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Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

forbes.com

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Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#91

Post by xtracto »

enra wrote: post #23

The article title is accurate, the one in HN right now is not. The point was that they did YC and seed round but didn’t raise funding after that. Traditionally startups raise every 18mo and have raised A,B,C,D etc in ~10 years and before hitting $5B valuation. Even with the latest round, it was a secondary sale, so not dilutive raise. Some investors sold shares to other investors but no new shares where created. Avoi…

Just remembered that I interviewed for a Zapier position sometime back. To back I didn't get in, I really love their product.

EDIT: Wow, after reading about the lack of Stock Options... I just changed my mind about this comment haha.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#92

Post by djrogers »

superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming.

Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability.

For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are other servothay do the same thing, but none that I’ve found do it as easily and as well as Zapier.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#93

Post by jurassic »

valzam wrote: post #74
throwawayyipyip wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to some extent it is. You can argue both ways, and in Zapier's case, I'd say it's overvalued as the 10-15 range assumes obtaining a monopoly. I don't see how Zapier will do that since there's also IFTTT and other services I've tried. With that said, consider huge successes like Amazon. Huge successes like Amazon have been generating much more profit compared to what they were projected to earn in 2010 [1]. I pi…

However, Amazon never pays dividends. And you probably cannot really vote on anything with your stock either. So what's the point? There is an interesting article about Facebook with a similar opinion. Zuck owns the majority vote and they never pay dividends. What's the point of owning the stock?

Dividends are taxable while price appreciation doesn’t become taxable until you sell. Unless you need income, it’s more tax efficient to shareholders if the company reinvests free cashflow in continued growth.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#94

Post by Silhouette »

marketingtech wrote: post #47
kritiko wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this CCPA / GDPR compliant?

There's a distinction between being a data controller and a data processor. The businesses that use these platforms are the data *controllers* and are responsible for implementing consent, "do not sell my information", "show me my data", or "delete my data" flows as required by law. The platforms generally offer APIs to implement these required data flows in a centralized way, which is another major value prop for th…

The sustainability of that model of responsibility must be in doubt, though. Take a simple case like a website that loads a resource from somewhere else. Given how the technology works, any model where the original site is responsible for everything and the user's data is supposedly protected is obviously misleading, because very often it's the third party services that are run by the bigger, more powerful, data-hoovering businesses, and neither the original site nor the user may be fully aware of what is happening or have any practical control over it. The model assigns responsibility where it's convenient, not where it's reasonable.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#95

Post by hooande »

djrogers wrote: post #92
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming. Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability. For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are ot…

why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough

Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#96

Post by syndacks »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #43
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

Khan Academy has an amazing collection of videos on finance. I highly recommend it for understanding cash flows, enterprise value, etc. It's helped me transition (one foot out the door) from tech to finance.

Curious to hear why you left one for the other. Not too often you hear that move. How is it going so far?

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#97

Post by josh33 »

Huge Zapier fan and user here. In fact I wrote an article on LinkedIn a while back about how many heads I think their product is saving us. And we have our own developers - there are just so many instances where using a service like this saves us the opportunity cost of building things for our own customers. Almost all of our use cases are around automating data connections for internal systems we use and love.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#98

Post by ralph84 »

_jxdz wrote: post #54
bradlys wrote: post #16

Congrats to the founders for not taking much funding but for employees... this has to suck unless they get to sell their shares to Sequoia as well. (If they even got any options...) Maybe they don't compete for SV talent and most employees aren't used to even getting options as part of compensation. Is there a specific reason a company would have IPO in mind but wouldn't say they are looking to do an IPO eventually?…

I believe only a few of the original Zapier folks have options (I don't hold any myself, for example but I joined when they were around 70 people).

Wow, this should be the headline. Bootstrapped unicorns are somewhat rare. But bootstrapped unicorns with no employee equity is a whole other level.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#99

Post by vincentmarle »

marketingtech wrote: post #28

Zapier joins Tealium and Segment on the list of billion dollar valuations for powering the next generation of ad tech. As cross-site cookies and browser pixels are increasingly blocked, ad platforms are moving from browser-based tracking to server-side data transfer. Like those other companies, Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-si…

> powering the next generation of ad tech

> Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-side APIs

I think that conclusion is a little far-fetched. If you've used Zapier you know how expensive it is to run tasks, so in my experience Zapier is used more to automate little bits of your business that you don't necessarily want to bother your engineer with. It's not like Segment that you can just turn on a firehose of data.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#100

Post by s1artibartfast »

mandeepj wrote: post #84

> Last summer, Zapier reached $100 million in annualized recurring revenue; it’s passed $140 million by now $1.3M in $140M RR is like a paper change. So, they can't find that amount somewhere in their revenue stream?

They have $140M RR in 2020. They took $1.3M in 2012 and haven't taken more since.
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