| Asking the wrong question? What about asking, "How has taking this amount of funding helped this business?" Strategically, this much funding through all of the controversy it has generated, will guarantee this company/brand gets in front of nearly every early adopter over the next couple of weeks. It will drive hundreds of thousands of people to try it out. And that's before they've spent a penny of it. Loads of Posts on HN alone excitedly linking to the app on Android etc (one on the front page right now). After that, it will sink or swim on it's own merit. Would that have happened if they hadn't taken this funding? No. It would have had 5 minutes on TechCrunch, and then been forgotten about because it may not have been remarkable. Now all they need to do is implement a business model / some way to make money from it so their per-user revenue exceeds their cost of user acquisition, and use the remaining $38,000,000 as a marketing budget to spread it to everyone else. Profit. |