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Andy Rubin's Essential Is Now Valued at Over a Billion Dollars Without Shipping a Single Phone (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Essential, the new phone startup from Android founder Andy Rubin, is now a unicorn, according to reports from over the weekend. If you're not up to date on the parlance of Silicon Valley, a unicorn is a company that's valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is no small feat in today's market. This title is even more impressive, given that Essential has yet to ship a single device to consumers. According to a report, Foxconn's FIH Mobile filing for a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company revealed Essential's new unicorn status with a valuation of around $1.2 billion.
I have a much better startup idea than this. Wireless Plumbing! Think about it!
I figure it should be worth at least twice as much as Essential.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
And yet, there are still people who say we aren't in the middle of another IT bubble.
It wants its tech bubble back.
A friend of mine had their Samsung Galaxy S8 crash for no good reason (although he was in an area that had bad reception) and it factory reset automatically and he lost all his data (photos, apps etc).
Not sure whom to blame but I've never heard of that happening with any other phone or phone OS.
a unicorn is a company that's valued at over $1 billion dollars, which is no small feat in today's market
Apparently, it now is...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's only worth that much on paper with projections. If you invest $1 for 0.00000000000001% of a company then that company would be worth more than his company using the same logic. It's how they do it but still, saying it's legit worth over a billion is only true to clueless people.
I would like to invent a tech site which lets users submit great content all on their own without any intervention - I was thinking of calling it dotslash (similar to unix -> ./) - dotslash.org/dotslash^HH
Foxconn is not at arms length from Essential. They didn't only get 0.25% of the company. The 3 million dollars will go straight back to them for manufacturing parts of the phone. If someone completely unrelated to Essential paid 3 million and they didn't get anything else other than the stock then you could say the company was worth 1.2 billion.
that money is fiction, and people with better bullshitting skills can get arbitrary amounts of it?
Someone gave me a dollar and I gave him 1e-13 of my company. My company doesn't do anything yet, it's already worth 10 trillion dollars, and is currently profitable.
If this site can be trusted, the global smartphone market is some 400 billion dollars annually. The total invested in Essential to date seems to be around 300 million, which is definitely real money, but not necessarily a shocking figure. Something like 30-50 billion of VC funding gets thrown around on a quarterly basis. Andy Rubin has as good a chance as anyone to be able to deliver some value for that money, and he can probably be counted on to be able to put together a good team as well. If Uber can lose billions annually without anyone batting an eye then I don't know why these guys deserve the press, or why the "...without shipping a product" angle was necessary. Are we expecting that they're somehow less likely to do with the additional funding? Is there some part of bringing a smartphone to market that's expected to be quick, cheap, and easy?
Apparently it's a slow news day.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
As long as folks believe and witness people throwing money at these things and watching valuations keep going up, we're going to continue to see this shit.
Tech is popular again and everything is going up. Money from overseas is pouring in because of all this cheap money and lack of decent returns anywhere.
All of the World's central banks are feeding into this nonsense. They are so afraid of recession that they are setting us up for something worse - again. And when - not if - we can a couple of quarters of earnings declines, we'll start to see a sell off.
OR, we'll see a sell off if N. Korea decides to see if Trump is bluffing and they find out that he's probably not.
In other news, AOL buys Time Warner, VA Linux has the largest first-day IPO price increase, and Pets.com announces free shipping on all 50 lb or larger bags of dog food...CEO says they'll "make it up in volume."
Unless things get crazier than they are now, I see this bubble deflating more slowly. There are fewer crazy pointless IPOs (Twitter and Snapchat are notable exceptions.) The average investor isn't being pushed so hard to buy tech stocks, and there's less cheerleading on CNBC this time. So maybe we've learned something.
It's amusing that one thing keeping this bubble inflated is the thing that I think we're going to take away from the bubble period and use...cloud computing. When a VC just has to cut a check to Amazon or Microsoft or Google instead of building a data center and buying network capacity, profitless startups can kick along for a lot longer. All that free capital can then be used to deck out a startup's hip trendy San Francisco office space with preschool furniture, free food and free massages for their employees.
Make no mistake though -- there are going to be thousands of scrum masters, DevOps ninjas and JavaScript framework of the month coders looking for work as the field contracts. Not because they're bad (although I hear startups are hiring anyone who can fog a mirror and write code in Rust...) but because you just don't need as many superficially-skilled web developers to go around. Just like last time, the good people will find or keep work, although I'm sure a lot of people's lives will be upended while they look to escape startup-land.
This has GOT to be a sign that SV tech startups are egregiously overvalued and we're just waiting for the bubble to burst, right?
Shut up and take my money
a $3 million investment in Essential for around 0.25 percent of the fledgling phone company
That only works on paper and is pretty much irrelevant in the real word. You can't scale up from a 0.25% transaction to expect the same amount of money for a 100% transaction (i.e. selling the company). So this definition of a "unicorn" doesn't hold up. And the paper valuation of the company based on this is bogus.
If it did work, I would make an absolute packet by selling my brother a one-ten-millionth of a percent share in my company for $1 and then tell the world that I'm a billionaire (less $1).
Though this sort of silliness goes a long way to explaining financial crashes.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons