[ajit_singh]

$1 billion!

I understand that the valuation of a company is also determined by its earning potential but did Boston Dynamics have that so much that it justified this crazy valuation.

From what I know it barely made any revenue while being in business for more than 25 years. It couldn't find a customer to produce any of its hyped robots at scale. It was clearly a loss-magnet entity for Softbank which is in a selling mode in the wake of Uber/Wework disaster.

In any other country valuation like this would have become the subject of enormous assessment because outside the US, $1 bn still means a lot of money. But I think USA is beyond but I really do not understand the system which facilitates such transaction without the corresponding exchange in value. How is the money being made?

[jitix]

As an immigrant engineer I feel this is actually good because it shows that the market in the US is bullish on new technologies. I believe this is what has led to most of the major inventions in the past 100 years to come from the US.

In my home country (India) it’d be impossible for a company to reach such valuations based only on research and prototypes, which in turn leads to low salaries for STEM people, culminating in brain drain.

[Abishek_Muthian]

A ~30 years bet on a company is difficult in any country or any sector for the matter of fact unless it has potential to change the landscape of future wars, thereby providing ROI in the form of strategic superiority or at least that's what U.S. DoD hoped for with Boston Dynamics and it didn't happen.

On the same context,

Imagine if Boston Dynamics was only involved with drones, it would have never changed hands.

[jitix]

And it’s fine. Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.

My point was that the economic culture in the US supports and this kind of innovation. No other country - maybe barring China, can do that.

I’m not praising the US as a country either (infact I’m moving to Canada). The US has deep flaws but it’s one redeeming quality is industrial innovation.

[Abishek_Muthian]

>Boston Dynamics paved a way with research and prototypes and some company will come along and commoditize it.

BD had already started selling its robots(Spot, Pick) commercially and had even had projected a plan for profitability[1].

Current sale is not really an indicative of its inability to make money but rather desperate situation of Softbank VF after string of poor bets, this must have been hard as Masayoshi Son is a self-acknowledged robophile.

[1]https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/14/boston-dynamics-ceo-profi...

[unishark]

We already knew it was a bull market for technology.

When absurd deals are happening it could mean the bubble is about to burst though.

[ajit_singh]

This immediately follows the Slack acquisition which was sold at at price that is almost 1/10th of Pakistan's GDP. Keep in mind that Pakistan has 220 million people.

One individual company with less than 2k employees is valued 1/10th of what 220 million people collectively produce in a year. How can one explain this asymmetry. No doubt it was the biggest tech acquisition in the history but tech executives in the US bolstered by Fed's dollar printing have been breaking paper records almost every year.

Maybe I do not understand the economics of this well so I would gladly accept any roast of my above observation.

[ZephyrBlu]

In my noob understanding, Salesforce overpaid on the acquisition for a couple of reasons:

1) They are desperate to continue growing and need acquisitions to do so

2) They believe Slack is their best bet to boost their revenue in the coming years

In saying that, the asymmetry is the markets each of them serve though. Are majority of Pakistani's serving B2B customers with a SaaS? No, and so the profit/revenue generation is different.

[jitix]

I agree Slack is way over valued for something which could be switched without much effort. In fact my anecdotal knowledge from my network suggests that MS Teams is taking over.

However the analogy with Pakistan is incorrect. Pakistan has a lot of people who simply don’t have the skills to be productive. Same with India. And in South Asia progress and reform doesn’t happen easily.

[jitix]

I think the boom bust cycle is good. It trims the extra fat and runs unsustainable businesses (like Boston Dynamics, Uber, WeWork, etc) and lazy unproductive individuals to the ground.

As a side effect home prices in the US remain relatively stable.

In India it’s impossible for a single income family to own a home and it’s a struggle with dual incomes. Same with Canada where I’m planning to move (since I don’t have patience to wait 20 years to start my own company)

[vibrio]

$1B seems like a quite a bargain when you look at Tesla $TSLA or Moderna $MRNA valuations with any sort of fundamental analysis. (flame proof suit on)

[tozeur]

It was acquired for the IP, not its earning potential, which in turn Hyundai would be able to monetize.

[varjag]

It's Snapchat money..