I don't think 'selling stuff with a margin' was ever their business model. In almost every aspect of their business they act as a platform (platform to sell things to consumers, host photos/ music/ etc, watch/ listen/ subscribe to content, AWS). I feel like Prime's goal is to encourage customers to stay within the Amazon ecosystem and although its a revenue stream, it doesn't necessarily mean that 'monetization is now tied to walking the fine line between positive experience and pissing people off'.
Not sure I see how it's relevant to the discussion... The article you linked talks about Woodman's stock grants, and mentions how stock option repricing is used primarily by companies with volatile stock prices. The price hit the stock took would lower the value of Woodman's grants, so I don't feel like that article really dampens the main point in any way... Would you mind clarifying?
Agree that bullshit offers need to be weeded out, but I don't think it would make sense for an Acquiror to propose a price without sufficient information to base that price on. Justin's post mentions bullshit offers as not putting time pressure or promise of term sheet delivery, but the email indicates they're interested in getting it done as soon as possible. Hard to say if this really was a bullshit offer, but don't think an indication of price through an email, especially prior to an NDA, would make sense.
After reading through the quora article, I agree that different tranches may have different terms. However, if investors are buying 70M shares at $1 each, it implies that they believe a share of the company is worth that much. If the company has 3.5B shares, that's an implied valuation of $3.5B. In that sense, the investment does value the company at $3.5B. Whether that valuation (or a higher or lower one) is realized through a liquidity event is a different matter, and if/ when that happens, the valuation would be specific to that point in time.
> However, if investors are buying 70M shares at $1 each, it implies that they believe a share of the company is worth that much.
Well, you need to unpack what "worth" means in that above sentence. If you're using some kind of probability distribution over expected future outcomes (say, using some present value future discounted cashflow model with a probability distribution of possible future cashflows), you can see that there are all these possible future worlds that Stripe can inhabit. In some of these, Stripe is making lots of money, and so the stock is "worth" a lot. In some of these, Stripe is crashing and burning. In those worlds, common stock is worthless. But the preferred stock isn't as badly off due to the 1x (or higher) liquidation preference, and the other terms. So the expected value of the preferred stock across all these worlds is higher than that of common, and imputing its value over common doesn't quite make sense.
Agreed, that's why I've always thought of it as an implied valuation. Investors are going into it expecting upside, and the terms allow them to have a floor (regardless of what happens with common/ prior rounds), but I don't think they would make the investment if they felt an acquisition/ IPO/ other liquidity event would value each share of the company at less than what they paid for it. I don't think its unreasonable to use this to get to an implied total valuation.
Thanks! I tried to make it as simple to use as possible. I might do a blog post or two if people are interested in how it was made and the design process. In short: Python using Flask on Google App Engine; YouTube API V3; GIMP for images and logo; Notepad++ for coding; And then loads of battling CSS.
