Instagram <=> $ 1 Billion Evaluation
No revenue.
12 employees.
Three year old company.
$1 Billion buyout by Facebook.
Risk => Revenue => Don’t add up.
Go figure …
Another example of the demise of traditional business logic or the evolution of new business rules.
Half or more of the business books now published deal with risk. Or, so it seems.
I just got back from Barnes & Noble. As a past author, I check out new hard cover books, which are a window into important business trends.
Maybe, it’s a situation of ‘where you sit is what you see.’ So, I sit in the risk space and all I see is risk. Risk in crossing the street. Risk in buying this or doing that.
But, the new hard cover business books point to a hard realization that risk is the new normal or new reset. And, it’s not going away.
Some implications: All if not most of the business rules are changing. Organizations and people are not ready for the changes. We need new: 1. Risk based, problem solving and 2. Risk based, decision making tools.
Hence, we are getting lots of business trade books explaining what to do to deal with risk.
… In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:
With each succeeding generation in tech the Internet, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable.
Yet, Web 1.0 companies never really seemed to be able to grasp the importance of building a social community and tapping into the backgrounds of those users. Even when it seems painfully obvious to everyone, there just doesn’t seem to be the capacity of these older companies to shift to a new paradigm. Why has Amazon done so little in social? And Google? Even as they pour billions at the problem, their primary business model which made them successful in the first place seems to override their expansion into some new way of thinking.
Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.
From http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/320137:
