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Cloudflare S-1

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Re: Cloudflare S-1

#201

Post by 6cd6beb »

notfromhere wrote: post #95
6cd6beb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have incurred net losses in all periods since we began operations and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future. The admission that "we've never made money and there's a good chance we never will" being boilerplate S-1 copy is monstrously troubling. When no one needs to see that a company can made a dollar before investing because profit is for suckers and this company's probably g…

You can't legally guarantee a return unless you actually guarantee a return

Fair enough, but there may be a small middle ground between "guaranteeing a return" and "never made a dime in profit and in fact is burning through millions or billions of dollars annually with no expectation to stop any time soon"

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#202

Post by zymhan »

the_duke wrote: post #81
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…

My guess: new development-intensive products like the 1.1.1 DNS, Wireguard, WAF etc plus general scaling and growth on one side, and increased competition from established cloud services on the other. After all, if you are already on eg AWS, just using Cloudfront is temptingly easy. (even if bad from a redundancy perspective)

> just using Cloudfront is temptingly easy

IMO this is giving way too much credit to AWS

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#203

Post by tracker1 »

est31 wrote: post #120
dsl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.

> Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.

It's really both. I think the biggest issue that some have is that Cloudflare has no real competition at this point for those that cannot afford the more expensive options. And combined with that, they control a very large portion of internet web traffic and are in a position where they could potentially be heavily influenced by government actors.

I'm not saying that it's happening, or even that it is the biggest concern for most. But it should be a bit of a concern to some, and one may want to think about if they really want to use them in this context. It's a matter of knowing and evaluating all of the risks involved.

Does it really matter for a static blog that only publishes a few articles a week? Not so much.

Does it matter for a media company that publishes articles a government doesn't like and initiates contact through it's website? Probably.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#204

Post by notfromhere »

6cd6beb wrote: post #201
notfromhere wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't legally guarantee a return unless you actually guarantee a return

Fair enough, but there may be a small middle ground between "guaranteeing a return" and "never made a dime in profit and in fact is burning through millions or billions of dollars annually with no expectation to stop any time soon"

that's why you should learn how to read financial statements before making investments in instruments like stocks.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#206

Post by tracker1 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #146
dsl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you fully understand the problem. If I hit the big red button and just shut Cloudflare off, millions of websites drop off the Internet. It is a massive single point of failure, and as you point out, a vertically integrated service (DNS, DDoS protection, WAF, proxying, etc).

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.

DNS for sites protected by cloudflare are on cloudflare's DNS afaik.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#207

Post by chx »

concert-gilled wrote: post #80
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess someone beat them to CLOUD?

I don't think NYSE has 5 letter tickers.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/investing/ticker-symbol-confu...

> Bankrupt electronics retailer Tweeter Home Entertainment soared nearly 1,000% in 2013 after Twitter (TWTR) filed to go public. That's because Tweeter's ticker was "TWTRQ" and Twitter had registered for "TWTR."

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#208

Post by concert-gilled »

chx wrote: post #207
concert-gilled wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think NYSE has 5 letter tickers.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/investing/ticker-symbol-confu... > Bankrupt electronics retailer Tweeter Home Entertainment soared nearly 1,000% in 2013 after Twitter (TWTR) filed to go public. That's because Tweeter's ticker was "TWTRQ" and Twitter had registered for "TWTR."

That is NASDAQ not NYSE.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#209

Post by favorited »

big_chungus wrote: post #180
skrowl wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Daily Stormer and 8chan have shown, CloudFlare has very few competitors and seemingly none that don't censor. 8chan jumped ship to BitMitigate when CloudFlare dropped them, and then BitMitigate dumped them when they had their backbone link yanked out from under them. Neither site broke any US laws, but they were both controversial.

> CloudFlare has very few competitors In the personal/SMB spaces, you're right. Of course, enterprise remains their cash cow, where they compete with the big boys (akamai, incapsula, etc.). > Neither site broke any US laws, but they were both controversial. This is basically why so many are bothered by CloudFlare's decision. Who decides what's controversial? We've seen many examples in the past of normal views being…

> Who decides what's controversial?

CloudFlare, in this case.

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