Instagram was the topic of conversation in the office yesterday. Date Event Revenues (Cumulative) March 2010 Received $500K Seed funding and founded company. Launched 6 months later. 0 February 2011 Received $7M in Series A on a valuation above $20M 0 April 2012 Received $50M in Series B on a valuation of $500M 0 One … Continue reading “Perfect”
Instagram was the topic of conversation in the office yesterday.
Date |
Event |
Revenues (Cumulative)
|
March 2010 |
Received $500K Seed funding and founded company. Launched 6 months later. |
0 |
February 2011 |
Received $7M in Series A on a valuation above $20M |
0 |
April 2012 |
Received $50M in Series B on a valuation of $500M |
0 |
One month later they were bought by Facebook for $1.01B. Based on $57.5M of funding, two years of activity, zero revenue and millions of users.
The conversation revolved around not how to create the next Instagram but around how far behind we are in terms of an investment environment. Taking Instagram as a perfect result – investors are happy, founders are happy, employees are happy and presumably the buyer is happy.
It’s obvious that the environments are completely different between San Francisco and Northern Ireland but how different are they? There’s no way you could get $500K seed money in this province and to even get $7M in Series A would mean just leaving these emerald shores. It would be maybe not too much of a stretch to declare that it would be impossible, with public or private intervention, to get the sort of result that Instagram got. But the analysis that interests me is …
…if I came with an idea and said I wanted funding to build a company that is kinda social like Instagram and I didn’t necessarily have a revenue plan, nor did I have anything more than single product on the shelf and though it’s a deliciously simple idea, it doesn’t go far beyond tapping into a market of real geeks. It’s not for photo-nerds because they’re using DSLRs. It’s not for happy snappers because they’re just going to use the default app. It’s for a demographic that takes pictures and then applies filters and then show’s them off. (like Flickr, but for people who want weird effects). I’m building this company to flip, to exit like a swan. Risky eh?
So, armed with that idea, what would I get in Northern Ireland?