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WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

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Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#21

Post by munk-a »

gnulinux wrote: post #8
danso wrote: post #7

Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…

Huh didn't even know Pinterest is still a thing. Is it like Instagram?

Every time I've interacted with it I've found it extremely obnoxious, it is very strongly oriented to capture users within it's network and actively tries to avoid letting users do anything while logged out or to get a raw image.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#23

Post by munk-a »

frostyj wrote: post #3

Market will teach these companies a lesson

Yea, I'm sure all the people who built up a multi-billion dollar valuation with a chat application are really going to be hurting when it... wait, since all these companies have already cashed out will it just like shame them or something? Maybe the invisible hand of the market will wag its finger in a condescending manner.

A bunch of these valuations seem pretty BS, but it's not going to hit companies, it'll hit investors that think they're going to make 1000% RoI on the next WhatsApp clone... granted the market is still rewarding them so until it comes down I don't know if we can really consider it to be too foolish.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#24

Post by marmaduke »

Barrin92 wrote: post #11
wavefunction wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies don't possess a capacity to learn, being just a legal fiction and not actual people.

institutions are just as capable of learning than anything else as long as they consist of bodies that are capable of reform and memory (my home country Germany can tell a lesson about it), and anyhow the idea of an 'actual person' as somehow continuous entity is a fiction too. Individuals pass through just as many disruptive phases as any other entity. A person at the age of 5 and at the age of 50 is only 'the same'…

Iso9001 being a prominent example of RL on an organizational level.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#25

Post by dougmwne »

losteric wrote: post #17
dougmwne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, HN showing off its gender bias I guess. Pinterest is also supposed to be popular with dads, so we must be showing off our age bias as well.

Maybe. Or, Pinterest is just a narrowly scoped and realistic product while this audience is more interested in pie in the sky ideas.

Blockchain Pintrest for uploaded brains. Putting together a series A if you want in.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#26

Post by jbarciauskas »

Zoom is also up 50% since it went public in April, and Crowdstrike is up 70%.

I don't really get the sense in comparing a bunch of companies with disparate financials and very different industries. The We Company is a real estate company trying to convince people it's a tech company. This list mixes B2C and B2B companies, SaaS platforms with monthly recurring revenue with companies with advertising-based business models. Almost none of these organizations are reasonably comparable.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#27

Post by danso »

losteric wrote: post #17
dougmwne wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, HN showing off its gender bias I guess. Pinterest is also supposed to be popular with dads, so we must be showing off our age bias as well.

Maybe. Or, Pinterest is just a narrowly scoped and realistic product while this audience is more interested in pie in the sky ideas.

Is Pinterest really that much different in scope, or at least less "pie in the sky", than Twitter, which regularly makes the HN front page for not just tech/design posts, but even for being down? I won't argue that Pinterest is a more "important" company than Twitter (though I'm extremely biased since I use the latter and not the former). But I'd expect to see more HN submission/discussion from its engineering blog [0], given Pinterest's success at scale.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fmedium.com%2F@Pint...

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#28

Post by anthony_doan »

danso wrote: post #7

Tangent: the article includes a chart titled "Unicorns Gored" with the caption, "Many of the highly valued young technology companies have not done well as public companies". It features 9 relatively recent tech IPOs, including Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify, and Snapchat. All of the companies have a negative delta in terms of initial stock price, from -47% to -2%, except for Pinterest, which is +77%. I actually had forgotte…

> I guess that's a function of how relatively few HNers may be Pinterest users?

I actually use Pinterest. It's just how often does the opportunity to mention Pinterest comes up?

My pins are fashion (boots, athletic wares, etc..) and haircuts.

Re: WeWork IPO Shows It's the Most Magical Unicorn

#29

Post by femto113 »

Magical indeed. From the chart in the article it looks like for the most recent half-year they were paid $1.35B in rent and spent $1.23B to operate their properties, which works out to just $120MM in operating income for the year, let's say $250MM for the year. Per the S1 they already have around $4B of debt which looks like it costs them about $80MM per year in interest. That leaves about $170MM in plausible "earnings" if you assume they didn't have any other costs (they do, massive ones, but for sake of argument). The suggested IPO valuations are about 400x that amount, or about 20x higher than the average P/E of the S&P 500.
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