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Backblaze S-1 IPO

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Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#41

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

bpodgursky wrote: post #25
tiffanyh wrote: post #20

I love Backblaze. Kind of surprised they aren’t profitable. >” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”

Pretty bold to IPO with those kind of revenue #s these days... I guess the iron is hot though.

Car companies are going IPO without any product at all and no track record showing they can run a sustainable business.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#42

Post by hatware »

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#43

Post by xmprt »

djbusby wrote: post #38
encryptluks2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I was until I switched to restic and saved a bunch of money. I still get unlimited storage with G Suite. You can also get 6TB of annual storage with Office 365 family plan for $80 at Costco.

Backblaze is $70/yr unlimited. Did you save $-10?

I'm assuming they're using the other features that Office 365 offers.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#44

Post by m0zg »

djbusby wrote: post #34
m0zg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like prices will pretty much inevitably go up after they're public, and I'll finally have the motivation to set up my own remote backup by exchanging hard drives with a friend of mine on the other end of the country.

Tried rsync.net?

25 dollars per TiB/mo? LOL.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#45

Post by throwaway832939 »

mkr-hn wrote: post #14
encryptluks2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the majority of their business is personal backups then the business is already in a decline. I've looked at them multiple times, and Google Drive and OneDrive are both much better deals.

Google Drive and OneDrive are sync services. Backblaze is backup. You can walk back to a specific day on Backblaze and download or ship a copy of all your files from before a disaster hit. Google's Backup is still live synced and has no rollback functionality. Sync is handy, but I still have the synced folders backed up.

It's a bit different to the original argument but there is the issue that people have more and more files created in those services and only existing within them (desktop Office tries its best to convince you to do this).

It's hard to convince people who go along with that "but you don't really have backups, you need to download everything locally and pay $5/month".

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#46

Post by eikenberry »

djbusby wrote: post #34
m0zg wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like prices will pretty much inevitably go up after they're public, and I'll finally have the motivation to set up my own remote backup by exchanging hard drives with a friend of mine on the other end of the country.

Tried rsync.net?

They were talking about switching if they got more expensive and rsync.net is already a lot more expensive unless you have very little data (<300GB).

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#47

Post by gruez »

qeternity wrote: post #23
tiffanyh wrote: post #20

I love Backblaze. Kind of surprised they aren’t profitable. >” In the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, our revenue was $40.7 million and $53.8 million, respectively, representing growth of 32%. We incurred net losses of $1.0 million and $6.6 million for the years ended December 31, 2019 and 2020, respectively”

This caught me by surprise as well because I am pretty sure they have stated before that they were profitable.

Yeah, what gives? I remember they prided themselves on being profitable, self-funded and not beholden to VCs. Sure enough, I was able to confirm that with a quick search:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15074289

>Finally, Backblaze is profoundly different than CrashPlan in that we never really raised any bank financing or VC financing. We're 90% employee owned, and there are no deep pockets. CrashPlan raised something like $150 million which comes with "pressure to grow fast or die". Backblaze is free of any such pressure, we own our own fate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21006216

> Yev here -> we HAVE to be cash-flow positive since we're not VC-funded. When we started the company it was bootstrapped, so "making enough money to survive" has always been a part of the equation!

That last comment was from 2019, yet according to the S-1, they were actually unprofitable. What's going on here? Were they profitable before, then suddenly taking on a massive loss? Their loss in 2020 was huge compared to the one in 2019.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#48

Post by m0zg »

eikenberry wrote: post #46
djbusby wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tried rsync.net?

They were talking about switching if they got more expensive and rsync.net is already a lot more expensive unless you have very little data (<300GB).

It's not just that. It's also that I don't really trust anything centralized anymore, and internet speeds are such that homegrown solutions are becoming more and more attractive. Another benefit is that I'll also be able to easily backup my Linux machines, which BB currently does not support. At the moment I just periodically copy data to windows on cron so that it's backed up - not ideal to say the least.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#49

Post by adar »

hatware wrote: post #42

I feel bad for taking advantage of their personal backup plan ($60/yr) now that I see they're struggling to gross a profit. I just can't find a better way to back up 80TB offsite with that value.

I'd feel deeply uncomfortable backing up 80tb of data to a $60/year plan, tbh.

Re: Backblaze S-1 IPO

#50

Post by Spooky23 »

antisthenes wrote: post #27

I'm surprised how small Backblaze is. Am I reading this right that they only had 53 million USD in Revenue in 2020? That's a tiny fraction of, say, Dropbox's revenue. I would have expected them to be in the 30-50% range of Dropbox on size. And with 164 employees to boot, that's only $323,000 revenue per employee. I wonder what the compensation is like there.

Why? It’s a pure commodity business. They are competing against your iCloud subscription and little USB drives that cost $30.

Not sure what the long term strategy is, but I hope going public doesn’t kill them — seems like a nice little business that could just coast for years.

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