

A Massive $75 Million Round Streams Into Ustream. - aresant
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/02/01/ustream-funding-softbank/

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timr
They raised $20M, not $75M:
[http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020210-softbank-
pays-u...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/020210-softbank-pays-
us20-million-for.html)

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paraschopra
First it was Zynga and now it is Ustream. Who said raising funds is difficult?
No seriously, I have difficulty understanding how can such exorbitant amount
of funding is justified during a VC round.

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coffeemug
It's really not that much money if you consider the cost of running a
dedicated data center.

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aresant
Most interesting part of this article is that the money is raised mostly by
Japanese banks, earmarked for Japanese / Asian scaling.

Interesting to me because $75m+ buy you a lot of technical talent overseas to
build your own - what is it about ustream that makes it so compelling as an
investment target vs. a new start-up buildout?

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patio11
Japanese VC is a little quirky. Imagine companies with great big piles of
money and no effective pipeline to get it to twenty somethings. I worked at a
technology incubator and essentially the only option for startups was friends
& family, government microcapital programs, and (for the very lucky) angel
funding from local entrepreneurs. This funding environment turns out very,
veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery different companies than Silicon Valley does.

Things are probably different in Tokyo, which is essentially a whole 'nother
country which shares a long border and some people with Japan. (I'm only half
joking.)

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prakash
what's the startup/tech/funding scene like in Tokyo?

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ajkirwin
I really don't care about Ustream anymore. Not since, like so many places,
they went 'super kid friendly'.

I used to love the service as I could watch artist friends create works in
real time and watching an artist draw/paint is just.. wonderful. Except,
occasionally, they'd draw or paint tits.

And get banned extremely fast.

So, fuck ustream.

