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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".
It wants its tech bubble back.
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!
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?
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.
Is it a bubble, or just a sign that there's so little organic growth and so much cash on the sidelines that people are willing to invest in anything that might provide better returns that T-bills?
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.
The stock market is run by perceptions. You're talking about a perception shift to drive the market down, which is what the stock market experiences in a bust.
The problem is the stock market isn't the economy.
We have these businesses fueled by more and more venture capital, big loans, and the like, where people are giving them money to go be useless in the belief that they'll return money. In 2000, this resulted in a lot of rich folk hemmoraging money and taking big losses, only to come out major shareholders in Amazon.com and the like--they lost millions, and got to hold a little nest egg that turned into hundreds of millions a decade later.
When the bubble bursts, VC will dry up; rent will come due; and the capacity to continue marketing and incrementally-improving products that nobody's actually willing or able to pay for (unless they stop paying for something else) dries up. Everyone involved loses their job, and you get a wave of unemployment.
Then: the stock market shits itself in terror.
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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
The republicans are attacking Social Security too and it's pissing people off; and yes, you nailed it with Clinton and the Glass-Stegall repeal. Do you know what these things have in common? They're all protections built by or in following of FDR's recovery policies.
Then we've got the far-right wingnuts--the crazies who are attacking McMaster at the moment. I'm no fan of the current administration, but a quick look over McMaster's history shows military officer experience in real wars, as well as a frigging Ph.D. study into American history culminating in a dissertation on the Vietnam War. The NY Times liked his book, but criticized him for focusing on the failings of the American administration and not talking much at all about the superior military strategy of the Vietnamese; and their criticism misses the point entirely: McMaster looked at what we did wrong, instead of making excuses about how losing wasn't our fault. Maybe we'd still have lost the Vietnam War if everyone fixed all the stuff he talked about the first time through; and on-balance, addressing those issues would only reduce our losses and improve our effectiveness in military strategic exercises--which is highly-relevant to his current job.
I've got a Project Management certification. What we're talking about here is critical Lessons Learned knowledge. It sort of stands out to me that he knows not just how to do his job, but also how to improve his organization's capacity to accomplish its mission in total. We need that in any administration.
So what do we have? Pizzagate morons slinging mud because he's not a fan of their right-wing extremism. Great.
On the other side, extreme far-left wingnuts are trying to take Democratic seats in office to pull the party to the left. The folks that far out don't offer any real progressive policies; instead, they talk about breaking down the rich, the banks, anything they see as "too capitalist" or "having more than they need". No talk about how we're going to take care of the poor or working-class American.
Of course none of them are thinking too hard about how to protect this country--economically, militarily, or even politically. They're throwing tantrums and putting us at risk of a fascist or socialist regime, creating either Hitler's Germany or Lenin's USSR. Yes, the people attacking McMaster are the same bunch of folks who espouse that what we need to straighten our continent out is to make America white again--or at least they're mixed in there, and they're venting those ideals right along with their vitriolic attacks.
Have you ever stopped to consider the political risks a nation faces internally from highly-polarized politics? It's horrifying.
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