Compare this with Dollar Shave Club acquisition for 1B.
Either Jet is overvalued or DSC is undervalued !!!!
Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
171–180 of 268 posts
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Throw away for obvious reasons) It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales. We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers. The few smart people…
https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?
We have close to 2,000 of them, and maybe 100-200 I would consider proficient in any type of technical role.
There was a massive push to hire as many developers as possible, so recruiting extended offers to everyone that applied. Senior engineers who have no degree or have ever worked at a tech company before.
I have no problem working with people who are capable of doing the work we need them to do.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hear they moved their back end to Node on Black Friday last year. If true that's damn impressive right? Unless it was a facade.
The node.js front end is on its second complete rewrite in the last 2 years, and a huge source of the scaling issues. Almost all the backend is still in Java.
An army of below average engineers working in a language with no compile time type checking is a guaranteed recipe for writing unmaintainable code that needs to be constantly rewritten.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."[0] [0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
Everyone always digs that out, but the first iPod was kind of lame. I don't think it's unfair for someone to have pointed that out at the time. Especially when it's a hardware product - sure, the line is going to get better but you're not going to get a free upgrade to it.
That "someone" is Rob Malda, who ran Slashdot. In a way that comment embodies how the "old guard" on Slashdot was left behind in their predictions of what technology would become pertinent post-90s.
On the other hand if you look at iPod sales numbers he was right. Their sales really didn't pick up that much until they released some new models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.sv...
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Throw away for obvious reasons) It is all total crap. We dumped a bunch of time and money into rebuilding everything as SOA and on all the latest technologies. Most of the work was done by an army of Indians that couldn't get jobs elsewhere in the valley. Absolutely nothing scales. We have more servers in total than peak users to the site, and still can't get any respectable performance numbers. The few smart people…
https://jet.com/about-us - the photos shows there is a small army for Indians in Jet too. So do the "few smart people left here" want to jump over Jet now ?
The group in that photo seems like a pretty diverse bunch to me...
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#176Jet.com ran a contest where they gave 100,000 shares as the top prize for the most signup referrals. This Guy is probably one happy guy right now. He spent $18k and the value of those stocks are probably worth in the millions. http://www.businessinsider.com/jet-insiders-referral-program...
I'm surprised that his wife didn't divorce him for taking so much risk over this much money. Especially when they have 2 kids.
I didn't see anything in the article stating that she disagreed with the decision. Or that that amount of money will actually be missed. 18k is peanuts to many people.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#177I get why Walmart would buy them, but it seems to me they could have waited 6-12 months and bought the company for $300m. There's just no way they were showing growth. The only thing that makes sense is that Jet would have been damaged goods in 12 months and this was the only option for Walmart to build a millennial friendly competitor to Amazon.
Why couldn't they show growth? Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users. They've increased their free shipping limit, longer shipments, and kept pushing their deals onto Prime users only. I've bought more from Jet.com this year than Amazon in the last two years and Jet was faster with its free 2 day shipping than Amazon's free shipping.
> Amazon is getting worse for non-prime users.
But the number of non-prime users is also dropping.... so Amazon doesn't really care that much.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#178Jet.com ran a contest where they gave 100,000 shares as the top prize for the most signup referrals. This Guy is probably one happy guy right now. He spent $18k and the value of those stocks are probably worth in the millions. http://www.businessinsider.com/jet-insiders-referral-program...
The last $350 million round @ a $1.6 billion valuation priced common shares @ $5/share implying ~ 320 million common shares (napkin math ignoring a bunch of other variables). 100,000 options would represent .03125% of the company. Assuming the strike price was at least $500 million (maybe more), that's a gain of $781,250, or ~ 43x on his initial $18k investment. A great angel investment for sure, but perhaps not millions. If that's truly the same number of options that some of the earliest employees were granted (as mentioned in the article), then I feel bad for those employees as they probably deserved a bit more.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#179I really hope Walmart doesn't scrap the Jet Anywhere cash back program [0]. It seems not well known and somewhat controversial, but offers generous rates higher than everywhere else. For example, 4.8% from Expedia, 5.6% from Orbitz. Unlike every other cash back program they do not cap the amount for flights. JetCash is effectively real cash because many items are available cheaper than even from Walmart, Amazon, or C…
For a more comprehensive listing of cashback programs, try using Cashbackholic [0]. You type in the store you're buying from and it lists almost every cashback program that offers additional cashback on that store. [0]: http://www.cashbackholic.com/
Cashbackholic is not accurate from what I've seen, guess it's out of date. Cashback Monitor is accurate.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#180I get why Walmart would buy them, but it seems to me they could have waited 6-12 months and bought the company for $300m. There's just no way they were showing growth. The only thing that makes sense is that Jet would have been damaged goods in 12 months and this was the only option for Walmart to build a millennial friendly competitor to Amazon.
They're not just buying a pile of code. They're also buying an energized and engaged team that they hope will be able to modernize Walmart's ecommerce systems. They wouldn't have gotten that if they had purchased a broken failure of a company somewhere down the road.
For $3B, they could have hired are pretty energized and engaged team. Seriously, whenever I see these big acquisitions by companies of a product they have been trying to develop internally, I always think about the person in charge of that team. I imagine that they are thinking that they could have done a lot more if they had been given a couple extra billion dollars to hire an amazing team.