You don't talk about rational during valuations of startups. It's all paper money and you put a number that pleases both of the parties. For example, you can give your friend $100 bill to start a company for leaf blowing and ask him to sign an agreement that you own 10th millionth of his company. What you just did in nutshell is value his company as a billion dollar business. This would just keep snowballing in next series rounds until Facebook is forced to buys it to protect its turf or they IPO it. After the exit, your company would falter and eventually evaporate because everybody is out the door after cashing out. Loosers are be "real" investors (i.e pension companies aka "your 401K"). I'm realizing the startups are game of eventual transfer of money from pension funds and 401Ks to smart aggressive get-rich-now personality types, at least 90% of the time.
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Quora is valued at $900M? Wouldn't that mean its worth more than the stackexchange network? I'm not sure I understand the rationale behind that.
You don't talk about rational during valuations of startups. It's all paper money and you put a number that pleases both of the parties. For example, you can give your friend $100 bill to start a company for leaf blowing and ask him to sign an agreement that you own 10th millionth of his company. What you just did in nutshell is value his company as a billion dollar business. This would just keep snowballing in next series rounds until Facebook is forced to buys it to protect its turf or they IPO it. After the exit, your company would falter and eventually evaporate because everybody is out the door after cashing out. Loosers are be "real" investors (i.e pension companies aka "your 401K"). I'm realizing the startups are game of eventual transfer of money from pension funds and 401Ks to smart aggressive get-rich-now personality types, at least 90% of the time.
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Not true.
"Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A Financing" (2010): http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/05/announcing-our-series-...
"Stack Overflow Raises $12 Million" (2011): http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-09/stack-overflow-rais...
and also http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/03/a-new-name-for-stack-o...
Stack Exchange has raised two rounds totaling $18M from USV, Spark, Index and angels: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-exchange
Also from your link:
"When I put all these things together the conclusion is that StackOverflow is one of those rare companies for which VC can really work."
Nope, looks like they raised 18M total over 2 rounds.
Source: http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-exchange