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sschueller
Didn't we have call in party phone numbers like this in the 90s?

How is this worth 100m?

btowngar
I don't really see how your first sentence is related to the second!
Kkoala
They might not be related but the second one is a relevant question I think.
alangibson
This looks like a good example of investing in the founders, not in the business. The business is very WTF, but the article makes the founder sound like a known quantity.
pedalpete
I'd suggest the reason for the valuation is exactly because we had this in the 90s (and earlier really) and it never made the transition to digital until now. So the market has somewhat been proven.
zakki
Maybe they plan to ‘learn’ every voice submitted?
alangibson
This was basically my reaction, but the enabling tech is definitely not the same thing as the product. It seems like they're betting on the founders to find the right approach to make it an Instagram for voice (Instaphon?)
tkinom
Maybe they have super high engagements per day - like twitter's early days?
rasz
$20K per user is only 20x worse than Quibi with 1.3 million active users and $1.75 billion spend making it ~$1.3K per user, or even legendary Broadcast.com acquisition by Yahoo that made Mark Cuban a billionaire. Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle made a !brilliant! decision to pay $10K per user! $5.7 billion dollars written off in less than two years.
lowdose
It's a classical pull signal from a VC. While the valuation is on a 100 million they paid $10 million in primary capital and at least $2 million in secondary shares. But the amount of attention this generates is enormous. Everybody and their grandmother with a startup is going to apply to A16Z.

The opportunities generated from that is worth 10 million at least. It is just a better mouse trap in an economy bracing for the impact of a recession.

VC do not deploy marketing resources to normal channels they signal value through deal channels that do not make sense to other people. It is effective because even on the channel of a competing VC we are talking about A16Z.