark Capital has a minority position in Facebook as a result of the acquisition of FriendFeed, a company that was incubated in our offices. I thought it would be useful to look at Facebook using the scorecard from our May 24 blog post, “ All Revenue is Not Created Equal, the Keys to the 10X Revenue Club .” For those that want to save time, the key point of this piece is that there is a broad disparity of Price/Revenue multiples for global Internet stocks, and that only a very small fraction of these companies achieve a […]

Frequent comparisons to Facebook leave many confused about the true value of Twitter. [Follow Me on Twitter] “In a brand new direction A change of perception On a brand new trajection” – UB40 [Disclosure: Benchmark Capital is a major investor in Twitter, and my partner Peter Fenton sits on the Twitter BOD.] Twitter is having a remarkable year. Active users have soared to over 100 million per month, with daily actives now above 50 million. Tweets per day are over 250 million. Most top actors, athletes, and artists are all active on Twitter. Every news and sports program proudly advertises its Twitter account handle. No one would consider […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] “ Don’t you know that you are a shooting star, And all the world will love you just as long, As long as you are.”  — Paul Rodgers, Shooting Star With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “ valuation ” and “ revenue ” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. Calculating or qualifying potential valuation using the simplistic and crude tool of a revenue multiple (also known as the price/revenue or price/sales ratio) was quite […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] “Living in the limelightThe universal dreamFor those who wish to seem.Those who wish to beMust put aside the alienation,Get on with the fascination…” — Limelight from Moving Pictures, Rush If you could travel back in time to the early 1990’s and ask Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs and private company executives about their long-term career ambitions, you would hear a constant theme – they all wanted to be part of an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Back then, taking a company public, either as a CEO, CFO, or founder, held an allure similar to that of a young athlete dreaming of making […]

[Follow Me on Twitter] In a recent New York Times article , Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst was quoted suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is the key catalyst for an important new technology trend. “Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend – one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years.” This argument rings true in that the “after iPhone” smartphone market is dramatically more interesting than the “pre-iPhone” smartphone market. Later, Ms. Huberty made an even bolder statement, “The iPhone is something different. It’s changing our behavior…The game that Apple is playing is to become the Microsoft of the smartphone market.”  Or perhaps not. Many analysts and bloggers have […]