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by curiousDog 4217 days ago
$200 million, for an email app from a company that was setup ~1.5 yrs ago. Has the whole world gone mad?
4 comments

I'm not sure how much the age of the company matters. If they have customers and/or revenue, that determines what they're worth much more than age.
It matters as an indicator of how long it would take to rebuild acompli from scratch.
How long it takes to rebuild an app really isn't that important. Revenue + traction trump technical sophistication 9 times out of 10.
Rebuilding isn't the hard part. It's acquiring the users, which gets into a whole host of non-technical things such as timing, messaging/marketing, word-of-mouth, and a good dose of just plain luck. Absolutely no guarantee Microsoft could do that even if their app was technically identical or even objectively better (see Windows Phone).
Does anyone know how popular was their app? How fast was it growing?
I've seen worse.
You have a lot to learn about M&A strategy.