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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

#381

Post by johnnyanmac »

fragmede wrote: post #372
mattmaroon wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange cartoony impression that people here have but not generally what they do, even in the case of LBOs which I assume is what you’re referencing but only a small part of what PE firms do. They generally buy businesses that are managed poorly, manage them well, and fix them. And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was c…

it's like saying drugs are bad. there are definite harms done by cocaine, but penicillin has saved the world. PE'a easy to hate because, as a group, there are hateful things that happen. we don't have any mechanism for not letting the group be represented by an outlier individual.

Drugs are a perfect example. They are a controlled market because the common person lacks the knowledge to safely use these by themselves. Good or bad.

PE's, meawhile, don't really have that control. They are shooting all the hell up and we don't know if they are self destructively OD'ing or are curing cancer. Most high profile results are sadly the former. There's simply less financial incentives these days to invest in "saving" a company if you don't emotionally invest in it.

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

#382

Post by johnnyanmac »

rchaud wrote: post #344
nraynaud wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, have MBAs made anything better for the masses, ever?

Couldn't you ask the same of most programmers? One way or another, everybody is pushing paper or pixels. Is the adtech developer at Google, FB, Amazon somehow morally superior to a finance bro that takes a job at Carlyle Group?

Depends on how you interpret what a programer's role and skin in the game is. by the Google/FB/Amazon level, the programmer is just another cog in the machine being told what to make by a director, who reports to/with some MBAs.

For smaller companies, I'd say programmers have done their share of good and evil. the AI sector is in real time gray area with some very malicious actions not too long ago to try and be first to market.

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

#383

Post by Wololooo »

JohnMakin wrote: post #241
mynameisvlad wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might work for small businesses, but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. It just screams unprofessional. You’re not going to see Meta employees do business over WhatsApp, and it’s their product. Like, sure, you could probably get away with it. Once at most places. And even then, it wo…

> but no real mid-sized or bigger company is going to be using Whatsapp or any other consumer messaging service for their critical or non-critical business communications. Before the Russian/Ukraine war, I worked for a US company that did business operations on Russian cloud providers - one (very major one I don't want to name here publicly) had their main support in some sketchy all-russian telegram channel that I o…

"Oh shit the Americans have some issues. Hey Andrej, what the fuck is Ivan doing with the server room?"

"I don't know, dude is usually black out drunk I will go check on him"

5 min later

"Yeah he was passed out on the floor, I threw a bucket of water on him and rebooted the thing it should come back up shortly."

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

#384

Post by [deleted] »

tomrod wrote: post #287
packetlost wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I moved my .dev domains under Porkbun right after it was announced that Google Domains was being sold to squarespace, so you don't have to drop the domains. Porkbun is also quite friendly IME.

I don't know porkbun. I was looking at namecheap -- why porkbun?

[deleted]

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

#385

Post by akho »

packetlost wrote: post #255
nicbou wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.

I feel like making it easy to how your own website is something that can be solved with an ingress service (Tailscale funnel?) + DNS management and a small box that someone buys and leaves in their living room. It doesn't have to require any technical expertise, you just need to build a lot of things to make it that way.

Cloudflare dynamic dns and cloudflare tunnels get you there. Of course, now you're relying on Cloudflare's free tier to continue to exist.

I think that the right place to provide this is at ISP level, positioning as a beefier router with extras.

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

#386

Post by mattmaroon »

arrosenberg wrote: post #366
mattmaroon wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange cartoony impression that people here have but not generally what they do, even in the case of LBOs which I assume is what you’re referencing but only a small part of what PE firms do. They generally buy businesses that are managed poorly, manage them well, and fix them. And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was c…

> I have come to the conclusion that people in tech are as largely ignorant of finance as people in finance are of tech. Well I'm you can certainly speak for yourself, but that doesn't mean the rest of us are, so maybe keep your opinions to yourself. I was responding to the premise that people hate on PE because of negativity bias - there is a negativity bias toward Private Equity, and it is entirely on the fault of…

That’s logically equivalent to saying average black people get a bad reputation because of the few who are criminals. It may be true but there’s nothing they can do about it and the fault really lies with the person who lumps them all together.

PE is a giant thing. There is a lot of it. The ones who don’t run companies out of business have no control over the ones who do. You’re using “they” to refer to thousands of people as if they’re a monolith.

And I don’t disagree that the bias you mention is accurate, I was pointing out that it’s because the people who think that way simply don’t understand finance. And judging by the comments here every time it comes up, the bias you mention is very popular.

Keeping opinions to ourselves would make these comments sections pretty sparse. Why is mine not ok but yours is? I was largely agreeing with you and expounding anyway.

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

#387

Post by mattmaroon »

to11mtm wrote: post #355
mattmaroon wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a strange cartoony impression that people here have but not generally what they do, even in the case of LBOs which I assume is what you’re referencing but only a small part of what PE firms do. They generally buy businesses that are managed poorly, manage them well, and fix them. And when they part one out like you are referencing, it’s usually a bad business. While what Eddie Lampert did to Sears/K-Mart was c…

Okay, fun question... (Honestly not sure where I sit on this...) I've always been very skeptical of the sale/spinoff of various divisions of automakers in the 80s/90s. To me it always felt like they were looking for a short term profit vs the general 'steady pace' of government contracts and the like, I also can't help to feel amazed nobody even showed a good second option for the next gen mail carrier... but again,…

I think it’s a mixed bag. There’s obvious efficiency in having a small number of companies make parts and sell them to the many auto makers. There are obvious downsides to outsourcing too.

I think Tesla is a good illustration. They make a lot of parts other auto makers outsource, and they also have a whole lot of quality control issues. I am sure I suffer from observational bias here, as my GF has a model Y and I notice all the parts that fail that never would on any other car (like vent fans, door handles, etc.) but the upside exists in some engineering document or p&l I don’t see.

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

#388

Post by paranoidxprod »

Corrado wrote: post #377
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 had a couple of .dev domains on Google Domains. Unfortunately, you can't migrate those to another registrar as the .dev TLD is locked to Squarespace. I wonder if they will ever unlock the .dev TLD.

I was just able to finish transferring out my .dev domain from Google to Cloudflare. I had started the process when SquareSpace first took them over but forgot to finish until I saw this, but I was able to transfer out my .dev domain!

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

#389

Post by dartos »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #166
lesuorac wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also know that the IRS classifies software development as R&D, but we all know those are not the same thing in reality. I think you may have spent too much time writing software to notice how R&D it is. You can pick whatever citation you want [1] but writing software is a very risky endeavor (in terms of ROI). "Generic IT" or SRE is really not R&D. If your solution to a bug is to "reboot" the device; that's an op…

Setting up shopify integrations, building a domain name registrar, and writing new web templates is not R&D. It carries no technical risk and the product is already known to be valuable. The only chance of failure is that you build it and nobody comes to buy because there's no reason to choose you over all the other people offering the same thing. I am sure that most software projects fail, but I am also sure that as…

> In contrast, people doing R&D in pharma or other similar fields will spend months or years working on a single project that doesn't go anywhere because it is too hard.

So does your argument boil down to “software moves faster than the sciences, so it’s not R&D?”

Initial development isn’t R&D. Like you said, setting up a webpage and hooking up payments isn’t R&D.

After a product is established, future work is R&D. A cycle of desired outcome, hypothesis for how to get there, and successive implementations until something sticks or the project fails and the hypothesis is proven wrong.

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

#390

Post by tim333 »

renegade-otter wrote: post #60

The gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.

Where is this Web 3.0 that I can move to? Do you have a link?
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