Fun fact: Matthew Prince had to borrow money from his mother when Cloudflare was just starting out.
They've come a long way.
Cloudflare S-1
281–290 of 366 posts
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#282Re: Cloudflare S-1
#283(I don't know a lot about IPOs...) When would I (i.e. a "normal" stock buyer) be able to buy some shares of Cloudflare?
It's unclear, but as we've seen in normal IPOs of this calibre (e.g. Slack, Pintrest, Fastly), probably next month.
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
300-400ms for blinking? is that during a stroke?? I see they went with the top search engine result Quora - not the best source for facts - and the second result states a tenth of a second, which is probably more accurate. we get it, your service is quite fast, as fast as blinking
>On average the human blink lasts only a tenth of a second which is 100 milliseconds. Wow, that’s fast! Sometimes, it can even last up to 400 milliseconds. This is what the second result says. Bit weird to focus on this for what seems a fantastic startup to succesfully IPO. Congratz to the entire team, and the CEO (who sometimes visits here I think)
not sure what your point is. pretty sure they use the average ms too in their estimate. this claim is the main driver of their business. they are basically saying their service is 3-4 times faster than blinking, which it is not. blinking is so fast you don't notice it, but that wasn't fast enough! so they amplified based on a dodgy source. false advertising gone nuts.
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/12/investing/ticker-symbol-confu... > Bankrupt electronics retailer Tweeter Home Entertainment soared nearly 1,000% in 2013 after Twitter (TWTR) filed to go public. That's because Tweeter's ticker was "TWTRQ" and Twitter had registered for "TWTR."
That is NASDAQ not NYSE.
The maximum, as provided by general consensus are 4 letters. The fifth letter, when applicable, signifies company status. "Q" for bankruptcy, "A" or "B" for class names, "E" for delinquent, "J" and "K" for voting and non-voting respectively, and so on. See https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/nasdaqfifthlette... (doesn't just apply to NASDAQ)
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not just pay a dividend? That's what stocks are supposed to be, shares of ownership in legitimately valuable enterprises with return on investment.
Well, at least prior to 2003 there was a strong incentive to prefer gains from stock sale since it could get long term capital gain tax rates (15% now, 20% at the time) vs. dividends which would be taxed as normal income. Since then however, qualified dividends are taxed the same as long term capital gains.
> Since then however, qualified dividends are taxed the same as long term capital gains.
Share buybacks are still better than dividends, because the investor can choose when to recognize the income.
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big shift towards privacy happening now. If Cloudflare came out a decade ago I'd also be in their camp. But the risks are too high and developers are starting to recognize that Cloudflare is far from free and comes with long terms consequences for the health and resiliency of the internet. I appreciate how they pushed HTTPs widely. But now that's Let's encrypt exists there's no excuse. Ill also never forgiv…
I mean, that's like your opinion or whatever, sure. But this S-1 filing is about if they are a sustainable business. And none of what you touched on would seem to have any serious impact on their business model. The Tor stuff feels way over blown to me. I worked at CF while it was a problem, and was an avid Tor user at the time. It was a terrible user experience, but it wasn't completely Cloudflare's fault. They didn…
> They already generate a profit, their operation costs are reasonable, etc.
They don't turn a profit, and their operating costs are growing sharply. From the S-1:
> As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively.
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
...but less money if Google spends the 5% on Google Plus or an Google Messaging Platform No.8 and doesn't double the company's value.
These are huge swings. Each of these projects has the potential to increase the company's value by $100B and only cost single digit $B. Same model as VC.
I wish more of the companies represented in my index tracker could make 1B investments with 100B returns.
If only it were that easy!
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.
> the entire internet behind a single entity You're giving CF too much credit. They are very small fish, as it seems from the S-1. But still dangerous because they MITM while operating for free at loss, so don't reuse passwords and logins between sites.
They handle about 10% of web requests according to this blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer
If we trust that metric, it seems significant to me. Not what I would call small fish.
Re: Cloudflare S-1
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it's just in my head, but it feels like the first tech IPO in several years where there actually seems to be a viable business model.
How about Slack, PagerDuty, Zoom, Crowdstrike, or Pinterest? These were all in the last few months.
You can also add DocuSign (last year) to that list. They're heading toward a billion in annual sales and they offer a straight-forward and useful service.