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Cloudflare S-1

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Re: Cloudflare S-1

#361

Post by rrss »

chocolatebunny wrote: post #267
whatshisface wrote: post #136

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.

> 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.

It's unfortunate that this doesn't make sense to you, because that it literally the original purpose of shares in a company.

Someone wants to finance a voyage to a far-off land to trade. To do so, they form a company and issue shares of the company. The profits off the voyage (if any) are then divided amongst the shareholders, in proportion to shares held. It was a pretty good idea.

(Debt is not the same as equity, not sure why you are talking about mortgages).

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#362

Post by vikramkr »

repolfx wrote: post #344
bonestamp2 wrote: post #244

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.

They're growing but not profitable. It's easy to grow by giving valuable stuff away below cost. It's not so easy to grow if you're making positive margin. Given CloudFlare's size and age, why are they losing money?

Looks like a lot of it is sales and marketing expenses which probably help drive growth, their gross margin is pretty great, I think that the key to profitability for them now is a high enough retention rate that they can turn down sales costs when they saturate the market

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#363

Post by ttsda »

Ayesh wrote: post #199
the_duke wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Site owners can turn off the captcha by reducing the security level. I understand why it exists, I just wish they didn't use a Google service for it... The lack of competition probably shows the difficulty of the task. A global CDN is complicated and expensive (physical infrastructure, all the interconnect agreements) and a big technical challenge.

It is quite possible to setup a global CDN overnight. Spin nginx reverse proxies in all AWS, Digital Ocean, and Linode POSs, and you'd have a good enough network. Throw Inna control panel and you got yourself a contender in the budget CDN sector. Cloudflare was rather innovative, with their authorative and recursive DNS, peering agreements with many ISPs including the ones that others didn't bother about, free SSL (W…

Sure, but no cloud company offers the amount of locations you can get on Cloudflare. Now you've even got edge compute, bringing really low global latencies for some applications.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#364

Post by fastball »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #329
fastball wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, considering the majority of the internet-connected population is not on fiber.

Fiber does not impact latency

From a physics perspective, perhaps not.

From a real-world perspective, fiber buildouts almost always include newer hardware and better routing, resulting in lower ping times on average.

Additionally, fiber (along with copper) is going to be faster than anyone on satellite internet.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#365

Post by neomantra »

concert-gilled wrote: post #80
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess someone beat them to CLOUD?

I don't think NYSE has 5 letter tickers.

The limit for a ticker symbol on NYSE is six characters... from Section 2.1 of the NYSE Symbology spec [1]:

The NYSE defines the symbol into two parts: a root and a suffix. The root constitutes the first part of the symbol and it can be up to six characters (although traditionally, most symbols representing companies only use a three-character root).

That said... in the early 00's, our is_nyse(ticker) function looked like: { return ticker.size() == 3; }

[1] https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/data/NYSE_Symbology_Spe...

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#366

Post by qeternity »

leedo__ wrote: post #360
qeternity wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buybacks are a more tax efficient vehicle for returning capital to shareholders.

While this may be true, they seem to be largely funded by debt. Taking on debt and not using it for capital seems exceedingly risky in the face of a recession. And I gather this popular because of the tax implications of a dividend vs increase in stock price. I'm in favor of people paying taxes, so I'd prefer a dividend.

This is an entirely different problem and not really true, except for the companies that do so to avoid repatriating foreign capital and incurring US tax rates.
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