
The Mutual Company - _pius
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2014/01/the-mutual-company.html
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IgorPartola
Eh. The creators of Instagram are getting paid because their customer is
really Facebook (or any other large social network that was willing to buy
them). I don't have a problem with them making money (though I think their
valuation, and Facebook's valuation for that matter are too high by at least
three orders of magnitude). The relationship I have with FB (not an Instagram
user here) is that they provide me with a valuable service (easy communication
with friends I don't see every day) and I give them a certain amount of info
about me and the chance to show me an ad or two. (To date I have not clicked
on a single FB ad, though they may surprise me one day.) This relationship is
fine by me. I don't claim ownership over what they built. Yes, sure the stuff
I give them is mine, or as close to it as it can be, and if they say otherwise
I am not happy about it, but they built this ecosystem and got virtually
everyone I know to join, so they did 99% of the work as I see it. In the end,
if I was posting gifs to my own blog, I would produce nearly zero value.

Another way to look at this is that FB's valuation at the time they went IPO
was about $50/user. So sure, you can ask them to give you even $40 of that,
and sure if you also actively participate say on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram,
and LinkedIn, you might own let's say $200-$300 worth of those companies. If
you assume that companies like these cannot grow another order of magnitude,
you are not really missing out on much.

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geoffc
A very cool idea. A meat space analogy I recently saw in South Africa is a
rapidly growing farm supply company that automatically gives the farmers stock
based on purchase levels, it has taken over from the old co-op system.

