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Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

investors.squarespace.com

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Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#271

Post by qeternity »

renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0?

People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#272

Post by nraynaud »

PedroBatista wrote: post #189
pier25 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Wix, Webflow, and others already. Seems pretty crowded.

Which is a pretty good sign the market is viable. You only need to "be better". And here "better", means eveything on can think of, including NOT spending money.

I'm curious, have MBAs made anything better for the masses, ever?

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#273

Post by toddmorey »

PedroBatista wrote: post #189
pier25 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's Wix, Webflow, and others already. Seems pretty crowded.

Which is a pretty good sign the market is viable. You only need to "be better". And here "better", means eveything on can think of, including NOT spending money.

Better here usually means finding a path to lower cost of acquiring customers.

Of course retention helps too but my gut is that Squarespace had reasonably low churn but increasingly elevated customer acquisition costs along with no real enterprise traction.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#274

Post by magicalhippo »

komali2 wrote: post #106
smallmancontrov wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a function of technology. It would absolutely be possible to integrate something like Nextcloud into operating systems or devices. It will never happen, because every party in a position to do such an integration is also in a position to become a middleman and extract money, which is much more profitable.

I'm curious what an integration would look like. Are you thinking Google Play Services but Nextcloud Services instead?

Opera, before it got Chrome-ified, had a built in web server. I used it to share files with my buddies. Super simple.

Didn't support scripts IIRC but with webassembly it doesn't have to be too difficult to support something like NextCloud I'd think.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#275

Post by morkalork »

echelon wrote: post #235
PedroBatista wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is a pretty good sign the market is viable. You only need to "be better". And here "better", means eveything on can think of, including NOT spending money.

That means the TAM is fully owned and you have to work that much harder to grab a slice. "Competition is for losers." I suppose if you're really passionate about the space, go ahead, but it's incredibly crowded with dozens of players. Some are even owned by the fintech giants.

There's a whole ecosystem of adjacent services-for-SMBs providers in hosting, domains, online advertising etc. and all the companies are running the "commoditize their products complements" playbook. Anyone trying to enter the market is competing against prices that don't even make sense in isolation.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#276

Post by arrosenberg »

qeternity wrote: post #271
renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0? People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.

People hate on PE for good reason - they often make money by destroying good businesses. They sell off the valuable parts for profit, load the debts on what is left, and declare bankruptcy, leaving employees and customers holding the bag.

PE is good business for the raiders, bad business for the raided.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#277

Post by radley »

qeternity wrote: post #271
renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

I'm not really sure I follow this logic. What connection are you drawing between PE and Web 3.0? People like to hate on PE, it's just negativity bias. Most people don't hear about all of the PE success stories. If PE just ruined companies as a matter of fact, it would not be a good business...and it's an objectively good business to be.

That's not entirely accurate. The easy way to make a crazy amount of money is to buy a well-credited company, sell / mortgage anything of value, ramp up user fees and debt over a short period (3-5 years), and then cast aside the husk via bankruptcy.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#278

Post by jmyeet »

renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

I agree about private equity: it's merely the latest incarnation of rent-seeking or enclosure-building. The playbook is the same: cut costs, jack up prices, load up with exploding debt, go public or resell before the debt explodes. There is absolutely no value being created here. We saw the same thing with the corporate raiders of the 1980s (who bought companies below book value and scrapped them for parts).

But I do not agree that Web 3.0 will rise from the ashes. IMHO that's pure hopium. And you hear the same thing whenever people talk about federation.

Web 3.0 (and federation) offers nothing users actually care about. It complicates everything and makes everything more expensive. Centalized services won for a reason.

Companies like things like Web 3.0 and NFTs because they simply want to restrict or profit of secondary sales of digital goods. That's it. You don't own your identity or your data. You can just as easily be cut off from the related services. We've seen it with games and NFTs.

Financial transactions are generally reversible. That's a feature not a bug. A Web 3.0, just like with crypto wallets, will generally result in irrecoverable identities (ie wallets). Trying to build that into the contract through a consensus method of trusted contacts is just another potential vulnerability.

I really wish we, as tech-savvy people, were more cognizant of user benefits here rather than having some idealistic utopic view of a federated world.

Re: Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira

#280

Post by tristor »

vlovich123 wrote: post #197
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how they get people to loan them money when they know that they are just going to strip mine the company Because on average, target firms of leveraged buyouts become more productive [1]. That lets them pay back shareholders and lenders in most cases. The reason public perception is off is the size effect and availability heuristic. The first shows that big deals do badly [2]. The second means the last widely-report…

Here's the PDF so you can read more than just the abstract [1]. It's always hard to analyze anything this big, especially with something as vague as "more productive": > First, employment shrinks more rapidly, on average, at target establishments than at controls after private equity buyouts. The average cumulative difference in favor of controls is about 3 percent of initial employment over two years and 6 percent o…

> So if I'm reading this right, huge layoffs followed by lots of churn with an overall decrease in salaries. But I must be missing something because the framing & wording seems to suggest that this is a positive thing.

You read it right. Private Equity firms come in, and then lay off everyone they can and replace them with the cheapest folks possible, to churn down salaries and get rid of long-time staff with higher benefits costs. It's the classic playbook, and it's written here positively because if you're a soulless MBA beancounter, this is a positive thing. If you're a 50 year old engineer who is 12 years from retirement and just got a cancer diagnosis 6 months prior, it's not a good thing though.

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