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Cloudflare S-1

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Re: Cloudflare S-1

#191

Post by mffnbs »

luckylion wrote: post #55
minimaxir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> completely legal websites Are you referring to The Daily Stormer and 8chan?

Not parent, but probably. If they weren't legal, there wouldn't be an issue: Cloudflare complying with the law to block illegal websites would be a non-story.

Cloudflare making the decision not to serve specific customers in a legal fashion that does not discriminate against any protected groups is a non-story as well.

You don't often see private businesses making decisions like this on the front page of the new york times, but this one is a hot topic. They have no social, moral, or ethical obligation to serve these customers, and one's disagreement with that does not mean we should be forcing individuals to cater to everyone.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#192

Post by humblebee »

lhill wrote: post #182
empath75 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite possible that cloudflare gains more value from the customers than they gain from cloudflare.

For instance? (Honest question)

> Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential employees. These free customers expose us to diverse traffic, threats, and problems, often allowing us to see potential security, performance, and reliability issues at the earliest stage. This knowledge allows us to improve our products and deliver more effective solutions to our paid customers. In addition, the added scale and diversity of this traffic makes us valuable to a diverse set of global ISPs, improving the breadth and economic terms of our interconnections, bandwidth costs, and co-location expenses. Finally, the enthusiastic engagement of our free customer base represents a “virtual quality assurance” function that allows us to maintain a high rate of product innovation, while ensuring products are extensively tested in real world environments before they are deployed to enterprise customers.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#193

Post by carl_island »

formercoder wrote: post #157
zaroth wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the heck happened to their OpEx in 2018?! They went from growing at 60% YoY in 2017 with an 8% Operating Loss, to growing 43% YoY with an Operating Loss of 44%. To put it another way, in 2018 they grew their revenue 40% (+$58m) and grew expenses 100% (+$115m). I mean, apparently they raised a huge round and felt the need to increase spending massively. And then saw slowing growth as a response? Was there a massi…

Arguably a lot of that R&D should be capitalized and not be on the I/S. Investments like that shouldn’t impact net income. I’m more concerned with G&A going up 500%.

They are claiming the work needed to become IPO ready (accounting, legal, etc) spiked G&A. I see that a good a chunk of that was 1 time consulting but most was from additional staff.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#194

Post by tom_ »

nguoi wrote: post #111
matthewowen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Private companies in the UK file accounts publicly every year. It's an exchange for creating a legal concept that allows someone to absolve themselves of any liability for their company's obligations. I know companies in Germany do the same too.

Link to the service: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/

Cloudflare: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08778322

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#195

Post by tracker1 »

lhill wrote: post #182
empath75 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite possible that cloudflare gains more value from the customers than they gain from cloudflare.

For instance? (Honest question)

It adds latency to API services, it doesn't add value in conditions where you aren't under attack. It inhibits legitimate users with privacy controls (and/or Firefox) in place.

It may or may not be worth it, but it isn't a panacea.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#196

Post by vechagup »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #140

How can you get into this IPO at the listing price ?

You generally need to be an institutional investor or a preferred customer of one of the brokers that is issued shares by the IPO underwriter. Here's a good general writeup https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/article... and Fidelity's eligibility requirements https://www.fidelity.com/customer-service/how-to-participate....

Note that even if you meet the eligibility requirements, if the IPO is sufficiently popular you may still not get a chance to participate, as the institutions and people in line before you may have already bought all the shares.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#197

Post by makomk »

labawi wrote: post #181
_bxg1 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNS is far from centralized and DDoS protection is something that small websites would have no ability to do on their own. It isn't just a convenience thing, it's a literally-impossible-without-scale thing.

DDoS protection is something that small websites should not need. Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.

Not only that, Cloudflare has helped to ensure that DDoS protection is something that every website needs. Under normal circumstances, all the shady DDoS-as-a-service providers would DDoS each other off the internet and leave everyone else in relative peace. However, Cloudflare kindly provided them all with free, world-class, no-questions-asked DDoS protection to ensure that they could continue operating their business of destroying sites that didn't use Cloudflare.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#198

Post by verisimilitudes »

Surely I'm not the only one who finds it suspicious that Cloudflare, as a startup, somehow invested so much money and other resources into an infrastructure that other corporations would struggle with.

That Cloudflare is a giant MitM hostile to Tor and previous cooperation with the government in a past business leads me to believe Cloudflare is nothing more than a US government operation in the guise of a business.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#199

Post by Ayesh »

the_duke wrote: post #101
nannal wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets. Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts. Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.

Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level. I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it... The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.

It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector.

Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (Which they offered with Comodo even before Let's Encrypt), etc.

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