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Ben Gilbert: evaluation

13 Jul 2017 Acquired Activision Blizzard

“I've been a little bit stumped too because I think on an absolute basis, it’s been fine like the growth has been what you would hope for out of a 10-year investment.”

— Ben Gilbert

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Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
13 Jul 2017
Publisher
Acquired

Transcript context

…Right. Or $19 billion into Apple or Facebook. You couldn’t have done Facebook then but I'm actually a little surprised that the growth hasn’t been larger. Think about it, like we talked about, this is 1 ½ times Snapchat in terms of engagement and Snapchat itself is 20 billion-ish market cap company. So, I don’t know, for me, without knowing enough about the ins and outs to understand why that’s the case from a valuation perspective, I think just purely from the perspective we usually take here at Acquired which is a more operational and product focused one, I think I’d give it a A-, I'm going to go with just because I do think it would have been really hard to do this value capture in some of the business model and pricing decisions that they’ve done around the product innovations separately. But it’s an A- (?) for me given that I'm just a little puzzled on the finances. I've been a little bit stumped too because I think on an absolute basis, it’s been fine like the growth has been what you would hope for out of a 10-year investment. I think that so on an absolute basis, it’s not like they did anything revolutionary. But then let’s compare it on a relative basis to where they potentially could have ended otherwise and then how other competitors were performing. So it is probably worth noting that they’re really the biggest sort of gaming company. They became the behemoth in this space. There were competitors that rose up incredibly fast in that time period. I mean, Riot Games sold to Tencent for a huge amount of money. I mean, estimates were that – Yeah, but sold way too early though for not that much money relative to what we’re talking about and relative to how big they are today.…

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