Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 267 posts

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

#131

Post by vladislav »

notyourday wrote: post #52
vladislav wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strictly speaking correct in that the $5B valuation was established purely on the secondary market and only from sales of shares of investors (not common holders), which doesn't give the company any VC funding. Also $1.3M in seed funding is a rounding error to get to $5B.

This smells like a sophisticated investor pump and dump: sell a small number of shares for a stupid amount to use the new valuation as the marker. I would trust this number far less than a number one would arrive at a new VC round

Unlikely due to the buyers also being sophisticated. "Sequoia and Steadfast Financial bought shares at a $5 billion valuation from some of Zapier’s original investors."

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

#132

Post by kasey_junk »

hooande wrote: post #95
djrogers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How to hire capable developers is an open question for even the most sophisticated technology companies. Anything that allows you to avoid that problem is extremely valuable.

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

#133

Post by marketingtech »

vincentmarle wrote: post #99
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 en…

It's incredibly cheap in the context of 6 or 7 figure marketing budgets. It gets budgeted as a new compliance cost to continue doing business as normal even after Apple, Mozilla, and Google block advertising pixels from their browsers.

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

#134

Post by tamrix »

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.

Me: I'll sell you 0.0000001% of my company for $1.

You: sure

Me: My company is now worth $10B!

Hackernews: wow that's so amazing! One day in going to be rich doing startups too!

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

#135

Post by anonymouse008 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #118
syndacks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I fell out of love with tech, and found more leverage in finance. I still write code (Python) for myself for fun, but would rather live in Excel versus VS Code and k8s 50 hrs a week (I squeeze in commits on my open source projects when the family has gone to bed). I’m semi retired in my late 30s, so it’s gone well. I am so extraordinarily thankful for the experiences and opportunities I’ve had, but recognize when it’…

If you’re willing to offer advice, when did you make the switch and how? That’s quite a jump, and usually upon entering finance you end up with different tasks to fill up a 50+ hour week. PE/IB/etc ... only way you strike rich with easy schedules is a family office?

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

#136

Post by rtpg »

xwolfi wrote: post #128
narrator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

Dentists lack empathy: they cant understand how most people think and never explain how they think outside of their bubble. Our startup, Dentir, makes you do things dentists do :p

The core difference being that “put value X from system S into value Y in system V” is actually conceptually extremely simple, and is mostly encumbered by machinery around it and “incidental complexity”.

Dentistry _is_ all the complexity and the skill of , like, drilling into your mouth or whatever.

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

#137

Post by gumby »

Why did the article repeatedly refer to the recent purchases as a "raise" or "round", especially after explaining up front that it was a private purchase of already issued shares and that they'd only raised a small amount long ago?

That kind of ignorance makes me doubt other things said in the article.

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

#138

Post by anonymouse008 »

wombatmobile wrote: post #120
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.

The $5b valuation is speculative. Only $1.3m has been raised, which is less than 0.02% of that valuation.

Or you could say $1.3m of a theoretical $5bn demand curve has been tested, at one point.

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

#139

Post by felipellrocha »

narrator wrote: post #103
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.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

> Twitch.tv is something that amazed me that it became so big. I don't really play video games. Who would spend hours watching people play video games?

Heh. I grew playing games with friends. When I got tired, I'd spend hours just watching them play and having fun hanging out that way. It was no surprise to me they got so big so fast. It really is all about empathy, and I thought this little anecdote would help strengthen your point! :)

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

#140

Post by nojito »

narrator wrote: post #103
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.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

>Twitch.tv is something that amazed me that it became so big.

Monetizing loneliness is how social media companies grow. twitch just has a strangle hold on a specific community that no one else thought of.

Post reply on HN