+1. the author's quote (and statements like it) seem to have this underlying unspoken assumption that VCs are the sole vehicle through which new ideas become businesses. that always bothers me. VCs are a small asset class that chases returns and are not the vehicle through which all global innovation should occur. if that's the reality today, then it's more of a policy problem. institutional LPs have fiduciary responsibility to returns, not a mandate to solve long term difficult problems in industries the VCs they are paying don't understand.
the interplay between this pricing practice, and the proposed partial or wholesale bans on large tech cos making acquisitions is where it gets interesting. copy acquire kill just becomes...copy, undercut on pricing and kill. this pricing practice will become even more prevalent, and is much harder to regulate.
It COULD compete with tech giants, it COULDN'T live up to the valuation and had a fiduciary duty to take the offer.
Slack's worth $27bn (which is in the top 100 GDPs by country) and was FCF positive. With the right cap table it could stay private and self fund. But it went public, and by the rules of the game it chose to play ended up valued at like 30x forward revenue. To maintain that valuation it had to sell.
Yeah, while I agree with the article overall Slack is a bad example to use. It sold not because it was on its last legs but because Salesforce made an absurd offer. There are plenty of smaller companies that die or get acquired because they have no other choice.
Forgetting their access to extremely cheap debt, MSFT has $140bn in cash which they need to use to return as much value to shareholders as possible. They can spend 30% or so of their cash to aggressively enter a fast growing trillion+ dollar market, with a service that has the potential to take a chunk of out FB. And it pushes them in to closer proximity to commerce. From a return to shareholders perspective, I don't really see why MSFT wouldn't at least seriously entertain this. It's not every day a non-US product scares the hell out of US social media giants and then gets dropped in your lap due to a forced sale. Especially when they were willing to pay $25bn+ for LinkedIn.
Then you have AMZN becoming 3rd largest online ad service, and WMT sees another area in which they'll get crushed by Bezos. They get access to the advertising side via Tik Tok, and can rely on MSFT's team's to help them avoid screwing up the product.
This isn’t really a criticism, and I get that the article’s purpose was to focus on gold price as a signal for potential debasement…BUT…it seems like a miss to not even allude to or link out to commentary on the tremendous political power being the reserve currency affords the US, and the long term incentive for others to provide an alternative.
I think the Stratechery article on the acquisition is paywalled, but I liked his explanation that while paypal positions this as a consumer play, its about the demand gen value they could create for paypal merchants. Amazon's opposition seems to align with this thesis.
The Gallup article they link to (also the source) says...
"Overall, just 25% of Americans say they worry "all" or "most" of the time that their family income will not meet their expenses; 37% worry "some of the time"; and 37% "almost never" worry."
The source of this easily discoverable in the PDF Gallup links to on their article.
