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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

What was the $1B valuation based on? It seems absurd.

I've discovered a foolproof way to make billions of dollars and take controlling interest in the major corporation of your choice. I'll share my secret with you, since I'm all done using my system (hint: if you want to buy any corporation known by three capital letters... forget it.).

Step 1:

Find somebody you trust to work with you as your partner. Your wife is a good choice, although in a pinch your pet hamster will suffice.

Step 2:

Create a dot.com company. Building a company with strong technical underpinnings and lead by a passionate and visionary leader is best. However, you can also cycle through e-<word>.com, choosing <word>'s from the dictionary until you find one which isn't used. Whatever.

If you find all the names are used, try the dictionary of a foreign language.

Step 3:

Go public! Issue 1,000,000,000 shares of stock. Keep 999,999,999 shares for yourself, and sell the other share.

Step 4:

Have your partner buy that share for $100.

Step 5:

Party!!!!! You now have a $100 billion market cap. Make sure you give interviews to Time, WSJ, and so forth. (If you don't understand why you have a $100 billion market cap, please close your AOL account and go back to your day job; this system isn't for you.)

Step 6:

Buy the company of your choice, using your $100 billion in stock. (Note: avoid companies created using this system.)

Step 7:

Retire. You've worked hard, and you deserve it.

(edit: source unknown, found on r.h.f a long time ago)

Step 6 is the difficult part these days, specifically finding companies not built using this system.

How do you go public so easily?

The $1B valuation was for their last round which was a $50m investment by Tencent, the company behind WeChat. The investment was more about a partnership between the companies than the economics. At the time, Kik's CEO said: "Today, there are only five other companies in the world that see the future like we do: Tencent, Line, Facebook, Snapchat, and Telegram. One of them owns the largest internet market in the world. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with them as we run this race."

I even wonder how Tencent thought Kik was worth $50m. That seems absurd.

When Tencent invested, it had 300m users including 40% of teenagers in the US, and were growing fast.

For Tencent (which makes WeChat), it's worth it to spend 0.03% of their market cap to partner with a fast growing app in the US market.

Whatsapp. Slack. Any chat app with sufficient user base seems to end up with multi-billion valuation.

This almost fees like the valuation was based upon the probability Facebook might buy them?

I'll give you 1$ to own .0000000001 % of your house. Now it's worth 1 billion, congrats!

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