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The other interesting part about Pinterest is that they mostly gained traction outside of the traditional early adopter segments. Not sure any what's the right way to value this kind of company: obviously if it was an established public company, a $1.5b figure might be scary (as far as I understand Pinterest does not yet have revenue). However, it isn't: venture capitalists valued it this high, in the hopes that there's a realistic (compared to similar companies, funded at the same stage) chance that they will have a $7.5b-$15b exit. It _would_ be a sign of bubble if Pinterest were to go public without revenue (which has happened during the 1990s) , with pension funds (that have a very different risk/reward profile from VCs) buying the shares. You could say "it's 1999 again" if as a result Sun (hey anyone remember them?), Cisco, and Oracle stock rose exorbitantly as a result of Pinterest buying a record number of servers, routers, and commercial databases (hey, remember when companies used to do that?) and their shareholders expecting (with great certainty) that there will be more and more companies like Pinterest sprouting up, i.e., that sales will keep growing. I've only caught the tail end of the bubble (I had an internship in a startup junior/senior year of HS, 2000-2002 -- and participated in SVLUG, meeting folks who worked for Webvan, RedHat, Va Linux, et al). I still remember just how differently it felt from today: for starters you couldn't drive from Sunnyvale to Fremont (over the bridge) without being completely stuck in traffic (as early as 3pm, and as late as after 8pm), and without driving past at least 3 or 4 Sun campuses. Nowadays: there is still commercial real-estate in that area that is empty (including the former Sun East Bay campus, where manufacturing happened), the Dunbarton Bridge is fairly traffic-free even during the rush hour. |
They use a service which scans all links on the site and where possible converts them to affiliate links (they don;t change affiliate links users have set). So if someone pins an Amazon product and another user clicks through and buys that Pinterest is getting a cut. So Pinterest is already making money. I have no idea how much but it seems like it could provide a decent revenue stream.