Valuations Make Bubbles
"...It's been profitable for five years, and until this week, the only way it made money was by charging $75 for each job posting on the Bay Area page. It just announced that it will begin charging $25 for job listings in New York City and Los Angeles, two cities that make up half of the 120,000 job postings the site runs in an average month...
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, the site, which employs only 14 people, will be making about $25 million per year on 12 percent of its available ad inventory. That's peanuts for most public companies."
So he argues they should go public. Two points. If your company is making this much (and it's this small), you have little reason to go public - unless you're a maniacal greedhead. Second, the numbers in this valuation don't add up. $25 million is way (way) more than I can get plugging in almost any kind of numbers, using the assumptions above.
But even beyond that, something in me really rebels at the sight of beancounters drooling over making $$ from cool stuff other people made...again.