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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

#241

Post by JohnMakin »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #223
cjbgkagh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the…

That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product. Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it wo…

> but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications.

Before the Russian/Ukraine war, I worked for a US company that did business operations on Russian cloud providers - one (very major one I don't want to name here publicly) had their main support in some sketchy all-russian telegram channel that I only could access via my personal device. You'd type your issue in english, get a bunch of russian responses, and then sometimes hours/days later your issue would mysteriously vanish.

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

#243

Post by cjbgkagh »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #239
cjbgkagh wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I think that view is US centric. Many other countries have WhatsApp as the default. I'm not even suggesting that they should have WhatsApp as the default, just describing the reality as I am seeing it. And yes even the biggest companies and government entities are using WhatsApp. When I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a…

> I was traveling through LATAM they were taking pictures of passports on their phones and sent off for checking via WhatsApp - a US passenger freaked out over it and I had to explain to her that this is just how it's done in LATAM. You had a mid-sized to corporate business sending passports over WhatsApp? I highly doubt that. This is not even coming from a “US-centric” view. This is coming from a “that will never pa…

I am describing reality as I see it, at this point you're basically calling me a liar. You could have simply googled it yourself; e.g. "is it normal to use WhatsApp for business in Latin America?" to which the resulting summary is "Across LATAM, WhatsApp is used by citizens as a way to communicate with family and friends and is being increasingly used by businesses big and small to provide customer service, make sales, take bookings, and more." Note the --> big <-- part of that. You don't need to rely on my assertions the when there is so much evidence readily available. I have no idea why you're arguing with me and do not care that you don't believe me - what on earth would I have to gain by lying to you in this way. It makes no sense.

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

#244

Post by CapcomGo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #167
njovin wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope that this results in a reduction of companies seeking to go public in the first place. We've seen many cycles of: innovation -> growth -> IPO -> happy customers + employees -> not enough growth -> PE -> layoffs -> product/user decline. The demand for ever-increasing a growth demanded by the markets is not sustainable for a majority of businesses. IMO the employees, customers, and general public would ben…

> SquareSpace has ~44% of the self-hosted website market. Shouldn't that be enough? They’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit on hundreds of millions of dollars of gross profit [1]. Most of the cost is marketing & sales. Private equity is actually about focussing less on growth and more on sustainability; the logic of this acquisition is that 44% is enough. [1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CI…

Isn't PE really focused on getting their fees?

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

#245

Post by jkaplowitz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #222
jkaplowitz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, this one is a 15% premium [2] Really? The sub-headline near the top of your link says 29%, so basically 30%.

It’s “a premium of 15% over Squarespace's closing share price of $38.19 on the NYSE on May 10, 2024,” the last business day before the buyout was announced. That said, you see the bankers bending over backwards to find a metric that satisfies Doft .

Ah, good catch, yes.

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

#246

Post by sangnoir »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #223
cjbgkagh wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do a fair amount of business internationally and WhatsApp is increasingly becoming a default. There is Signal, Slack, Telegram, iMessage, etc plus a multitude of many other options including uploading via our website. Places like Japan and Germany are still pretty big on faxes so I guess it depends where on the continuum the customers are. Thus far our only email issues have been on the client side and they're the…

That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product. Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it wo…

> That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications

...and yet WhatsApp Business exists to do exactly that. In developing countries, some businesses use WhatsApp as the only written-communication channel (supplemented via voice calls). For over a billion people, their smartphone is the primary - oftentimes only - computing platform. Business communication over WhatsApp is not as awkward as you suppose it is, and all businesses, including large ones, have to meet their clients on whatever platform(s) they happen to be on.

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

#248

Post by darknavi »

skrebbel wrote: post #204
pavlov wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Web3" was hijacked by cryptocurrency promoters as the marketing term for various get-rich-quick token schemes. (Generally what made them "web3" was simply that some venture capitalist had bought a bunch of the tokens early and would get to dump them on Coinbase.) If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...

I propose “Web 95”

I'm partial to Web ME my self.

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

#249

Post by dehrmann »

rchaud wrote: post #205
sroussey wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Private equity likes cash making business machines.

Like Sears and Hertz?

There are different strategies. You can buy up dying companies and try to turn them around with management changes (and debt), you can sell off companies for scrap, you can buy up money printing machines and run them hotter.
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