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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

#291

Post by michaelt »

sroussey wrote: post #188
makeitdouble wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it have gone private if it was such a great business at this moment ? Squarespece looked like a fairly competent company, even as they were perhaps overspending on advertisement. Their competitors don't seem to be doing that much better except for Automattic perhaps.

Yes. Private equity likes cash making business machines.

Ah, but stock market investors also like cash making business machines.

If private equity is able to outbid the stock market, they must have spotted a way they can extract more value. Sometimes that's by raiding the pension fund and cranking up prices. Other times it's a distressed business and better management can turn it around.

Neither is exactly good news for customers.

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

#292

Post by esturcke »

johnbellone wrote: post #201
dawnerd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently after taking over all of Google Domains too! I missed transferring a couple of domains before the cutover and now I’m in squarespace hell trying to get them out. They make it so much harder by putting artificial delays on everything.

I was about to go start the transfer process. How bad of a time am I in for?

I transferred 6 domains to porkbun and it was about 2 days to get the code and 5 days to transfer. Mostly painless, but DNS records were not copied over. I tried to see if I could manually copy them over in advance, but I got an error with porkbun. I probably didn't know how to do it correctly, but I needed up with a couple minutes of downtime. I don't remember having to do anything when I went from namecheap to google, but that was a while ago.

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

#293

Post by zoul »

n_ary wrote: post #238
nicbou wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.

I was part of some social computing facilities and burnt my own and friends’ money to offer basic stuff for people to publish basic html pages, small twitter like service, one nextcloud and one invidious instance. Within weeks, nextcloud was filled with pirated content sharing, html pages were hosting fake bank login phishing pages and moderation became horror. Our colo provider sent us some written warnings to sort…

As a positive example, Mastodon seems to work fine.

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

#294

Post by JohnMakin »

jumploops wrote: post #279

Thanks to Google, I’m now a Squarespace customer… Does anyone have a new favorite domain registrar? I miss being able to search the search capabilities of Google Domains, specifically the exact match and TLD-specific filtering.

Really like cloudflare.

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

#295

Post by devcpp »

arrosenberg wrote: post #276
qeternity wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless the company has a very negative outlook with outstanding debts (which Squarespace is not AFAIK), the price they have to pay to take over is much lower than the value of their assets.

And even with a negative outlook and debts (i.e. liquidation), extracting value without making bigger issues is not at all simple.

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

#296

Post by can16358p »

klysm wrote: post #87
can16358p wrote: post #73

> Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access web.prd.q4inc.com > Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What?? I'm just trying to open the page…

That will show up as a prevented attack in some dashboard

But why?

I'm behind a CGNAT (if that's the trigger because of possible same external IP with bots that have nothing to do with me), there's nothing I can do.

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

#298

Post by arrosenberg »

devcpp wrote: post #295
arrosenberg wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless the company has a very negative outlook with outstanding debts (which Squarespace is not AFAIK), the price they have to pay to take over is much lower than the value of their assets. And even with a negative outlook and debts (i.e. liquidation), extracting value without making bigger issues is not at all simple.

And yet, they do.

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

#299

Post by verdverm »

esturcke wrote: post #292
johnbellone wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to go start the transfer process. How bad of a time am I in for?

I transferred 6 domains to porkbun and it was about 2 days to get the code and 5 days to transfer. Mostly painless, but DNS records were not copied over. I tried to see if I could manually copy them over in advance, but I got an error with porkbun. I probably didn't know how to do it correctly, but I needed up with a couple minutes of downtime. I don't remember having to do anything when I went from namecheap to goog…

I'm migrating to Cloudflare

You can setup alternative nameservers first, they clone current DNS settings, then you update nameservers. Do the transfer after.

This worked while they were at Google Domains and about to be transfered. Haven't tried with squarespace yet, but it ought to work

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

#300

Post by wredue »

xyst wrote: post #140
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 already self hosting an e-mail server with no problems in deliverability or receiving. No limitations on aliases. No more artificial limits. Cyrus-imap + postfix. If I need to scale up, can migrate from sqlite to postgres.

My ISP blacklisted my mail server within a couple weeks. I am not even particularly active in email.

Heck, the company I work for gave up trying to host our own email blasts to customers as we were fighting with different places around the world *constantly* (we had a dedicated position just for dealing with this shit, and they were becoming overwhelmed).

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