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Cloudflare S-1

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Re: Cloudflare S-1

#91

Post by zemo »

SanchoPanda wrote: post #71
zemo wrote: post #53

"we may maintain relationships with customers that others find hostile, offensive, or inappropriate" these dudes would be neutral in the face of Sauron.

They discuss this very thoughtfully in the blog post from when they kicked the daily stormer to the curb. https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

yes, a long post defending neutrality. What I'm accusing them of is exactly what this post espouses: that they think that neutrality is de facto virtuous no matter the stakes and no matter who is endangered, so I don't see how this post is counter to my claim that they would be neutral in the face of Sauron.

> we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network.

This blog post essentially says "if Sauron wanted to set up shop to recruit and use our services, that would be fine unless Sauron said that we liked him, if we were under public pressure to drop him, or if it were literally illegal for us to front his network":

> The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

It doesn't say "we would be opposed to Sauron using our services because he intends to enslave Middle-Earth and we don't think we should help him do that". I think that having no regard for the consequences of your actions reflects poorly on the tech industry.

I don't think that being neutral is values-agnostic, I think that neutrality benefits the oppressive and those already in power, and that adhering to neutrality at all costs is a form of fundamentalism.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#92

Post by nannal »

OrgNet wrote: post #57
the_duke wrote: post #14

The free tier of Cloudflare has been really amazing for small to medium websites. It gives you a basically unlimited CDN, SSL, HTTP/2, DDos protection and fast DNS servers with almost 0 effort... for free ... Thus increasing the stability and speed of many web properties that otherwise wouldn't pay for it. I'm afraid this could easily change once the company is public and is under the pressures that come along with i…

Cloudflare is getting too big so I'm all for anything that could possibly make it smaller

In defense of this user we have had a few system wide outages which have shut down major communications networks and news outlets.

Additionally they're less than friendly to users who strive for anonymity via forced captcha which further empowers google's massive machine learning/data classification efforts.

Cloudflare are big and competition is something they clearly lack.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#93

Post by dragonwriter »

whatshisface wrote: post #84
JohnAtCC wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? If the service is WORTH paying for, then it SHOULD be paid for. The world of service, if proven magnetizable, should always be monetized. #FreeMarkets

Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two.

> Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two.

No, they don't compromise between them, nor do they reflect one more than the other: the basic law of supply and demand is that markets clear at the quantity and price where the marginal cost to produce equals the marginal value to customers which also equals the sale price.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#94

Post by steve19 »

thinkloop wrote: post #75
mikeyouse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom stands out in this category too. Random blog on Medium, but the points all stand: https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/zoom-ipo-s-1-breakdown-1192... Growing >100% YoY, profitable, generating cashflow, NPS above 70, just an all around solid business.

Zoom has very little defensible tech, it's more about packaging/marketing. Cloudflare is very difficult to duplicate.

Not true, Zoom has developed and deployed very sophisticated malware which would be hard to replicate on purpose or through incompetence.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#95

Post by notfromhere »

6cd6beb wrote: post #77
BowBun wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is on every S1 thread. And every time someone mentions that it is essentially standard copy for all S1s, because you can never guarantee anything on the market.

>We have incurred net losses in all periods since we began operations and we expect we will continue to incur net losses for the foreseeable future. The admission that "we've never made money and there's a good chance we never will" being boilerplate S-1 copy is monstrously troubling. When no one needs to see that a company can made a dollar before investing because profit is for suckers and this company's probably g…

You can't legally guarantee a return unless you actually guarantee a return

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#96

Post by btown »

cosmie wrote: post #85
louis-paul wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They list it as a key element of their business model: > Free customer base—Free customers are an important part of our business. These customers sign up for our service through our self-serve portal and are typically individual developers, early stage startups, hobbyists, and other users. Our free customers create scale, serve as efficient brand marketing, and help us attract developers, customers, and potential emp…

This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect! Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411

Yea, it didn't occur to me either - as implementers we'd be like "why would we want the responsibility of so much scale that we need to support without corresponding revenue," but in their position they can say "we need all the tooling for that scale anyways, why don't we leverage that into better bulk discounts with the interconnections!" And presumably they've run models that say that their bulk savings from interconnect make this far from just a loss leader.

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#97

Post by sciurus »

thinkloop wrote: post #75
mikeyouse wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom stands out in this category too. Random blog on Medium, but the points all stand: https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/zoom-ipo-s-1-breakdown-1192... Growing >100% YoY, profitable, generating cashflow, NPS above 70, just an all around solid business.

Zoom has very little defensible tech, it's more about packaging/marketing. Cloudflare is very difficult to duplicate.

> Cloudflare is very difficult to duplicate.

Unless you're one of their many competitors, like, say, AWS. From the S-1:

"Our current and potential future competitors include a number of different types of companies, including:

• on-premise hardware network vendors, such as Cisco Systems Inc., F5 Networks, Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., FireEye, Inc., Imperva, Inc., Palo Alto Networks, Inc., Juniper Networks, Inc., and Riverbed Technology, Inc.;

• point-cloud solution vendors, including cloud security vendors such as Zscaler, Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. through Umbrella (formerly known as OpenDNS), content delivery network vendors such as Akamai Technologies, Inc., Limelight Networks, Inc., Fastly, Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. through Edgecast, domain name system vendors services such as Oracle Corporation through DYN, NeuStar, Inc., and UltraDNS Corporation, and cloud SD-WAN vendors; and

• traditional public cloud vendors, such as Amazon.com, Inc. through Amazon Web Services, Alphabet Inc. through Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Corporation through Azure, and Alibaba Group Holding Limited through Alibaba Cloud. "

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#98

Post by fastbeef »

gamblor956 wrote: post #90
fastbeef wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want to post my own company since it can be traced to me IRL, but yeah, all tax returns are public in Sweden, personal and companies alike. Here is Spotify’s financials from its inception to today: https://www.allabolag.se/5567037485/spotify-ab You can find the same data for all companies.

Spotify is publicly traded. Do you have an example for a privately owned company?

Spotify didn’t go public until a few years ago, but sure, I get your point.

Here’s Delaval, privately owned maker of milking robots:

https://www.allabolag.se/5560123928/delaval-international-ab

Re: Cloudflare S-1

#100

Post by jonas21 »

buildzr wrote: post #39
groundlogic wrote: post #9

Finally an IPO I want to buy into. Technical fundamentals matter. Edit: I mean that in the software/service way, not the economical way, in case there was any confusion.

I'm sure it's just in my head, but it feels like the first tech IPO in several years where there actually seems to be a viable business model.

How about Slack, PagerDuty, Zoom, Crowdstrike, or Pinterest? These were all in the last few months.
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