Nicolas Nguyen onto Instagram
Clipped Apr 12
No bubble here? Are you sure?
Instagram’s billion-dollar sale to Facebook raised eyebrows Monday, renewing cries of a new tech bubble. But relative to other major acquisitions, turns out it’s a pretty good deal and not the least bit inflationary. To put the acquisition in perspective I pulled together data from a selection of 30 notable internet acquisitions over the last 10 years, from Broadcast.com to OMGPop to see if Facebook/Instagram for $1 billion was as crazy as everyone thinks. (I left out companies without public purchase prices or user stats.) CODEWORD Andy Baio The spreadsheet below captures the acquisition date, dollar amounts, and ballpark counts of the users and employees at the time of acquisition. Be warned: Any of these numbers are very rough, cobbled together from Internet Archive searches, old news articles, Quora answers, and tech blogs. If you have more accurate information, please leave a comment and I’ll fix it.
