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Elastic files for an IPO

sec.gov

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#22

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…

Be sad at your politicians. They allow for it. This tax avoidance scheme is known for years now and nobody takes action, so it must be okay for them.

And as a public company, it is your obligation to not spend more money on tax than you are legally obliged to, unless you’re doing charity.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#23
post #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.

No, he's Israeli, and Elastic started when he lived here. I don't think they have offices in Israel which is atypical.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#25
post #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,…

Exactly. Serious investors aren't going to look at this list, but rather do their own research. This is basically to protect against lawsuits.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#26
post #4
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.

To be fair, both MongoDB and Elasticsearch have had serious issues as pointed out via the Jepsen tests. https://aphyr.com/posts/317-jepsen-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/323-jepsen-elasticsearch-1-5-0 Though, all those issues have been fixed for both MongoDB and Elasticsearch so it's not necessarily fair to judge them based off past performance. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... h…

These jepsen tests cover elasticsearch 1.5, a large number of issues have been progressively fixed. We're now at ES 6

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#27
post #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 In…

I can't speak for others, but I was looking to set up a quick elastic search cluster and Elastic's hosted offering beat the pants off of AWS ElasticSearch in terms of usability, polish, ease of getting started and security-by-default.

Now, I don't have a lot of data in the cluster, so we'll see how performance is when that happens, but would definitely recommend Elastic's offering.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#28
post #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.

I edited my post. Missed those tabs. Thanks!

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#29

> 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.

Thanks for posting these. These numbers and loss margins seem typical for a company in this line of service (cloud or self-hosted distributed databases or data services.) See similar recent IPOs for MongoDB, Cloudera and Hortonworks.

Another useful section related to revenue in the paragraph just before the one you posted:

> As of July 31, 2018, we had over 5,500 customers across over 80 countries and in a wide range of industries, compared to over 5,000 and 2,800 customers as of April 30, 2018 and 2017, respectively. Our revenue was $159.9 million and $88.2 million in fiscal 2018 and 2017, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 81% for fiscal 2018. Our revenue was $56.6 million and $31.6 million in the three months ended July 31, 2018 and 2017, respectively, representing period-over-period growth of 79%. Subscriptions accounted for 93% and 90% of our total revenue in fiscal 2018 and 2017, respectively. Subscriptions accounted for 91% of our total revenue in the three months ended July 31, 2018. In fiscal 2018, revenue from outside the United States accounted for 39% of our total revenue.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#30
post #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,…

I read them so that I can understand catalysts for a great trade, and jump on that when it happens.

My favorite risk factor was "Timothy Sykes doesn't like us"

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