It's how the wind blows these days in "tech". It's reminiscent of a bubble with all of these mobile apps calling themselves "companies" when most aren't even profitable. It reminds of the early 2000s when "how many eyeballs do you get monthly" was the question of the day.
Does Pinterest really need $400M+ in venture to operate? What are they doing over there? Advanced robotics with neural implants? Burn rate of $30M a month?
Utter bullshit.
Like I said before, VC's aren't dumb but they're also not very smart, most at least - they don't need to be. They flock to whatever's hot and popular (trendy) and invest. Their exit strategy is simple: a highly overvalued IPO where the public market will buy based on hype or an acquisition.
These unsustainable trends in extremely overvalued companies/apps will continue for a while, unfortunately.
Until the shit hits the fan and one of these giants of venture capital infusion tank.
Unfortunately, it's so much more than an issue of Snapchat being worthless, it's a large chunk of the tech community today being generally worthless by looking for the EASY WAY OUT - building some stupid app, getting 5M+ users for a few years of engagement and raising large rounds and cashing out. There's no intrinsic value of any kind in this.
It wasn't like this before the App Store.
There is still great technology being developed out there, but most people (and human nature in general) flocks to the easy way out, the replication factor, globalization, the art of copying something, or as Peter Thiel would say" "the 1 to n of globalization."