Cyanogen Now Worth $1Billion After $80 Million In Funding Raised

[pc747]

No idea how much the top guys have cashed out or pay themselves, but with $110M raised so far that's enough to pay each of their 70(?) employees $150k for 10 years.

I'd love to know what their revenues are. Doesn't seem like it could be much more than a few million, and I can't ever see them making enough to pay decent dividends. Seems like purely a bet that either Google or Sammie, possibly MS, will one day pay billions for the company primarily for strategic reasons. But to me it's telling that he was at Sammie, and they chose to stick with Tizen and also NOT to outsource upgrades/maintenance to a company like Cyanogen. The latter makes a lot of sense, but I think most of us crack flashers would acknowledge the rom community is not a commercial quality service.

Good point, and plus the rooting community is more interested in specs than "freedom". Well specs and cost as we saw from the complaints about the price of the nexus 6. There are plenty of phones out there we can root and ROM easily but are not on par with the top devices on the market.

 

[FoxKat]

What I'm most frustrated with is that even though this guy may have devoted several years of his free time crunching numbers and coding and compiling and such, is that worth the extreme multiples of millions he is walking away with? Nothing he created was so innovative or game changing that it warrants a billion in valuation at this stage of the game. Maybe millions but billion?

He reverse engineered a commercial OS that was, yes, open source but still, his work doesn't even begin to compare with the multiples of Billion's that Google spent to build it from an obscure hodgepodge into a viable and functional commercially ready product. He is nothing without Google.

There are plenty of other developers that lived and breathed custom ROMs during those same years, again benefiting from the same huge head start that Google afforded them. What do they have? Nothing. How about them? Where's their payday? How about never?

 

[kodiak799]

There are plenty of other developers that lived and breathed custom ROMs during those same years, again benefiting from the same huge head start that Google afforded them. What do they have? Nothing. How about them? Where's their payday? How about never?

And in the early days of the automotive industry, there were over 1800 car makers in the US. It's not just about the product, Cyanogen had the ability to build a company and the willingness to take the risk - something that separates entrepreneurs from most of the rest of us.

Still trying to wrap my head around this. Linux has 1.5% of the desktop market, so on 1B phones and tablets Cyanogen could, in theory, easily get 30M users. But what's that worth? The problem is they'll lose 99% of customers upgrading to a different or locked-down phone. And the other problem is how much can these budget or niche phones afford to pay Cyanogen for their software? A buck or two?

I'm wondering if you were to look at Cyanogen's investors if a few don't have some serious political influence. Because I think, barring an FCC mandate for unlocked bootloaders, this company just isn't worth anything.

 

[pc747]

Remember Cyanogen? I See No Bullet in Google's Brain - XDA Forums

Interesting write up.

7 months later and Google is still standing. Maybe CM needs help learning how to work the gun.

I dont want to kick anyone while they are down. I am sure that comment back in March was meant to spark interest. But some times the best way to spark interest is to let the product/services do the talking. Amazing how people doing the most talking this year seem to make more noise with their mouths than their products (yes I'm talking to One Plus).