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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

#301

Post by mywittyname »

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

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Private equity likes cash making business machines.

Like Sears and Hertz?

It's still possible to make money in this situation. Buy a company, then have it buy itself back using debt. The PE firm gets most of its initial capital investment back then secures a revenue stream in the form of management fees. The company can still go bankrupt, but as long as it sticks around long enough to pay back enough to the parent company that it turned a profit, things worked out. The bond holders can fight over the scraps post-bankruptcy.

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

#302

Post by ericd »

avree wrote: post #227
nkotov wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just launched a site on Squarespace - $25 a month for a basic landing page.

That seems about right? I use Netlify to deploy my own 11ty static site, and it costs $19/month, plus there's no WYSIWYG editor like Squarespace.

Any reason to go that route over just making an S3 bucket publicly accessible and pointing dns at it? Should cost roughly $0/mo unless you’re getting massive amounts of traffic.

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

#303

Post by bragr »

zoul wrote: post #293
n_ary wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mastodon effectively democratizes the moderation to the huge group of server admins - who do a massive amount of unpaid labor. It definitely keeps some people away, and burns others out.

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

#304

Post by shostack »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #156
berkeleyjunk wrote: post #2

It is interesting how most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I have tried to investigate why but could not find a good explanation to why this number is so prevalent.

> why this number is so prevalent It comes from a 2004 Delaware court case, which found “recent appraisal cases that correct the valuation for a minority discount by adding back a premium ‘that spreads the value of control over all shares equally’ consistently use a 30% adjustment” for the control premium [1]. (Under Delaware law, shareholders are entitled to the pro rata share of a company’s fair value. The courts c…

Can you ELI5 this?

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

#305

Post by pixodaros »

nkotov wrote: post #224
xyst wrote: post #137

> Permira, the global private equity firm current Squarespace users about to get gouged

I just launched a site on Squarespace - $25 a month for a basic landing page.

I run a Wordpress site that gets tens of GB of traffic per month for about half of that (hosting + domain name registration)

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

#306

Post by Rebelgecko »

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 from Google Domains to Porkbun and it took about an hour. Half that time was changing over my dynamic DNS updater on the server

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

njovin wrote: post #153
gzer0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current state of the markets and private equity is deeply troubling. Gone are the days when companies like Microsoft went public at reasonable valuations, allowing everyday investors to participate in their massive growth. Now, companies like Uber and Airbnb debut on the stock market at sky-high valuations, leaving little room for the average investor to profit. Worse still, the concentration of wealth has enable…

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…

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by tryptophan »

gzer0 wrote: post #63
dpflan wrote: post #22

Has the trend of PE owning things increased in the last decade? Has PE gotten more money in the past years so that they can hoover up companies?

The current state of the markets and private equity is deeply troubling. Gone are the days when companies like Microsoft went public at reasonable valuations, allowing everyday investors to participate in their massive growth. Now, companies like Uber and Airbnb debut on the stock market at sky-high valuations, leaving little room for the average investor to profit. Worse still, the concentration of wealth has enable…

Classic case of overregulation killing things. Stock markets were originally invented to fund very risky new ventures in the Netherlands. Now you need to spend millions on lawyers and various forms before being allowed to list, after which the regulatory nonsense only spirals upwards to more and more.

There is no reason that random mom and pop shops shouldnt be able to list their sandwitch shop and raise 50k to remodel. Will there be tons of scams and nonsense? Yes. Dont invest in tiny companies with no track record then, easy solution. Will productive stuff also happen? Also yes. People can already waste their money gambling/smoking/lotteries/drugs/stock options/supid luxury goods - all of which have a guaranteed chance of working out poorly for society, but this is apparently ok and we instead need to protect people from the stock market.

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

#309

Post by pmontra »

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…

Italy here. Photo ids via WhatsApp is not normal but it happens. WhatsApp video calls as proof of identity are normal: showing your face and a photo id is a way to get formally identified by many of the identity providers for the state digital id platform.
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