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Elastic files for an IPO

sec.gov

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Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#11
post #5

Is it just me, or does 33 pages of risk factors seem pretty high?

I used to put together deal documents similar to this when I worked in finance. It was literally my job to think about potential risks and then list them out.

"Hey boss, this investment has possible earthquake risk, but that seems very remote; do I have to put that in?"

"Yeah, put it in. No one reads the document anyway unless it goes to court and in that case, you can get dinged for leaving out stupid risk factors, but not for having them in."

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#12
> We have incurred losses in all years since our incorporation. We incurred a net loss of $52.7 million in fiscal 2018, $52.0 million in fiscal 2017 and $18.6 million in the three months ended July 31, 2018. As a result, we had an accumulated deficit of $233.4 million as of July 31, 2018.

Woah.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#13
post #2

Interesting. My initial instinct is to compare them to MongoDB which IPO'd about a year ago. They seem to be doing quite well since, but then again, who hasn't in the tech sector? I will say I very much enjoy Elastic's suite of products, I can't say the same for MonogoDB.

There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic.

MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB Inc's revenue, which is why investors are bullish on the company.

Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].

Say what you will about MongoDB (the database), but MongoDB Inc. is the most successful open source software-based company since Red Hat. You can see it in the outperformance of $MDB compared to similarly timed open-source IPOs such as Hortonworks ($HDP) and Cloudera ($CLDR).

[0] - https://www.elastic.co/blog/hosted-elasticsearch-services-ro...

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#14

Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document: "Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V." As far as I know, Elasticsearch h…

Isn’t the founder from the Netherlands? I’m fairly sure they also have a small office in Amsterdam, but most of their engineering is done by people working remotely.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#16

Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document: "Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V." As far as I know, Elasticsearch h…

Taxes aren't really relevant when you are losing millions of dollars a year.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#17

Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document: "Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V." As far as I know, Elasticsearch h…

They have a thriving office in Amsterdam. One of my friend works there. Also they are distributed. Their engg team is all over the world.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#18

Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document: "Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V." As far as I know, Elasticsearch h…

> As far as I know, Elasticsearch has no headquarters or offices in The Netherlands.

According to their contact page, their European headquarters are in Amsterdam (https://www.elastic.co/contact), so they do seem to have some kind of presence there. And if you look at their careers page, it seems that most of their engineering team is distributed/remote.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#19

Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document: "Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V." As far as I know, Elasticsearch h…

Even just checking the Contact Us page would show you they have their European HQ in the Netherlands. They’ve had a long history in the country.
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