Elastic files for an IPO • Hacker News Board

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#41

Post by tschellenbach » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

xaranke wrote: post #6

d4l3k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, both MongoDB and Elasticsearch have had serious issues as pointed out via the Jepsen tests. https://aphyr.com/posts/317-jepsen-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/323-jepsen-elasticsearch-1-5-0 Though, all those issues have been fixed for both MongoDB and Elasticsearch so it's not necessarily fair to judge them based off past performance. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... h…

The results for ElasticSearch are from 2015, curious to see how relevant they are now especially given that the team has been working on addressing these issues in the interim.

Also elastic back then was used as a place where you copy your data, not your main data store. (Their positioning changed later) MongoDB was supposed to be used for your primary data store.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#42

Post by tschellenbach » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

dvirsky wrote: post #23

tthisk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the founder from the Netherlands? I’m fairly sure they also have a small office in Amsterdam, but most of their engineering is done by people working remotely.

No, he's Israeli, and Elastic started when he lived here. I don't think they have offices in Israel which is atypical.

One of them is Dutch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenschuurman/

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#43

Post by tschellenbach » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

Anyone figure out which product/services are driving the majority of this revenue?

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#44

Post by czbond » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:23 PM UTC

hendzen wrote: post #13

aventrix wrote: post #2

Interesting. My initial instinct is to compare them to MongoDB which IPO'd about a year ago. They seem to be doing quite well since, but then again, who hasn't in the tech sector? I will say I very much enjoy Elastic's suite of products, I can't say the same for MonogoDB.

There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic. MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB In…

Really great reply - thank you for sharing. I was just researching the company more for investment. I agree also with regards to Horton/Cloudera. They had so much promise - but felt out of favor.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#45

Post by jedberg » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

Any time there is an IPO filing, I immediately come to the comments on HN, because there is always someone well versed in reading these things that can provide an excellent summary. Thank you!

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#46

Post by tootie » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

Elastic also has an excellent market position. They have far fewer credible competitors than Mongo.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#47

Post by moxious » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #7

Just to be clear, $100M is what they are looking to raise , not their valuation. Their last valuation was about $700M in 2014, so presumably, they are looking for a valuation that exceeds that, most likely in the low billions.

$100M is likely a placeholder amount. They're filing to go public and can adjust that figure later, it's not that strange to do so. I don't think $100M means much there, and relative to their overall valuation if $100M is all they wanted they'd likely have other options.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#48

Post by FridgeSeal » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

mooreds wrote: post #27

hendzen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic. MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB In…

I can't speak for others, but I was looking to set up a quick elastic search cluster and Elastic's hosted offering beat the pants off of AWS ElasticSearch in terms of usability, polish, ease of getting started and security-by-default. Now, I don't have a lot of data in the cluster, so we'll see how performance is when that happens, but would definitely recommend Elastic's offering.

We recently moved our stuff at work from AWS to Elastic Cloud and it’s excellent.

Performance is miles and above better, there’s actual security options on the clusters and there’s way more features.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#49

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

[deleted]

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#50

Post by nodesocket » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

hendzen wrote: post #13

aventrix wrote: post #2

Interesting. My initial instinct is to compare them to MongoDB which IPO'd about a year ago. They seem to be doing quite well since, but then again, who hasn't in the tech sector? I will say I very much enjoy Elastic's suite of products, I can't say the same for MonogoDB.

There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic. MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB In…

I setup a 3 billion plus document ES cluster using AWS Elasticsearch Service. As a whole it works really well, and it's nice not to have to manage individual EC2 instances. With that said, there are some very annoying things. Previously if you modified the access policy of the ES cluster, it would completely rebuild the entire cluster (create all new nodes and copy all data), which can take many hours.

Recently I turned off some slow query and slow index advanced logging options, again AWS completely rebuilt the entire ES cluster when these options surely should be able to be applied without copying all data.