141–150 of 414 posts
This makes the Google registrar change even worse. I need to get my act together and transfer my .dev domain. :/
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Going from their financials, Squarespace makes no money: Revenues of $281.1 million for Q1 with Net Income of $0.1 million so it can be rounded to $0. They have debt of $556.9 million so yes, for the founder being able to pass on this pig with lipstick is great. Permira is well known for what was their management approach with AA in the UK, so for the employees this will probably mean massive layoffs soon. https://ww…
Those numbers don't tell you that Squarespace is a pig with lipstick. It might be one! But, SAAS economics treat the ability to hit near-zero profitability as a feature of the business model, not a problem. Here's why -- income is taxed, and growth is rewarded, heavily, in the valuation of the company. If every dollar of business you make is worth $6 (Roughly $1.2bn in revenues = $7bn buyout), and every $1 of new bus…
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Becuase it is the one that the system has evolved to consider the rule of thumb. The equilibrium appears to be 30% above asking and, and least local to our time period, appears to be stable.
I... what? Great-Grandparent> most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I [...] could not find a good explanation to why You> It’s probably just a good rule of thumb. Me> But why is 30% better than 15%? You> The equilibrium appears to be 30% above asking I still don't understand how that's supposed to explain why 30% is the stable value, instead of another, as the GGP was asking. How…
Private equity will only own about 20% of the company, only 20% of the stock was public to begin with. Why is everyone singing songs of doom and gloom?
> Permira, the global private equity firm current Squarespace users about to get gouged
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All software companies have R&D going on constantly. “How do I push this user metric” “How do we increase conversion” “How can we increase conversion for our customers” “Can square space be easier to use”
Software people massively over-classify their work as "R&D" when most of it is basically the equivalent of tuning or plumbing. R&D involves at least a little bit of the "R" part, which usually means some risk that the work is worthless. If you are just doing the development part, which is what you are doing when you ask the question "how do I push this metric?", private equity is usually happy to fund that. I general…
I think you may have spent too much time writing software to notice how R&D it is.
You can pick whatever citation you want [1] but writing software is a very risky endeavor (in terms of ROI).
"Generic IT" or SRE is really not R&D. If your solution to a bug is to "reboot" the device; that's an operational fix. If your solution is instead to read a stacktrace and write some code; that's R&D.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=most+software+projects+fail
I hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.
They gonna increase prices
For a company like SquareSpace unless they're massively overspending and they are rife with inefficiencies I don't see how this works out for the PE firm.
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it has to be high enough to give the board enough cover that they're doing their fiduciary duty to existing shareholders
Maybe I'm missing something basic but that still doesn't explain why it's 30% and not 50%. I don't think purely qualitative arguments work here.
This makes the Google registrar change even worse. I need to get my act together and transfer my .dev domain. :/
Yeah what an annoying one two punch. I was going to transfer everything to cloudflare but apparently cloudflare can't handle .dev domains.