241–250 of 264 posts
I wonder if they will start trying to monetize stuff like Netbox. It's a really solid free product and some of the paid closed-source alternatives are terrible and cost a lot of money. The potential revenue is likely a droplet in the bucket though.
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Average CEO tenure is 5 years and it's going down. Personal anecdote: I worked at a large EU tech company, then acquired by even larger US tech company. For the five years there, I've seen five different CEOs with almost fully different teams of other C-levels. After the second CEO you clearly start to see how long the next one expects to reign - just take the roadmap and look where reasonable and achievable goals co…
In contrast, FAANGM’s have had an average of <2 CEO’s in the past 20+ years.
And I honestly think that in any of them, neither mass hirings nor layoffs are initiated by CEOs. I'd bet it's rather "one person pushes through the idea of hiring a lot of people, a year after another person pushes the idea of laying them off".
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Gross Profit isn't a helpful number as it doesn't account for any fixed costs like offices, wages, sales and marketing, etc. Operating profits is a better indicator (EBIT or EBITDA) and also much closer to the holy grail of Free Cash Flow that companies need to keep an eye on to make sure they make payroll and fulfill their interest payments obligation, among other things
Last 12 months on Yahoo Finance is showing Digital Ocean's operating income at -$21M. Also, negative in 2019, 2020, 2021. It's either financially illiterate or completely disengenuous for commenters to cherry pick financials such as gross profit, which doesn't include salary expense, when we are talking about layoffs. Other commenters calling execs sociopaths when company is losing money, as if they can lose money fo…
What are these high margin numbers both DO and CF report? They both report high margins but then do not make any money. Are these margins excluding most expenses - because that makes no sense. Companies have expenses and that affects the bottom line. If digital ocean had real margins of 60% they would show a profit.
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Treasuries return exactly what is printed on the coupon, no more, no less. Short of government default, they are as risk free as you can get.
and if the government every truly defaults, you are pretty much screwed no matter what you own.
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> When you can get a 5% risk-free return from treasuries, even 7% rate of return is unattractive when compared to the safest asset on earth returning 5%. I got news for you. The riskiest place to park your money right now is government bonds. Long-dated US treasuries are risky. You will end up losing everything. But if you insist on US treasuries, be my guest. I need someone to trade against.
Treasuries return exactly what is printed on the coupon, no more, no less. Short of government default, they are as risk free as you can get.
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My point is that market expectations are fickle, over-hiring, layoffs etc are all symptoms of paying too much attention to the market in the short term rather than focusing on long term ROE.
I really struggle with this perspective for a pretty simple reason: "Market expectations" are predictions of the future. Early pandemic, predictions for tech companies were favorable. They were hiring not because of quarterly targets or short-term objectives, but because companies believed they would be able to pull future goals forward. They are now laying off because future predictions are more bleak. With new data…
And what justified these beliefs, to them?
you could not imagine how little responsibility, care, and general competence was displayed by leaders on the all-company call today. We were told that reliability issues will be fixed by going slower. Feature delivery targets are not changed though. The amount of engineering time planned for reliability work is 0%.
I don't really get the motivation for this beyond personal greed on behalf of executives that are only seeking to prop up the share price in the short term. The market forces at work will force all technology companies down in valuation pretty much regardless, what is the difference of a few extra million market cap to handicap your ability to grow during the next expansion phase? I can understand it if you have brou…
> I can understand it if you have brought on a lot of fat and you want to lean out your team and need an excuse but outside of that rather narrow situation This doesn't really seem to be a rather narrow situation. The tech companies were hiring like crazy for the past two years. Quick googling shows that DigitalOcean increased headcount by 31% last year. And contrary to the popular opinion here, for me this does soun…
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I mean, I don't want this to be the "kicking them while they're down thread", but I always wondered how a little guy is supposed to compete with AWS. I say that as someone who was there firsthand to watch Rackspace get crushed by them.
IMO what DO had going for them was simplicity. If I was in the market for a no-nonsense VPS I could see myself going with them over AWS.
DO is in a weird place - not as popular or feature-rich as the big clouds, but also not price-efficient enough to compete in the extremely price-sensitive VPS and baremetal market. I wonder what kind of startup decides on DO as their infra provider of choice.
Hearing more. Appears some C-Suite and VPs have resigned in protest. Earnings call tomorrow. Maybe Gabe finally brokered the Microsoft acquisition that everyone has been joking about since he joined. Seemed like a joke then, but now.....