I knew I would find a work justification for the time I spend on Facebook. Being a ‘friend’ of Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook since we had dinner together a couple of years back, it was her status update “Congratulations to my amazing husband Dave Goldberg and the entire team at SurveyMonkey” that pointed me to the Fortune article – Why SurveyMonkey is holding off on its IPO. This is clearly a family not short of a bob or two!!
The news story is that SurveyMonkey has raised $800m in a private deal to buy out early stage investors – something that at this level usually requires an IPO. SurveyMonkey joins an elite club being valued at $1.35b. SurveyMonkey had revenues of $113m but made an EBITDA margin of c50%. Good to see the profits – but that valuation of over 10xrevenues is still pretty ‘rich’! At least retail investors didn’t waste their money as they did on the IPOs at Groupon, Zynga etal.
Actually, I really like SurveyMonkey. They have a decent business model along the Freemium lines that we adopt here at TechMarketView. The market for online surveys is clearly strong and the subscription model, that you need to use it regularly and effectively, is what we really love!