[joncalhoun]

I suspect that if HN had been around when Google was raising we would have read the same type of comments there.

Based on the numbers in the article, they could very well be in the billions of rev within a few years if they can maintain the growth.

[bane]

The problem I have with valuations is that they're supposed to somehow reflect what somebody might pay to buy the company. But because of the hamfisted way they're calculated they seem to be so huge or so small (depending on the case) that they're essentially meaningless.

For example, here's a company operating in an ultra-competitive space, from a fairly interchangeable position (middle-man) that has a supposed value on the market that's 225x what they expect to bring in in revenue during 2015. And they're losing 5x their projected revenue in customer acquisition costs (yeah yeah, growth stage and all that). "Valuation" as a term is clearly divorced from actual business realities.

People who claim to be smarter than I will say "but the investors figure the company's market position in through their N-round investment terms". So what do I know?

[trimbo]

> I suspect that if HN had been around when Google was raising we would have read the same type of comments there.

Before raising, Google had a substantially better product than Altavista running on a dev server in the stanford.edu domain.