Vonage Keeps Squeezing Money Out Of The Private Markets
from the mo-money,-mo-money,-mo-money dept
Vonage really, really seems to want to squeeze every last dollar it can get out of the private markets before either going public or selling out. As we've noted in the past, Vonage has a number of reasons for avoiding actually going public -- and they've raised so much private money that you almost had to wonder if they ever meant to go public at all. The latest is that the company has picked up yet another $250 million, on top of the $400 or so million the company had already raised ($200 million of which came just seven months ago). These kind of "raising lots of money, right before an IPO" deals do happen often enough, but they always seem a bit sketchy, as it makes you wonder about the motives of almost everyone involved. Financings are generally supposed to be to put money into a company to build out something, but these deals always feel like they're just about someone trying to cash in on "a sure thing" -- though they don't always turn out as sure as you'd think (remember when Idealab did the same thing -- and it turned, instead, into lawsuits). Considering all the questions surrounding the Vonage IPO, you might wonder how successfully this move will turn out for these new investors. In fact, some might question how a company like Vonage might need so much money so quickly. Have they already spent the $200 million they raised in May? If so, does that mean they're going to have run through this new round before summertime rolls around? At what point does the company actually start earning money on its own?
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My quick switchover may be attributed to the fact that I did not have POTS service though any of the Bells...
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Vonage is great
I love my vonage, although I knew ahead of time not to wait for them to ship me something, and instead went down to bestbuy and picked up a nice linksys router with vonage support. It literally took less than 10 minutes to setup my vonage account and have the phone working.
Typically any delays in number transfers are the fault of middlemen and the source company involved in the transfer, not of the destination company.
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Landlines are for losers.
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