This is just part of the acqui-hire culture in silicon valley: throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. The idea that you don't need a business model as long as you can grab a large enough userbase, then come up with a business model later, or get aquired, only works when you have lots of venture capital, because relatively few of these startups produce sustainable businesses. This model isn't practiced so much in Europe, where if you want to build a business, you better be considering how to monetize it from the beginning, because there aren't many sources of capital for ideas that don't have a detailed business plan.
I think that a lot of startups would benefit not from disregarding thinking about how they're going to make money, but not making it their primary focus.
We had an idea a few months back for a product we wanted to exist, talked to some other people that also wanted it, built it (total cost ~$120 and lots of free time), got some people to use it, and one of the first thing several of them said is "I wish I could pay a few dollars to do X". We hadn't thought of that.
The point is, we could have said, no there's no point in doing this, the only clear monetization path for us is worth less than the cost in hosting, and killed the idea in January. However, we decided that lots of people would probably use it if it were free, so we built it, and it turns out that we would be able to make it profitable by testing it.
