OfferUp, Up, and Away!

From a GeekWire article about OfferUp, a fast-growing Craigslist competitor:

…the company has yet to make any significant money, choosing hyper growth over profits.

“It’s obviously a little scary, big valuation no monetization,” admitted OfferUp investor Josh Breinlinger, managing director at Jackson Square Ventures. “It’s easy to throw up the bubble flag.”

But Breinlinger says that OfferUp is different.

Forget fundamentals. This time is different!

“We’re not built on any other platform,” he said. “We own all of the usage, we own billions and billions of dollars of transactions. We can monetize that.”

Display advertising, featured listings or in-app payments could help turn those free users into profits, he says.

“I think we’re only a couple years away from OfferUp being one of probably the four or five largest commerce brands in the U.S.,” Breinlinger added. “They’ll be in the company of Amazon and eBay and Craigslist and Apple. That’s kind of it.”

Even given a chance to hedge such a bold prediction, Breinlinger said he’s backed a lot of marketplaces and he’s pretty confident that’s where OfferUp is headed.

I’m getting some serious ’90s dot-com bubble déjà vu here. So much “can,” “could,” and “I think” driving absurd amounts of money into companies that have yet to prove any ability to, you know, actually make money.