> Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.
I'm not sure I could sell SO any worse if I tried. It spends more time describing a niche audience than the actual product ("a website used by developers"). Wow. Contrast with how they word the description of Prosus:
> Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus’ biggest acquisitions.
There's several superlatives you could use for SO, but it's more important to have a hedged form of "most valuable" for the investor I guess.
Or is the reporter just simply uninformed? I don't get it.
Reads like a recruitment piece for programmers, or maybe that's how I read too many articles being programmer. I was a little confused by this:
> For example, Jane Street, which is privately held, has increased its shareholder’s equity, or net worth, to more than $1 billion today from $228 million in 2007.
Is this supposed to be an impressive stat? ZocDoc has become about $2 billion company in basically the same time frame, which seems more impressive given that ZocDoc didn't start from that $228M handicap. My perception is that it's also much more expensive to run a company like Jane Street.
Title should be renamed to reflect that revenue is $127.7mm, thought this was going to be an article decrying the crazy valuations some tech companies get.
Is there any source that identifies the supposed investors? The Washington Post article just includes the nonsensical sentence "As of Monday, the company’s shares put its value at $7.6 million."
Like any HN reader, I want to believe that two women with no coding background can develop and ship in 90 days an app that will scale to millions of users...
These guys are the new lion-shooting dentists of the internet, but I'm afraid it's all a publicity stunt.
This is taken completely out of context. He was referring to a fake stock market for conference attendees at http://secondmarket.com where Stack Overflow "closed" at something ridiculous like $365/share
Most people using Musical.ly—many are American teens—don’t even know the app is built in China. The app allows users to create 15-second music videos of themselves lip syncing and dancing to pop songs. Musical.ly now has 85 million users worldwide, with 10 million daily active users, and has been consistently in the top ranks for photo and video apps in the U.S. and Europe. Greylock partner Josh Elman, a Musical.ly investor, called it “the next phenomenon in the media industry since Snapchat.”
Musical.ly stands out as the first Chinese company that only targets customers who don’t live in China. The app does not even have a Chinese-language version. Over half of its users—called “musers”—are in the U.S., with another 35% from Europe, according to co-founder Alex Zhu, who is from China but has worked in Silicon Valley.
Musical.ly is trying what Mr. Zhu calls “user-generated ads.” Last month, the company started an advertising campaign for Coca-Cola, where users film their own Coke-related videos. It is also experimenting with virtual gifts on its new product, the live stream app Live.ly. “Our vision for Musical.ly is to make it a YouTube on mobile,” Mr. Zhu said. The Shanghai-based company has no immediate plans to enter the Chinese market. Mr. Zhu points out that teens in China are usually too busy with academic work to have time to generate content.
> There’s a startup in New York everyone talks about, and the things they say aren't very nice. The startup sold for ~ $80 million and the founders got rich. But, as the rumors go, no other employee made more than $50,000.
Does anyone know which startup they are referring to? carrentals.com? something else?
Not that it is a great article but honestly that looks like a very messy transaction. It also looks like Spotify got the raw end of that deal. The whole thing is just crazy and I'm not sure how anyone can make sense of those numbers.
> tl;dr: In 2016 they spent over $250k on software development as a line-item, out of about $500k in revenue total. It's by far their biggest budget item.
The numbers are actually $250 million and $500 million. All the tables this report (as well as a newer one I have to search the link for) list the figures in thousands.
From what I understand, this is not a company, but the personal blog of a (former) consultant that worked for a company that had already spent $1.5mil when he took over. Given that context, the headline seems clickbaity as he wasn't personally involved, but whatever.
> In 2016, Opera was acquired by an investment group led by a Chinese consortium.[7] On July 27, 2018, Opera Limited went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange, raising $115 million in its initial public offering.[8] Opera is a subsidiary of Kunlun Tech Co., Ltd., and controlled by Zhou Yahui.[9]
So they bought it, and then they sold some of it (that's what an IPO is).
What's important here is the last sentence with 'controlled by', which is in practice more important than ownership.
Not that I disagree with the sentiment here, but there’s a pretty gigantic footnote in the article that relegates it to the bargain bin of overhyped clickbait:
”That doesn't mean Oath is actually worth only $200 million in cash — Oath said it still has about $5 billion of real assets remaining.”
Oath’s goodwill was dramatically overvalued, but the fact that it has $5 billion in real assets makes it difficult to describe the “almost worthless” label used in this article’s title as anything but clickbait.
> Based in New York, closely held Stack Overflow operates a question-and-answer website used by software developers and other types of workers such as financial professionals and marketers who increasingly need coding skills. It attracts more than 100 million visitors monthly, the company says.
I'm not sure I could sell SO any worse if I tried. It spends more time describing a niche audience than the actual product ("a website used by developers"). Wow. Contrast with how they word the description of Prosus:
> Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable tech companies, is best known as the largest shareholder in Chinese internet and videogaming giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. Listed in Amsterdam, Prosus signaled its appetite for deal making when it sold a small portion of its equity stake in Tencent in April for $14.6 billion. The Stack Overflow deal ranks among Prosus’ biggest acquisitions.
There's several superlatives you could use for SO, but it's more important to have a hedged form of "most valuable" for the investor I guess.
Or is the reporter just simply uninformed? I don't get it.
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