That's just $4 per registered user, so it's not a ton of money. And they've gotten people to give them a ton of data. Venues, locations, tips, activity.
I've been a user since the Dodgeball days, and I personally wouldn't invest in them at this point. But I don't think it's a crazy gamble.
Facebook took $2.24 billion in investment before going public. Twitter took $1.16 billion. Free-to-use network-effect businesses are expensive to build, because you need to build a mainstream-quality product and keep it running quite a while before you can monetize. Indeed, it's best to wait as long as possible before monetizing.
(i) Facebook did not raise $2.24bn, it was much (much) less. That $2.24bn figure, which comes from Crunchbase, includes secondary equity sale (shares sold by employees, early investors, etc. to third party investors like DST). That cash was not seen by Facebook.
(ii) Facebook and Twitter raised so much capital later on to support real user/activity growth, the primary use of proceeds was not fund their ongoing burn rate. The $41m raised by FourSquare is going to finance current operations/burn rate, not growth.
Which money do you believe didn't go to Facebook? Looking at the Crunchbase investments, only the $120m Elevation Partners money appears to be secondary-market purchases. Facebook itself says that they took the $1.5 billion:
Regarding point ii, what expenses do you see as under each category? I'm not denying the difference; I'm just not clear what you think is being done differently with the money.
