> Just a year ago, Didi was valuated at only $13B... even then, the $2B would've resulted in a ~13% ownership stake. Last year, they were valuated under $10B. Tencent got a ~20% stake in Didi for just $15M only 3 years ago.
Interesting. Btw, what share did Apple get for their $1B?
>I worked for a company that sold for over half a trillion
Que?
There are only a few companies worth that much in the world. The only (well known) company big enough to buy another company for that amount is Saudi Aramco.
> But I do think its fair to say that the scale of Discord is 5x bigger while having 1/10th the employees and the last valuation round was at 2 billion versus slacks 12 billion valuation?
Slack has revenue, probably 100-1000x that of Discord. It's a real business and not burning VC/Tencent money, which is exactly why it (imo correctly) has a much higher valuation.
> That's not even a lot! Apple, Google & FB have $200bn, $140bn & $65bn respectively. Dividends don't seem to be a thing, and it's basically impossible to invest this much cash internally. These companies don't have factories to build, or any kind of hard capital investments to make.
Apple arguably does have factories to build, given how utterly dependent on China it is.
> And of course giant investments mean giant valuations. They have to
This reads like satire these days because so many of YC's top companies are exactly that: companies losing hundreds of millions, or even billions of investor money every year, but all having insane valuations [1]
> All of this is more or less fine while the company is valued at billions of dollars.
It's still valued at billions of dollars. The absolute valuation is irrelevant. As another article I read said, building an $8 billion company out of $10 billion of investment is not an especially great achievement. In particular, it is not similar to building an $8 billion company out of $10 million of investment.
> it would be company with the largest market cap in history, yes bigger than Apple
Apple is not remotely the largest company in history, when adjusted for inflation. The The Dutch East India Company, for instance, was worth over 7 trillion dollars at one point. Likewise, Standard Oil held a monopoly on all the USA's oil at one point and certainly had a several trillion dollar valuation.
Saudi Aramco will be massive, certainly. But not without precedent in history.
Personally I would never use “small” to describe anything worth 15B…
Anyway, Tencent is worth 850B and these guys own approx. 200B of that, so they’re quite large.
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