Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Backblaze IPO

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 300 posts

Re: Backblaze IPO

#261

Post by dougSF70 »

timwaagh wrote: post #205
dnautics wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPOs usually pop quickly regardless, if you believe in shorting it, you can get even better value for your short.

How could they not pop if people can't sell?

A bank is given an allocation to sell at IPO, the IPO roadshow before the IPO is where potential investors have the chance to buy an IPO allocation at the IPO price. This price can move up and down to manage/stimulate demand. On the IPO day, these shares are allocated to investors. They can then hold them or sell part or all of their allocation. Those investors who did not get allocated shares can then buy them on the market causing them to pop.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#262

Post by curryst »

olalonde wrote: post #229
kottaram wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CTO just said the truth. How else would he say that the customer's data will be deleted? Sure it was straight up blunt, but I think he was just speaking casually.

I am very confused by the email, especially the second point. I've never used Backblaze so maybe I'm missing some critical information. To me, it sounds like Backblaze was happily keeping a backup for a paying customer until said customer booted their laptop. They then threaten to delete the backup if customer doesn't update their software. I understand about warning that the software no longer works but why threaten…

There's might be some ancillary issue on the backend. Something like that they changed backup formats, but can't reformat the customer's existing backups because of E2EE, so they need the customer to power up their laptop so the client can reformat the backups. That would explain why the client doesn't work, and why they're so keen to have them do a new backup.

It wouldn't have been unreasonable to move away from SHA1 in that time period, for example. They may have needed the original files to get a SHA256 hash.

I think it must have been blocking some organizational objective. I can't think of any reason why they would bother to send that email, much less to go all the way to the CTO to send that email.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#263

Post by robbiemitchell »

max46 wrote: post #152
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

the answer is simple... either it's an employee for the marketing department who can turn anything into a positive or it's a fanboy. The page long responses that starts with textbook marketing BS ("No worries, the most important..") tells me it's from an employee because no one cares that much and actively wants people to lose data faster. The amount of buzzwords in his other response... ffs how can you guys seriousl…

Hmm. I am indeed just a normal person who likes the software.

Backblaze + Dropbox have saved me multiple times.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#264

Post by timwaagh »

dougSF70 wrote: post #261
timwaagh wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could they not pop if people can't sell?

A bank is given an allocation to sell at IPO, the IPO roadshow before the IPO is where potential investors have the chance to buy an IPO allocation at the IPO price. This price can move up and down to manage/stimulate demand. On the IPO day, these shares are allocated to investors. They can then hold them or sell part or all of their allocation. Those investors who did not get allocated shares can then buy them on th…

I'm wondering whether these things ever go down at market open. If not then that's a free lunch.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#265

Post by Taek »

megous wrote: post #258
femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Filecoin doesn't make sense to me: https://file.app/ says it's 0.0000394/GiB/year So for 4TiB HDD used for 4 years: 0.0000394 * 4000 * 4 = USD 0.6. Wut? I guess I'm missing something. :)

The storage on the network is being subsidized to the tune of $20 million per month, which means there's a massive oversupply of storage and nobody buying it, hence very cheap prices.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#266

Post by howdydoo »

megous wrote: post #258
femto113 wrote: post #180

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin…

Filecoin doesn't make sense to me: https://file.app/ says it's 0.0000394/GiB/year So for 4TiB HDD used for 4 years: 0.0000394 * 4000 * 4 = USD 0.6. Wut? I guess I'm missing something. :)

As it turns out, unreliable storage is not as valuable as reliable storage.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#267

Post by prirun »

rsync wrote: post #38

I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…

Brian posted a histogram a while back on HN showing the backup size distribution of the unlimited customers. There was one customer backing up over 400TB. But, more than 50% of customers were backing up less than 300GB. IOW, they are paying $7/mo for flat-rate unlimited that would only cost $1.50/mo on B2. Sounds like a good business plan.

To add a Linux plan, which could be lots of larger servers, I would add something like $7/TB/mo rounded up to the nearest TB. This is priced similarly to the flat-rate plan but also accommodates larger servers.

1) It has the same advantage of the unlimited plan that most customers will not be backing up a TB, increasing their margins

2) even if they do backup a TB, B2 is currently priced at $5/TB, so the Linux backup is higher margin

3) there will be an average unused space of 500GB per backup, even for customers backing up more than a TB, further increasing their margins

Re: Backblaze IPO

#268

Post by treesknees »

chalupa-man wrote: post #250
kjaftaedi wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely some sort of encryption/privacy issues. Since the software version no longer works, they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway. Keeping their old data on the live servers longer could be a liability. (just a guess, but i imagine it's something along these lines)

> they wouldn't be able to do a restore anyway. The Backblaze software doesn't handle restores, it just backs things up. To restore, you download zip files of selected folders from the website.

They also offer a separate app for performing downloads/restores https://www.backblaze.com/help-backblaze-downloader-win.html

Re: Backblaze IPO

#269

Post by treesknees »

pxx wrote: post #144
ehsankia wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.

Yeah, this is awful. I don't understand why they would also delete the data from that machine even if new data weren't flowing. What if you had needed the data from years ago? Isn't that part of the whole point of backup??

That's actually not the whole point of a backup in this context. It's important to remember that the Backblaze Personal Backup service is essentially an emergency extra copy, not a data archive. Once the client backs up a file (or more accurately a revision of a file), it checks every 30 days that the file still exists locally. If it does not, then it will be deleted from the cloud backup.

For example if you plug in an external harddrive and back it up with Backblaze, if you don't plug it in at least once every 30 days, then its cloud copy is deleted. So no, the intention of Backblaze is not to keep your offline machine from several years ago securely backed up.

That being said, you can pay for unlimited revisions which just stores your data in b2 and you pay per month on the extra storage. In that case then yes I would expect the data from years ago to still be present. But that's a recent addition, and not what the OP was using.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#270

Post by dannyw »

KaseKun wrote: post #236
dannyw wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note: the 13 EiB pledged are real storage capacity: miners must provide a cryptographic proof every day, that they are storing this much space; or it doesn't count. I still think crypto valuations are excessively, tulip-y high, but valuation/byte is pretty similar. The cryptographic system that enables people to prove storage is called 'Proof of spacetime'; which sounds cringey, but it's pretty clever (begins at page…

People have said "tulips and crypto" when bitcoin was at $800, $5000, $20000, and now at $50000. I wonder when (if) it will stop? I also wonder if crypto valuations are a reflection of truly "free market" economics. Where there is little-to-no barrier to entry as a creator or an investor, and there is complete impossibility of counterfeiting assets.

No, it's not. Have you tried crypto projects? Scams and rug pulls are rampart. It's a wild west, and really not a good way if you are trying to invest in anything that's not Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Post reply on HN