Cloudflare S-1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#21

Post by BowBun » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

This comment is on every S1 thread. And every time someone mentions that it is essentially standard copy for all S1s, because you can never guarantee anything on the market.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#22

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

Completely unrelated: the font that they chose to use in their marketing material looks a lot like San Francisco. I didn't know you could use it for promotional material that wasn't software for Apple's platforms.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#23

Post by cremp » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

tiernano wrote: post #16

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

> Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? cough uber... cough

Exactly, and the real reason they did it was to cash out.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#24

Post by craze3 » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

This is perfect timing considering they made headlines all of last week for banning that one site from their platform. But Google Trends seems to reveal that the banning incident was only 1/4 of the search volume they got for their big service outage on July 2nd:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

I wonder how the IPO news will compare in terms of global search volume

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#25

Post by matthewowen » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:45 PM UTC

fastbeef wrote: post #11

I mentioned it in the We S-1 thread, but it really weirds me out that the S-1 is the first chance the public has a chance to see a company’s financial status.

why would the public have a chance to see the financial status of a privately held company?

alternatively, would you like to share your financial status with the rest of us?

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#26

Post by throw03172019 » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

Is this just a risk factor that the SEC applauds or forces?

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#27

Post by PatrolX » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

It's legal SOP for IPO's, to protect themselves in the event of lawsuits.

It doesn't "literally say" they won't make money, that's you twisting it that way.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#28

Post by cremp » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:46 PM UTC

BowBun wrote: post #21

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

This comment is on every S1 thread. And every time someone mentions that it is essentially standard copy for all S1s, because you can never guarantee anything on the market.

Except something that is not the same for all S1's, is the history of losses.

For a business to really give a positive, something needs to change, otherwise they stay negative.

Edit:

> and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future

That is not a common statement.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#29

Post by schneidmaster » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

BowBun wrote: post #21

cremp wrote: post #13

> We have a history of net losses and may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability in the future. I never got this... Why go public if you literally say you won't make money? Who would buy stock in something that will not return a positive? Are they starving for money and hope some public trading gets them a boost? Edit: It seems to be following the same pattern as the other tech IPOs recently, just to cash ou…

This comment is on every S1 thread. And every time someone mentions that it is essentially standard copy for all S1s, because you can never guarantee anything on the market.

Right, it is strongly in your best interests to be as pessimistic as possible in your disclosures. Even if you expect to turn a profit next year, the market is finicky, and if you don't meet your projections then absent these sorts of S1 disclosures you open yourself to legal liability for misleading investors.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#30

Post by superkuh » Thu, Aug 15, 2019, 4:47 PM UTC

leetrout wrote: post #19

superkuh wrote: post #5

Now they'll have even more incentives and pressures for censorship.

That’s an interesting opinion. What about being publicly traded makes you think they’ll me more incentivized to censor? Facebook’s performance suggests that playing fast and loose is preferable

So far the CEO has twice bowed to public pressure and unilaterally removed completely legal websites from the service because he perceived hosting them made Cloudflare's brand look bad.

As a publicly traded company the company is now actually accountable (rather than just in his head) to a slice of public opinion and to keep the brand as profitable as possible. That means not providing services for anything controversial.