291–300 of 366 posts
Their S-1 looks financially strong and it's a great company. But it's rapidly becoming a single point of failure.
Earlier 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.
The purpose of an IPO is to raise money to do something. It doesn't make any sense to sell part of your company to a random set of people, just to pay them back over time. That's like me getting a mortgage for my house and after 30 years I pay back the mortgage and the bank still gets to own my house.
In all fairness, private investment was much lower when this was the case. Companies used to do an IPO much earlier when they needed funding instead of raising hundreds of millions in private investment money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. Assumptions made for what you said to play out include: perfect competition, perfect information, perfect rationality of actors, 0 barrier to entry, that value and cost is strongly bounded and defined on either end, and much more. Common examples that violate each one in term: Facebook, Used cars, Veblen goods, Utilities, Healthcare. A ma…
> assuming a huge number of perfect circumstances which is not how reality works. I don't think there is actually an equilibrium price defined as some kind of compromise between supply and demand curves absent those circumstances, either; there's an actual price at any given time, but it's not an equilibrium (particularly, without rationality—which incorporates perfect information—you don't have any expectation of an…
Additionally, irrational does not mean unpredictable, after all advertising is extremely effective.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends on the topic of discussion. If we are discussing the viability of a company, and trying to project long term success, then this is all good news. If you are discussing whats best for society and how these businesses impact those things, then this could be alarming news.
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…
Is the privacy pass extension an invalid fix for the problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, not necessarily. Drawing font glyphs is certainly protected by copyright (even if not filed, an implicit one) as artwork. You probably wouldn't get prosecuted because they probably couldn't prove if you copy-pasted, but it's still the work of an artist.
Typefaces are not covered by copyright in the US. Bitmapped fonts aren't either as that's just a computerized version of a typeface. Other types of fonts are covered by copyright as they're computer programs that tell the computer how to draw the typeface. This means unless a typeface was created for and used in a trademarked logo there is no protection on it and you can freely recreate it by tracing the output of an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with all of that, but the other important thing (at least to me as an investor) is their 51% growth over two years (with 77% gross margin). You can have the best product, but if you're not actually growing and profitable then as much as I like the company or the product I'll put my investment dollars elsewhere.
77% GM is incredible for a cloud infrastructure service!
Also, with the more widely adopted terms like iaas, it's easy to confuse with the VM or container type of services.
Both CloudFlare and Zoom are pretty great products and as much as I applaud their team's IPOs, I'm worried that the vagaries of being a public company will result in the GOOG syndrome. That's where a company with a great product is forced to expand every quarter to the point that it becomes a frankenstein-ish hulking version of itself.
Fun fact: Matthew Prince had to borrow money from his mother when Cloudflare was just starting out. They've come a long way. https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1129929178382446592