[deleted]
Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
201–210 of 268 posts
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#202[deleted]
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#203[deleted]
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#204This seems like a very average deal for investors. They would have similar returns if they invested that money in Amazon or Facebook stock
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#205I figured out what is going on here. Walmart thinks to themselves "we want to be like amazon, we want to be huge online" and then jet comes along and is something of an almost competitor to amazon, so corporate thinks "oh we should snap this up" but...my gut reaction here is this is going to be a terrible deal for walmart, what are they going to do, keep dumping $500M/yr for it at a loss or what? Pretty desperate, bu…
Walmart has something Jet.com needs: one of the world's most advanced product delivery systems. Every Wal-Mart store is a distribution center waiting to happen. They are enormous and they are everywhere. Jet.com has something Wal-Mart can use to rocket its online presence forward: advanced online infrastructure, patents, a wealth of technology experts, and users. Together, Wal-Mart can beat Amazon at its own game by…
I hope it works out for them. Amazon's age it's showing, their site it's clunky and unresponsive at times. Sellers misrepresent their wares all the time. They're outright banning some products which, for a store, it's a very opinionated move if you ask me. And don't give me the "the Apple Store doesn't carry the Fire" crap, Amazon bills itself as the "everything store". It works sure and customer service it's still miles ahead the competition (this is expensive and something that it's always overlooked by the competition) but they're neglecting the storefront by trying to be "everything".
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> $10m is probably best case scenario (after taxes, you can afford a pretty nice place in the Bay Area and have some left over) That's an extreme overstatement - a 'pretty nice place' in the bay area would cost in the $1M range, maybe $2M if you have a pretty jaded view of 'pretty nice'. > you just made a million bucks, which will be about 700k after taxes. More like 500K - 39.6% federal and up to 12% CA state tax.
CA state income tax goes up to 13.3% (for >$1 million), it's 12.3% on taxable income of $526,444 up to the $1m threshold. There's also the ACA medicare tax of 3.8% on investment income (which applies to employee options) which kicks in if AGI is >$250k for Married Filing Jointly, >$125k for a single person. You can itemize and deduct state taxes paid (for now - some proposals to weaken or eliminate this), which cuts…
Great summary, one caveat: You often won't see full deductibility of your state income tax because between state income tax, property tax, mortgage interest and/or childcare, you find yourself subject to the AMT.
I would also like the ability to do something similar to the way a business can depreciate an asset over time. How about the opposite: IRS tells us how many years you can spread an _appreciation_ out over. Currently the tax code penalizes the guy who works below market for years and then sees a lump sum payday. Why should it?
That said, I'd be happy if we just did away with dual-basis of ISOs and eliminate the rube goldberg AMT credits.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll never understand remarks like that. The people who can put together something with similar functionality to Dropbox are by far in the minority. It's like having access to tons of scrap and be able to weld and dismissing metal bed frames because "I can do the same thing with some welding and scraps". Also the claim that it would eliminate my need for a USB drive was 100% on point.
They are the highly technical types that quite bluntly aren't ever going to be entrepreneurs because that's not how they see the world. They just do everything themselves. Not a bad thing, that's just what it is.
Coming to terms with the fact that I'm one of these people has been a mixed journey. Still working on/figuring out if this can be "unlearned".
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Ya, the thing is they probably couldn't. Not really. It's not just about money. Think about how many big companies (including WalMart!) have plenty of money but don't have the internal talent or culture to really drive change and innovate in ways they never have before. Companies are funny things. A lot of the time they can do what they can do and really just can't do what they can't do no matter how much money they throw at the problem. Sometimes (though definitely not always!) an acquisition can really help.
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well he was just referring people to sign up for the website. The money was money he spent advertising the website(?), so the money only went to getting new members. The stocks were given as the reward for the most sign ups, not in exchange for money.
The point is that the stock was exchanged for something (referrals, marketing, etc), and that the contest was announced (ie, general solicitation). That no cash traded hands doesn't matter. There is precedent of an almost identical enforcement action by the SEC, but my google fu is failing me.
Can a startup publicly recruit with the promise of stock as compensation?
Re: Confirmed: Walmart buys Jet.com for $3B in cash
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question. The answer is the same for all of them: roughly 0. Jet's last valuation was $1.6bn and it was, and continues to, burn cash like crazy. Investors aren't dumb, they see that. So they add a terms to their investment whereby they guarantee a return on their investment. For a company that needs hundreds of millions of dollars and is trying to beat Amazon? Let's say 3x. That means that if I put in $100m dol…
If no employees get anything, why wouldn't they organize and threaten to quit together (leaving Walmart buying the name, a founder or two and some technology with nobody to run it) to try to stop the deal? Isn't the whole idea of accepting 1/2 salary at a start-up because of your glorious equity? Whenever I hear about these "deals" where employees end up with nothing or close to nothing, I wonder what they are thinki…
There are fairly few F# jobs going around and Jet pays decent $.