Facebook Correction
For a long time, I've used Facebook as an example of deferred monetisation.
In particular, it was my example of how businesses that benefit from network effects should be given time to breathe and grow, before adding in anything that could hamper adoption and engagement.
It turns out I was completely wrong.
Reading the S-1, it's clear that Facebook actually started monetising pretty much from day 1 in order to cover rapidly growing server costs. They made a few hundred thousand dollars in year 1, which scaled quickly to $9m and then to $48m (!) by year 3. That's an insane level of revenue to generate in such a short period of time. Not only was I wrong, it was pretty much the perfect opposite example for the point I was trying to make.
It seems Facebook was clearly a beast from the get-go. That makes the $500k investment from Peter Thiel in 2004 even more of a steal, in retrospect.