81–90 of 253 posts
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Pretty bold to IPO with those kind of revenue #s these days... I guess the iron is hot though.
Well, growth empirically beats all, won't it? What's even revenue to say in the face of growth.
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I back things up to Backblaze B2 from Linux using borg. It works really well and it's incredibly cheap. I'm paying less than $1/month to keep about 155GB of data there. About half the data is from Borg backups, the other is rcloned copies of my music files.
What's your process for backing up to B2 using borg? I'm currently doing borg backups to a local server, then using restic to back up my borg backups to B2. My reason for using restic over rclone is so that if the local backup is corrupted I've got history on the remote to fall back to. I'm hoping to find a less cumbersome way to do this.
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They didn't say they were profitable - they said they were cash-flow positive. And if you look at the cash flow statement in the S-1, they were indeed cash-flow positive in 2019. It looks like much of the difference comes down to stock-based compensation. This doesn't cost the company any cash, but under GAAP, it has to be recorded as an expense. (IANAA, so take what I say with a grain of salt).
Backblaze was tweeting about being profitable as late as 2020: https://twitter.com/backblaze/status/1242481625004273665
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Can the service itself be profitable but the company not be? I mean how do we define profitable?
If the service is provided by employees who are compensated with equity, why would you not count that in profitability numbers?
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”
What does this even mean? And how is their business even remotely competitive with the big 3? Bit pushing is a volume game, and it doesn't seem like they have much of it.
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.
According to Backblaze's calculator[0], it would cost $4,800/yr to store 80TB on Backblaze B2 and you're storing it for $60/yr. Cases like these are why unlimited storage plans don't make sense... Also it irks me that the personal backup plan forbids network drives [1]. I can't backup my 4TB NAS but 80TB is fine because it's stored on one machine? 0 - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html 1 - https:…
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”
Deciding to use your gross profit to fuel further growth (especially considering they're compounding it at a healthy rate and doing so without giving up equity or interest) is a wise move. If anything, it probably would have made sense to take some debt or finance more of the hardware purchases early on (as I see they are doing now at some scale as of 2020) in order to put those proceeds towards customer growth.
The only thing I see which is a marginal concern with these numbers is that it's difficult to see the split between marketing spend on b2 customers and backup customers (They spent $8M in 2019 on sales and marketing to generate 42k new customers, and $11.9M in 2020 to add 40k). It is very possible and likely that those marketing dollars went towards new enterprise customers (on b2 storage vs backup) and the revenue-per-customer number increasing during that timeframe seems to support that. Are blog posts calculated in the sales/marketing spend? Seems lots of the customers came from the organic content play.
Very cool to see the company who's free blog post about which harddrives are most reliable (when some had >5% annual failure rate and others <1% for the same price) nearly 10 years ago come around to s1.
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.
edit: lol 80TB - hopefully it's mostly torrents and porn and they can de-duplicate it on their end from all my torrents and porn already on there :D
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Pretty bold to IPO with those kind of revenue #s these days... I guess the iron is hot though.
Not really. They've taken very little outside funding (mostly venture debt and a series A), and have been around for 10+ years. They'll likely get a better valuation from the public market than they would privately and the founders who have been waiting 10 years can take some money off of the table. Smart move IMO.
This is really all there is to it. You don't actually have to build a business anymore to get rich. You just put together something that looks like one, pay yourself a handsome salary for 10 years, then cash out and retire to New Zealand.
Sweet gig if you can get it.