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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

#401

Post by jimbobthrowawy »

pavlov wrote: post #172
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.

"Web3" was hijacked by cryptocurrency promoters as the marketing term for various get-rich-quick token schemes. (Generally what made them "web3" was simply that some venture capitalist had bought a bunch of the tokens early and would get to dump them on Coinbase.) If there's going to be a web 1.0 revival, maybe it needs to jump straight to version 5 to leave enough of a gap from the taint of blockchain...

IIRC, most of the promise of web3 was a "semantic web" or a web with a bunch of APIs talking to each other. The hijack was convincing people that some form of payment needed to be built into each API call some way, with some rent seeking/speculation on what the payment was denominated in.

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

#402

Post by dang »

MyFirstSass wrote: post #154
gzer0 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current state of the markets and private equity is deeply troubling. Gone are the days when companies like Microsoft went public at reasonable valuations, allowing everyday investors to participate in their massive growth. Now, companies like Uber and Airbnb debut on the stock market at sky-high valuations, leaving little room for the average investor to profit. Worse still, the concentration of wealth has enable…

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological tangents (they're repetitive), and especially please don't post in the flamewar style. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#403

Post by arrosenberg »

mattmaroon wrote: post #386
arrosenberg wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You think it's valuable to call people ignorant and to compare negative bias against PE funds (of all things!) to racism? I think the comments section would be better without that. Maybe I should keep that to myself, I don't know. You can certainly keep spouting them off, but I'm going to point out how absurd those types of comments are.

> You’re using “they” to refer to thousands of people as if they’re a monolith.

This is the same thing the cops whine about. The PE industry has a ton of money - if 90% of them are good actors, they could easily organize and lobby for rules to stop the bad actors. That they don't tells me that the incumbents like the rules where they get to do whatever they want.

> I was pointing out that it’s because the people who think that way simply don’t understand finance

I think you are wrong. They understand the impacts that financiers have had on themselves, their families and their communities. There is a reason private equity (and its' older equivalents) have been loathed by common people for over a hundred years in this country :)

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

#404

Post by pclmulqdq »

dartos wrote: post #389
pclmulqdq wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's not about things moving fast. It's about projects carrying specific kinds of risk and developing a specific kind of output. Namely technical risk and intellectual property.

Technical risk is the risk that your technical development won't pan out. I'm not referring to schedule risk - the risk that it will take longer than you thought - but actual risk that it will never work at all. Intellectual property is a durable, hard-to-copy advantage over your competition.

Pharma is a great example because it is a very pure form of R&D - you find a drug, test the shit out of it, those tests mostly go negative, and if you succeed, you have a formula and a manufacturing method that lets you charge extortionate rates. Most software work is not like this at all.

And no, ongoing future work is absolutely not guaranteed to be R&D. If anything, it is the opposite: most startups begin with R&D - creating an uncertain product with a (hopefully) durable advantage - and move out of doing R&D as they mature and the competition catches up. That is generally the lifecycle of companies that develop new product categories, from Singer (the first company to produce a sewing machine), to IBM, to Google.

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

#405

Post by bragr »

DANmode wrote: post #374
bragr wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon effectively democratizes the moderation to the huge group of server admins - who do a massive amount of unpaid labor. It definitely keeps some people away, and burns others out.

I'm still focused on the "effectively" part, since the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities !).

Sorry, "effectively" was an ambiguous word to use. I meant it in the sense of "for all practical purposes; in effect," rather than implying it was good.

To be clear, I think the admins are mostly white knuckling the moderation problem.

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

#406

Post by DANmode »

bragr wrote: post #405
DANmode wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still focused on the "effectively" part, since the other part has always been endemic to the Internet (and communities !).

Sorry, "effectively" was an ambiguous word to use. I meant it in the sense of "for all practical purposes; in effect," rather than implying it was good. To be clear, I think the admins are mostly white knuckling the moderation problem.

Yes, as they have been forever.

My point: at least there's something worthwhile there on the more desirable network to require moderation, rather than it all being on Facebook.

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

#407

Post by packetlost »

akho wrote: post #385
packetlost wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. This is something that should be completely independent of an ISP. Maybe we should have some standard protocols that facilitate it, but not be exclusively provided by ISPs.

I worked for an ISP before and did multiple projects involving consumer hardware. You do not want to be tied to whatever garbage your ISP decides to buy in bulk and give to.

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

#408

Post by akho »

packetlost wrote: post #407
akho wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. This is something that should be completely independent of an ISP. Maybe we should have some standard protocols that facilitate it, but not be exclusively provided by ISPs. I worked for an ISP before and did multiple projects involving consumer hardware. You do not want to be tied to whatever garbage your ISP decides to buy in bulk and give to.

I'm doing well regarding my self-hosting. Question is not what I want, but who can best deliver this sort of service to a wide consumer base. This will produce no extra load for ISPs, will drive little additional complexity for users (one device for internet things).

You want your stuff to be movable between ISPs, however, so your domain registrar should be separate.

ISPs are not great, true, but why not build a good one? For a change.

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

#409

Post by dehrmann »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #262
dehrmann wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different strategies. You can buy up dying companies and try to turn them around with management changes (and debt), you can sell off companies for scrap, you can buy up money printing machines and run them hotter.

Just to show that these bets are not without risk, the Sears bet failed bigtime. Lampert lost a ton of money.

People love to vilify PE for destroying companies, but a lot of these companies were dying anyway, and PE was trying a last-ditch, high-risk reorg to save them.

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

#410

Post by bjhess »

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.

I sure hope so! I missed the serendipity of web 1.0 and then in the past couple of years I realized it’s all still there! In fact, there or more sites than ever behind the sheen of these giant companies.

I hope this next iteration brings a proliferation of tools that can help regular folks take part in that (personal sites, blogging, guestbooks, etc) without getting trapped in a walled garden or social network.

We’re trying to do our part to help at our company (Good Enough) with https://pika.page/

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