
SlideShare acquired by LinkedIn - jaip
http://blog.slideshare.net/2012/05/03/linkedin-acquires-slideshare-2/
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aditya
Wow. 3MM raised, 119MM exit. 40x return, and they made that 3MM last 4 years
from 2008-2012 with revenue. Congratulations!

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ChuckMcM
The good news is that since the employees owned some we can be sure that they
saw some of that 119M$. That being said their site died :-)

[1] Random note: It seems to me that that KK would be the appropriate unit for
millions (thousand-thousands) and MM would be Million Millions or (10^12, or
trillions.

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sjtgraham
Mille, i.e. Latin for a thousand. Thus MM = 1000 x 1000 = 1,000,000.

I rarely see MM used to denote a million outside the financial world. I have
never seen a job, for example listing remuneration as "circa 120M" meaning
120,000

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eli
It's widely used in advertising/marketing. CPM is Cost Per Thousand.

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sjtgraham
> I rarely see MM used to _denote a million_ outside the financial world.

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eli
Yes, MM is used with some frequency in advertising and marketing to denote
million.

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tylerrooney
I don't know what the cash/stock split was, but it's worth mentioning the
LinkedIn's IPO raised $352M* so buying SlideShare was just under 34% of all
the money they raised.

* [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/linkedin-raises-352...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-18/linkedin-raises-352-8-million-in-ipo-as-shares-priced-at-top-end-of-range.html)

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ajross
Linkedin has revenue though, they're not just burning cash. Wikipedia tells me
they grossed $243M last year, so a purchase like this doesn't sound
unreasonable.

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debacle
I just looked at LinkedIn's P/E. It's almost a thousand. How is anyone
valuating the company in such a way that could even assume they would increase
their revenues 50 times over in the next few years?

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jcampbell1
P/E is market cap divided by profits. Your comment about increasing revenues
by 50x is non-sensical.

Consider a company with $100M in revenue, $1M in profit, and a market cap of
$1B. PE is 1000. Now say this company has a shot at doubling revenue in the
next few years without incurring additional cost. They will then have $200M in
revenue, $101M in profit, and the PE will be 10.

Just looking at P/E in isolation is like judging a programmer by how fast they
can type. You need to take a broader approach to reading financials and
understanding the underlying business.

I haven't followed LinkedIn close enough to have an opinion on the current
valuation. You may be right that it is overvalued, but the PE ratio isn't a
very good indicator in isolation of expected future earnings.

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blantonl
_Consider a company with $100M in revenue, $1M in profit, and a market cap of
$1B. PE is 1000. Now say this company has a shot at doubling revenue in the
next few years without incurring additional cost. They will then have $200M in
revenue, $101M in profit, and the PE will be 10._

Can someone provide a concrete example of a company that has doubled revenue
in a few years without incurring additional cost? I realize that it is
possible, but I'd love to see where this has actually occurred.

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jcampbell1
It is uncommon in most industries, but quite common in pharma and
theoretically possible in tech. I am not in front of a bloomberg terminal, but
off hand I believe Google doubled its quarterly revenue in 1 year. Something
like $800M-> $1.5B and added just 2000 employees[1]. That is why the stock
went from $110->$400 in the first year of being public.

It is not uncommon for small pharma companies to have 1000% increases in
revenue with little cost increase, especially if the companies don't
manufacture or do marketing and just take royalies from big pharma.

[1] My memory is not perfect, but I was invested at the time and paying close
attention. I remember being blown away that their revenues doubled and they
only cost they added to the business was mostly non-search related activities.

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apaprocki
Google listed on 8/19/04. Q4'04 revenue 1031.50M, Q4'05 revenue 1919.09M. Cost
of revenue doubled too, 362.10M to 655.16M.

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dm8
Congrats to team SlideShare. Good product!

Wondering whats the goal of LinkedIn for this acquisition? It is not a people
acquisition. And SlideShare is already integrated with LinkedIn's platform. So
I'm curious!

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oacgnol
It seems like a strategic acquisition. LinkedIn looks poised to be expanding
more into business operations/communications, especially given their previous
acquisition of CardMunch. I can definitely see them trying to position
themselves as an indispensable communication tool for industry and business
professionals.

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dgudkov
Then they should buy Yammer next.

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avichal
I think Yammer is probably too expensive at this point. But they might want to
build a competitor. Social CRM in general is a hot space and LinkedIn is well
positioned to take a big chunk of that market.

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adeelv
This is incredibly good news - no not because it's another acquisition but
rather it is an acquisition of a quality and worthwhile business that has a
defined set of competitive advantages to sustain itself in the long-term. Love
it.

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rhizome
Does LinkedIn own a Webex yet? If they're going from a recruiting site to a
full business-communications type model (archiving, in this case) they're
going to need it.

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mynegation
Webex is owned by Cisco for a long time already I did not hear anything about
their intentions to sell.

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rhizome
"A" Webex, as in a service similar to what they do.

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trequartista
Congratulations to the Slideshare team. Very inspiring to all the women and
minority entrepreneurs (and to everybody else of course)

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prayag
One of the stars of the New Delhi start-up circuit! Kudos to the team.

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blahbap
This makes total sense to me - slides and enterprise are like bread and butter

