Reunion.com Raises Massive $25 Million Series A Round

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/04/16/reunioncom-gets-25-million-for-meeting-old-friends/

by farmer • 19 years ago

9 22 19 years ago

techcrunch.com

pg4• 19 years ago

I've been resisting the idea, but I have to say that this is starting to feel like another Bubble.

dpapathanasiou• 19 years ago

Not yet, because the exit isn't as obvious.

In the last bubble, you had some control over the process (there was a brief window when anything "Internet" could be sold to institutional buyers via an IPO).

Right now it's all acquisitions: dumb deals will get made, but in general, the buyers tend to be much savvier (and warier).

Also funding does not equal payoff.

If anything, they've just created a huge burden for themselves because the payoff has to be orders of magnitude higher to satisfy their investors.

abstractbill2• 19 years ago

Out of interest, do you think anything about YC would be likely to change if this did turn out to be Bubble2.0? Would you be likely to scale it back, or to continue funding companies and hope that some of them could ride out the storm for however many years it takes?

create_account• 19 years ago

do you think anything about YC would be likely to change if this did turn out to be Bubble2.0?

Ya-huh: sell that overvalued portfolio faster than you can say "Common Lisp".

pg4• 19 years ago

I do wonder what we'd do if the weather suddenly got worse. We might have to encourage companies to be more self-funding. Maybe we'd accept fewer.

zaidf4• 19 years ago

That is precisely why it isn't a bubble:) When you can see a bubble, you can avoid it while others go down when it bursts.

JMiao3• 19 years ago

Interesting to see if that's what people were thinking in 1999.

pg4• 19 years ago

I saw the original Bubble, and that was still a bubble.

Alex3917• 19 years ago

I think one of the biggest factors fueling the initial bubble was the misconception that the costs of doing business online would rapidly drop to zero, so it didn't matter if companies were spending way more than they were making in the short term. The bubble burst because investors figured out that:

A) The cost of hardware wasn't dropping to zero because companies needed to upgrade hardware to keep up with the competition, rather than doing the same thing at a lower cost.

B) By far the biggest costs of doing business were the people and not the hardware, and those costs were going to remain fixed.

Do you see any underlying ideas fueling this bubble that will ultimately be proven false, leading the bubble to pop? To my thinking this reunion.com thing is just a case of stupid business, rather than some underlying common fallacy that's pervading the web. (The closest thing I can think of is that we are all just overvaluing the ability of startups to create wealth, but if this is true then the bubble also has a lot more room to grow before it pops.)

pg4• 19 years ago

To the extent this deal is bubbly, it's not because it reflects some conceptual misunderstanding but more that some VC firm has too much money to invest. That was a big cause of the original Bubble too.

Readmore• 19 years ago

I agree but I don't think we'll see the same kind of fallout as last time. The fact that we (app devs), can maintain sites with much less cost means that even if people go bust with stupid ideas it should be much easier for good ones to weather the storm.

brett• 19 years ago

28 million users? Has anyone even heard of them before?

The premium account seems to add features that are anti-community fostering. If you're working on a social network I would think it's a bad thing if a writeup about you includes the phrase "snooping features".

jcwentz• 19 years ago

That is very fishy. Where can that 28m number come from? From some popular widget they bought or something?

danielha• 19 years ago

I cringed when I saw the $25 million number and I cringed again when I saw what the site was.

mattjaynes• 19 years ago

Wow. Yes, this is a scary development. This could easily be built by a couple of hackers with a few thousand dollars. I wrote about taking unnecessary money like this a few weeks ago at:

Outside Money and Irritable Bowel Syndrome

http://blog.nanobeepers.com/2007/02/20/outside-money-and-irritable-bowel-syndrome/

Reunion.com Raises Massive $25 Million Series A Round

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