David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's a great point. It's interesting to know, too, the scale of both of these platforms at the time of the acquisition. It's like, what do they get for 800 to a billion? Musical.ly had 100 million monthly active users at this point and because of the scale of China, TikTok/Douyin had 500 million monthly active users. They're buying a big company at this point, not necessarily in terms of people or revenue, but that is a thing that tons of people around the world, and really the Western world use all the time. Yeah. We'll get into this maybe [...] forward, but what happened otherwise a little bit. You have to imagine that Musical. ly didn't have a ton of leverage at this point in time because Facebook is already out. We don't know what happened, but unlikely that there's going to be an acquirer. You've got Tencent and Kuaishou interested. Tencent is probably the biggest point of leverage, but Bytedance is executing a build-or-buy right in front of them. There's very little imaginable path that Musical.ly either on its own or as part of Tencent is going to win as a big standalone network here. Billions sounds like a big number and it was only up a little bit from the post money on the last round, but when you think about it, it's only $10 per monthly active user. When you think about what does Facebook make off a monthly active user per year in the U.S? It's like $25-$30. So, to be able to go and pick up what might be the next generation of social networks and get those users in perpetuity for $10 ahead, it's a steal.…

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