131–140 of 185 posts
According to crunchbase, they raised money at a $3.25B valuation in 2012. If they are IPOing at $2.66B now, that means a lot of stock options granted in-between are going to be worthless, unless they were granted at some very different price...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess what I'm getting at is something like this: If you're given 1% of the company in the form of stock options as an employee, how can one get a grip on what that's worth should a company IPO? Like, if I came in as a high-level hire at Square. Early in the game. Jack gave me 1% of the company in the form of employee stock options. Now I'm vested. What would that mean to me now, after an IPO? How does one even beg…
You would have been given an option to purchase an absolute number of shares, not a percentage. Let's say 10K. That may have been worth 1% when you were granted them, but as more shares are issued in subsequent funding rounds / IPO, your 10K will constitute a smaller percentage of the bigger pie. This is called dilution. You still have 10K shares, though, and they will still be worth $9/share at the moment the compan…
If covenants are not in place, you could also "destroy" the proportional ownership of shares by diluting down to a negligible value.
I guess what I'm saying is that people should always be sure they can trust management, ask for a cap table and probably consult a lawyer.
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Chrome Mac renders it correctly.
Since it's a character in Unicode's "private use area," its correct rendering is unspecified. (That code point's "use and interpretation may be determined by private agreement among cooperating users" according to the Unicode standard.)
I've always wondered - why was it so easy to replicate Square's scanning device? Seems like about 6 months after they really started gaining traction, PayPal came out with their copycat triangle one, and then a cascade of copycats. It went from not being a thing to there being tons of them overnight. I would imagine there would be somewhat of a barrier to entry, but it seems it's a fairly easy device to create?
Which is why Square's growth has been so impressive. It totally dominates the "dongle" market despite, as you note, the ease in copying it by well-resourced competitors.
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Effectively, yes. If an employee has 10,000 options with a $1 strike that means they can purchase 10,000 shares for $1 each. Since the shares are worth $9 the employee can then sell those shares immediately for an $8 profit, or $80,000. As far as how many shares Square has, it's much more than 300k. That's just what they're offering to the public. That percentage is listed in their S1 filing somewhere How many shares…
I'm seeing reports that Khosla led a Series A round of $10 million at $0.22/share ( http://www.cnbc.com/2015/11/09/square-ipo-will-net-big-win-f... ). At a $40M valuation. $40M/$0.22 = ~182 million shares at that point? So they've almost doubled the number of shares they started with if they're IPOing at 300 million shares. Does that sound like a reasonable bit of math?
Between Series A and IPO they had roughly 40% of their stake wiped out through dilution. (45M/182M=25%-> 45M/300M=15%) The dilution happened because, during that time Square issued 118M shares to investors in trade for the investor money. The company valuation at each round was determined by: Investment/shares issuedTotal shares outstanding after transaction.
Is anyone willing to give a contrarian take? I'll give it a shot: Square is an ambitious company with some great engineers, stellar UX and a giant total addressable market. Their business loans are interesting and could grow into something important. Square readers are a fashion accessory for hip businesses. No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb than its yuppie hipsters patr…
No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb I'm not so sure about that. I'd agree that they all have "fancy" (for want of a better word) payment systems, but I don't think there's a reason they have to be the fancy ones made by Square. But more importantly: the US is (finally) moving to chipped and tap-to-pay transactions. That means that pretty much all merchant hardware is going…
According to crunchbase, they raised money at a $3.25B valuation in 2012. If they are IPOing at $2.66B now, that means a lot of stock options granted in-between are going to be worthless, unless they were granted at some very different price...
Date Strike ($)
==============================
July 25, 2012 2.73
May 31, 2013 2.90
August 27, 2013 3.33
February 27, 2014 7.25
June 20, 2014 8.23
August 16, 2014 9.11
December 17, 2014 10.06
March 20, 2015 11.28
May 14, 2015 13.09
June 17, 2015 13.94
July 9, 2015 14.81
August 11, 2015 15.25
September 16, 2015 15.39Earlier quoted context omitted.
No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb I'm not so sure about that. I'd agree that they all have "fancy" (for want of a better word) payment systems, but I don't think there's a reason they have to be the fancy ones made by Square. But more importantly: the US is (finally) moving to chipped and tap-to-pay transactions. That means that pretty much all merchant hardware is going…
I have a quick question about this - there is exactly one business in my area that has actually switched over to chipped cards, and that's Home Depot. Everyone else goes "lol we don't do that, use the magnetic swipe like a normal person" when I try it. I thought that the adoption date was in October, and seeing as how everyone has the machines already... what the hell is going on?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No sooner would a coffee shop be seen without a Square reader and an Edison bulb I'm not so sure about that. I'd agree that they all have "fancy" (for want of a better word) payment systems, but I don't think there's a reason they have to be the fancy ones made by Square. But more importantly: the US is (finally) moving to chipped and tap-to-pay transactions. That means that pretty much all merchant hardware is going…
I have a quick question about this - there is exactly one business in my area that has actually switched over to chipped cards, and that's Home Depot. Everyone else goes "lol we don't do that, use the magnetic swipe like a normal person" when I try it. I thought that the adoption date was in October, and seeing as how everyone has the machines already... what the hell is going on?
Beyond that I don't know too much - maybe the price of the hardware is such that it makes sense to risk it for a little while before buying a chip-capable machine (do people lease them?). The part I really don't understand is that there are businesses with chipped terminals that still insist on you swiping, I can't work out why they'd want that at all.