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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

#211

Post by ralph84 »

dgavey wrote: post #199
_jxdz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice! First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.

I've always thought profit sharing was more fair overall than shares/options for most employees. I'm really glad to hear that this happens at relatively larger companies too.

Strongly disagree for tech companies. At tech companies there is almost always significant lag between when value is created and when profits on that value are realized. The employees who worked for Amazon for the first 10 years generated incredible value but little profit. The value of equity takes into account all of the future profits of the company, not just what is left over in any particular year. The engineers who created Windows are still being compensated for it today if they held their shares, even if they stopped working for Microsoft 20 years ago. That is fairness. The company benefits from your work even after you leave, you benefit from the company's growth due to your work.

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

#212

Post by djrogers »

ipaddr wrote: post #196
djrogers wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I pay someone hundreds of dollars to build something that I don’t know how to maintain, when Zapier can do the same thing for free or $20/mo?

Free is free. Your return on investment at the $20.00 per month level is a year or less. So it depends on how long you need it for.

Give me a break - there’s no developer that anyone could reasonably trust to write even the simplest program and maintain and modify it throughout they year for less than $20/mo.

Maybe I spend several hours finding someone online who will do the job for $200, then I spend an hour communicating and clarifying my request, then another hour testing the result. 1 months later I decide I need the automated email to have a different subject line, or include an attachment that wasn’t there before, so I find the developers’ email address and pay him another $100 to make the change - or maybe I don’t because it’s too much trouble.

In the alternate world (in which I live), I simply fire up my browser and create a task in about 15-20 minutes. When I need or want a change, I change it myself.

Less time, less hassle, less risk, and in all likelihood less cost.

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

#213

Post by pishpash »

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

What will you do to maintain it?

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

#214

Post by freeqaz »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #195
freeqaz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Is Zapier a positive or a negative for you?

I think they're clearly saying that Zapier is a positive for them.

Re-reading, you're definitely right. Where I got confused was the "Terraform/Heroku is bad because it adds another layer" but then not understanding why Zapier is better?

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

#215

Post by tluyben2 »

devoutsalsa wrote: post #121
namuol wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers are ridiculously expensive and comparatively slow for many tasks.

Also, no developer you’d hire with confidence is gonna get out of bed for an “I can barely explain myself, but all I need is...” job that pays a small amount.

Create in zapier, send the login to dev; please recreate. Works fine and can, in very many cases, be done for well under zapier's pro account prices. Especially for tasks you need to run 100k+ per month, which is not uncommon if you are trying to build a product yourself.

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

#216

Post by ryan_j_naughton »

tjbiddle wrote: post #165

I love Zapier and wish them the best. Been using them the past couple years to automate many things in my e-commerce business. That being said, I come from a software background (As many here at HN do), and I recently found "Integromat" and have completely switched over all my Zapier automations to them. Their price point is much cheaper (Zapier was beginning to charge a few hundred a month for me - and now I'm down…

I totally concur. I switched over to Integromat as well as I found their solution and UI much better. Both are great though and I still like zapier.

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

#217

Post by melomal »

ryan_j_naughton wrote: post #216
tjbiddle wrote: post #165

I love Zapier and wish them the best. Been using them the past couple years to automate many things in my e-commerce business. That being said, I come from a software background (As many here at HN do), and I recently found "Integromat" and have completely switched over all my Zapier automations to them. Their price point is much cheaper (Zapier was beginning to charge a few hundred a month for me - and now I'm down…

I totally concur. I switched over to Integromat as well as I found their solution and UI much better. Both are great though and I still like zapier.

Hmmm, makes me want to check out Integromat further. I've tried it but have basically stuck with Automate as it's basic but there's enough to automate things. Zapier got a little hectic for some of these tasks too.

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

#218

Post by matthewheath »

ng12 wrote: post #169
_jxdz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice! First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.

Unless they're paying massive base salaries that sounds pretty low compared to RSUs at a big tech co or the yearly bonus in finance.

I don't know what qualifies as "massive base salaries" but most folks in Support (the team I worked on) were on around $70k+ USD base compensation.

Profit sharing happened twice a year, but I don't remember it ever going above 10% of your six-monthly compensation rate (so effectively, you got 20% at most).

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

#219

Post by jaxn »

bryik wrote: post #177
ab_testing wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The valuation of current tech companies is way astronomical compared to what is considered normal for mature companies. The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. Similarly the P/E ratio for S&P companies used to be in the 15-25 range to the considered normal . However with these internet companies,…

> ...with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000 What "internet" company has a P/E ratio above 100? Facebook: 25 Apple: 31 Netflix: 81 Google: 36 Netflix is close, I guess.

Shopify: 420 Square: 513 Salesforce: 95 Zoom: 149

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

#220

Post by perfectstorm »

_jxdz wrote: post #107
ralph84 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice! First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.

are they taxed at 40%?
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