391–400 of 469 posts
I'm staggered that there are 575 companies paying slack $100k / year. I don't even have anything against slack but what is possibly worth $100k a year from a comms software?
You would be amazed at the types of software large companies pay for >$100k a year to solve narrow business problems.
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Indeed, I was at a biotech drug conference in Berlin last year and was astonished at how little direct research large pharma are engaged in. They've completely offloaded primary research to drug development companies. Maybe it has always been like that, but for me it was an eye-opener.
I would assume the smaller companies are much more efficient when it comes to R&D.
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> Slack has a huge opportunity in front of them (become the messaging platform for every business that exists). How about: being bought by Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft would buy Slack given the money they've dumped into developing and promoting Teams. Seems they're too far gone at this point. Disclosure: Work at MSFT, not on Teams.
They bought Github even though they already had VSTS aka Azure Devops that offered free git hosting and they just abandoned their own browser engine for Chromium. Also they bought Xamarin.
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> Slack has a huge opportunity in front of them (become the messaging platform for every business that exists). How about: being bought by Microsoft.
I don't think Microsoft would buy Slack given the money they've dumped into developing and promoting Teams. Seems they're too far gone at this point. Disclosure: Work at MSFT, not on Teams.
Microsoft would buy to prevent someone else from doing so.
Though its hold has weakened greatly, the Outlook, Exchange, and AD behemoth still own enterprise communications.
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>In no world is the SEC's role to determine whether or not a company's business strategy qualifies them to go public or not. Profitability is objective...let’s not pretend what I’m suggesting is the SEC subjectively making a decision on a business judgement or business plan. Simply you want to register a security for public offering show a GAAP profit...I understand that’s not “how it works” or I wouldn’t have sugges…
You realize that you can very easily be proven wrong, right? Amazon was "losing" more money in each year leading up to their IPO. By your logic we all should have been protected from investing in this obvious scam of a company, right? If you could go back in time and dump money into Amazon stock, would you? Of course you would, because profitability is obviously too simplistic a measure to gate companies from going p…
Based on my logic? I never said slack/uber/Lyft are scams, I even admit they may be good investments when they IPO...I even said profitability is not the full picture.
I never said the SEC was your nanny, I never said you couldn’t read an S-1...though based on your assertions I have to question you reading comprehension.
Maybe you could give me a comprehensive breakdown of how the market would be different if amazon did have to post profit before IPO, since you are so sure we would all be worse off...even non investors. Are investors, public markets and private markets really all better off? Is it possible amazon wouldn’t dominate and there be other companies competing in the space? Better jobs even more investment opportunites? I don’t think you could answer any of those questions with certainty.
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Ok, then why is loss-making more acceptable (safer for small investors) in a formerly profitable company than it is for a not-yet-profitable company? And as others have pointed out you are exactly wrong about efforts to make public investment available earlier. Besides founders who would love to have more fundraising options, there is plenty of evidence and outcry that small investors are not getting access to econom…
> Ok, then why is loss-making more acceptable (safer for small investors) in a formerly profitable company than it is for a not-yet-profitable company? One has demonstrated the ability to turn a profit and the other has not. This seems a bit like asking "Why is radiation considered a valid cancer treatment and rhino horn isn't when both have failed to help people before?"
There are exceptions and sleight of hand (like when Uber doesn't reveal costs to get drivers, but this is 100% true for formerly-profitable companies too. You could make a much better argument for skipping on those, or by forcing more disclosure in S-1s. But painting broadly based on total profitability is just too simplistic.
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>What future growth would there be for buyers if the company went public already at its peak? I never said anything about peak. I said profit. Certainly a company making profit may want to go public to finance growth to make more profit (ie peak). IPOs/stock companies were not created for companies that were unprofitable.
If growth rate continues as they project, buyers get a larger future bump/multiplier. What makes you say that? Proof? It was historically used to raise more funding to fuel growth, a function VCs can now fill (ie, then it would be likely to have a VC provide the larger sums required). Though VCs can fill such a gap, IPOs give insiders an exit.
It’s your assertion show me proof IPOs are for “unprofitable companies”.
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IPOs were historically done by unprofitable companies to raise funds. It's like seeking out VCs for another round of funding, but it's instead the public. Now, it's usually done to give insiders an exit. What future growth would there be for buyers if the company went public already at its peak?
>What future growth would there be for buyers if the company went public already at its peak? I never said anything about peak. I said profit. Certainly a company making profit may want to go public to finance growth to make more profit (ie peak). IPOs/stock companies were not created for companies that were unprofitable.
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They are already profitable. They're just warning it's possible they might become unprofitable. Just like any other company.
No, they're not already profitable. From the document on which we're commenting: "...we incurred net losses of $146.9 million, $140.1 million, and $138.9 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively."