
Kevin Rose Passed On Pinterest At A $5M Valuation - barredo
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/14/the-one-that-got-away-kevin-rose-passed-on-pinterest-at-a-5m-valuation/
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daeken
I don't understand why any investor would be worried about missing an
opportunity like Pinterest at this stage. Yes, they have a lot of traction and
a nice valuation, but if you're an investor in Pinterest you have effectively
nothing to show for it right now. If they go public successfully or sell for a
large chunk of money, then you can kick yourself for passing it up; as it
stands, you made a logical decision with the info you had, and that _may_ have
turned out to be the wrong one, for the right reasons.

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nikcub
The last round of investment valued Pinterest at $1.5B. If an angel investor
from an early round wanted to cash out at that point they could have.

From $5M to $1.5B in two years. That is a hell of a return.

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the_mitsuhiko
That does not mean you get the money. Nobody is going to pay out 1.5B to any
investor.

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ojbyrne
Probably true, but with secondary markets you could probably sell a small
portion of your stock for 10x your total investment, and be left with an
immediate 10x return and huge upside with the remaining stock.

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hadem
This is coming from someone who has never used Pintrest before, but how does
it make money?

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dave1619
I don't believe they're making money as of yet. But they drive a lot of
traffic to eCommerce sites and they can find a way to monetize by promoting
products. Just like Twitter/FB are doing sponsored posts, they can do
something similar.

~~~
Firehed
Affiliate programs and injecting ads into people's news feeds are two complete
different and largely unrelated ways of monetizing. If pinterest goes the
route of sponsored pins (or whatever they might be called) instead of
affiliate commissions on product links, they'd be out of their minds and
hopefully be laughed out of existence. This sponsored crap is the best way
I've yet seen to piss off your users (and in twitter's case, alienate third-
party developers, although that's because they've made some poor choices).

Ads work on google because there's intent to buy (or at least learn about a
product category) Samsung buying ads against the iphone5 trending topic on
twitter is supposed to make me want their latest and greatest? Good luck with
that.

Pinterest just needs to tag links with affiliate codes whenever possible. I'd
bet amazon alone could make them serious money with zero detriment to the user
experience.

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samstave
Why is this guy still in the press at all?

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erreon
Why wouldn't he be in the tech/startup press? He's usually in the middle of it
in someway.

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samstave
Digg failed; he threw his employees under the bus.

He went to form milk, that failed and he took money from people. Oink failed.

He got acquired to work on G+, very quickly after got booted to Google
Ventures - and apparently didn't do too well there.

A lot of people have put him out there in good faith, figuring he was _not_ a
one-trick-pony - and that he had more in him, yet, now, we are talking about
how he failed at investing in a runaway success.

So, really, why? This guy is like the valley's version of Kim Kardashian where
Digg was his sex tape.

Look - I appreciate that he has done well for himself. But he has not created
anything amazing, nor done amazingly well for others.

After all this, his best accomplishment is interviewing Musk, perhaps.

Its a waste of energy. let me know when Kevin really innovates.

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drgath
> let me know when Kevin really innovates.

Digg created social news. The company ultimately failed because of some
missteps, but the concept is still thriving on the Web today and can be seen
with Likes, Retweets, Upvotes, and others. Digg Labs was cool, they had a
great API, and while I'm not going to claim it was the first website to
feature this, it was at least the first time I'd ever seen a website with an
RSS feed of search result pages. Getting an RSS feed (when feed readers were
cool) for any search query you wanted to amazing as it allowed you to follow
any topic you wanted to.

Overall, the early execution of Digg was brilliant. They just thought too big.

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ojbyrne
I feel like I have to say thank you. Execution and all....

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agpen
Why is Pinterest such a shining example when it doesn't have a fully developed
market model yet and hasn't shown a single profitable quarter? What makes it
more than just another overvalued company waiting for the next burst?

~~~
tzs
It's got a user demographic similar to FarmVille. Female, late 20s to late
30s, well off. I'd guess some have decided based on FarmVille that this is a
good demographic to grab the attention of.

This is be no means a scientifically valid survey, but based on the experience
of my married friends when they got smart phones or tablets in their families,
women buy, men seek free.

