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Twilio opens trading at $23.99 per share
- wslh 10y agoIt is weird that Google Finance [1] is not displaying the stock while Yahoo does [2]. [1] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWLO&ei=WRRsV5j0KtD9eo2FqvgB https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWLO&ei=WRRsV5j0KtD9... [2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWLO&ql=0 http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=TWLO&ql=0
- ofcrpls 10y agoDo this check for any IPO stock on any given day, it always is the same case. GF has taken a week sometimes to get them on their feeds.
- cookiecaper 10y agoYahoo! Finance is probably the last respected Yahoo product on the market. The serious investors I know always use Yahoo Finance as their free data source (they also have expensive private data sources, of course).
- nradov 10y agoPlus Yahoo Finance makes it super easy to download historical closing price data in CSV format to do your own analysis.
- Grazester 10y agoSo does google actually.
- nradov 10y agoNo the Google Finance download feature is far worse, and effectively useless for many types of analysis. The data only goes back to 2000, whereas Yahoo goes back to 1986. And the Google closing prices aren't adjusted for dividends which makes it impossible to calculate actual returns unless you pull that data in from another source. Yahoo includes a separate column which has that built in.
- g8oz 10y agoPlus they have option prices.
- pduan 10y agoThank god they rolled back the terrible beta redesign.
- freebs 10y agoTradingView has worked well for me for a few years now: https://www.tradingview.com/ https://www.tradingview.com/
- Grazester 10y agoNot strange at all. When Ferrari had their IPO I had to use Yahoo finance because of the same issue.
- throwaway6497 10y agoDid anyone do a S1 summary of Twilio already? Will be great, if you can point to it.
- willejs 10y agoThere was another HN thread about the S1 filing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11779453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11779453 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000104746916013448/a2227414zs-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447669/000104746916...
- api 10y agoLots of haters there, which I don't get. Twilio seems to have a lot of substance.
- cylinder 10y agoGood service but still very overvalued.
- davidu 10y agoThis post is an amusing summary of the six years of Twilio haters: https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/ https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comme...
- dublinben 10y agoIt seems like a running that their primary competitor (Plivo) is ahead on features, and has better prices. I think those are completely fair criticisms of any company. It's a little strange that this compilation goes to great lengths to never mention the competitor by name.
- rgbrenner 10y agoyou can click on the links and see they are each about a different competitor.
- rm999 10y agoStock prices aren't very useful, I prefer to look at total marketcap. They IPO'd at 15 dollars with a valuation of 1.23 billion dollars, which means they're now about 1.97 billion dollars. https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/22/twilio-prices-its-ipo-at-15-per-share-above-its-previous-target/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/22/twilio-prices-its-ipo-at-1...
- jonknee 10y agoActually, for an IPO the stock price is very useful. It opened at $15 which was higher than the previously announced range of $12-14 and have shot up 70% in early trading. It's a great start for a tech IPO, hopefully this will encourage more companies to list.
- MichaelApproved 10y ago> hopefully this will encourage more companies to list hopefully this will encourage more VC's to fund. Quick edit: not saying there isn't a lot of funding already happening but there's fear that VC might dry up. Hope it doesn't happen.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoDoesn't that mean the company missed out on about half its value?
- triangleman 10y agoYep that's called money on the table.
- jonknee 10y agoNot really, they only sold a small percentage of the company in the initial offering.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoStill looks like ~$100,000,000 was missed.
- philip1209 10y ago[deleted]
- rabidonrails 10y agoI don't think that Twilio is a YC company.
- bankim 10y agoFor employees sake, stock price should remain that high after 6 months...
- mknocker 10y agoActually, it might go up quickly once they start filling up their financial results every 3 months. If they have a steady growth the market will react positively and the employees owning shares will benefit from it.
- bedhead 10y agoCan someone explain one aspect of their business model to me? Their cost of goods sold is rather high at 45% and hasn't shown much operating leverage - no bueno. They explain that this is mostly payments to "network service providers"...would this mean the carriers? If so, what options are available to Twilio to lower these costs as a percent of revenue? This is the only aspect of the business model that concerns me. I read that Bandwidth.com actually owns a CLEC in order to lower these costs, might Twilio be able to do the same? Any help much appreciated.
- rtpg 10y agoThere are a lot of industries with a much higher COGS that do fine. To me it sounds like they're selling goods at 122% markup.
- eldavido 10y agoThis is my read exactly. Investors need to understand that internet application service providers aren't software companies, and that it isn't reasonable to expect software-company margins (selling CDs for hundreds of dollars) from services providers. Companies like New Relic, Twilio, etc. have real costs to operate their infrastructure, especially so in Twilio's case where they likely have to make payments to the downstream network operators (not sure on that last point, I assume, but would love to be corrected if I'm wrong)
- nexxer 10y agoOne thing they do is send out international bulk SMS to their users, probably through large SMS aggregators. This has a cost per SMS that's pretty hard to get around.
- mbesto 10y ago> There are a lot of industries with a much higher COGS that do fine. But not many that have such a ridiculously high PE ratio. One of the main reasons tech businesses (specifically SaaS) can command such a high valuation is because their gross margins are amazingly high (some up to 90%, on average around 70-80%), which means 90% of their revenue can be reinvested back into growth (S&M and R&D). I think it's certainly fine to discredit Twilio when looking through the lens of publicly traded SaaS businesses (they're on the low side of gross margins), but if you compare to other industries, you're right, it's a very healthy business. Good read on this: http://tomtunguz.com/not-all-revenue-dollars-are-created-equal/ http://tomtunguz.com/not-all-revenue-dollars-are-created-equ...
- eldavido 10y agoAnyone local in SF who wants to meet and go through the fundamentals on this? I've gotten through about 40 pages of the S-1 (of about 160) and want to compare notes. In no particular order, a few thoughts: - I'm not sure how defensible this is against AWS or another infrastructure provider cross-selling to existing customers. AWS/Azure already has lots of relationships with buyers and both have the engineering muscle to build a competitive product. Maybe the existing knowledge of the API and general head start will cause people not to switch? - How large is the addressable market? Can Twilio grow it? Are they planning to do anything beyond their existing "bringing telephony to the Internet" product line? - Dual-class share structure a concern for any? Interesting that it ceases to exist after a few years. I'm thinking about buying a few hundred shares as a long-term hold (3+ years at least) but the first-day pop is making me rethink, maybe it'll cool after a few days, who knows?
- mason55 10y ago>Maybe the existing knowledge of the API and general head start will cause people not to switch? It's hard to imagine anyone switching. Presumably if Amazon started trying to compete on price then Twilio could lower their prices enough to not make it worthwhile for anyone to switch. Especially given that they're going to be integrated pretty tightly, it shouldn't be too hard for them to not make it worth the cost to switch. The real question would be if they were able to continue growing if GC, AWS and Azure introduced the functionality. Lots of companies are willing to pay a little more to keep everything in one ecosystem. The only difference is that integrating with all the mobile carriers is a totally different problem than anything else AWS, GCE and Azure do. It's not just an infrastructure/technology challenge, there is also the relationship building and negotiating which isn't something you have to deal with when you're building out, say, media transcoding as a service.
- AJ007 10y agoAnother question is what happens if the current SMS-Voice use cases migrate to platforms such as FB Messenger and Whatsapp? The seamless integration of alternative platforms in to iOS 10 could be a hint of a future where carrier are just interchangeable with any available data provider.
- GnarlyWhale 10y agoSide note, some of the Twilio dev team is currently running a "code jam" from the NYSE trading floor and broadcasting it via Twitch. https://www.twitch.tv/twilio https://www.twitch.tv/twilio [Now Over]
- cdnsteve 10y agoSo far I've seen Flask, Node/Express and Sinatra being used ^^ https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/745985282659524608 https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/745985282659524608
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoMakes me unreasonably happy :)
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- arsenerei 10y agoKenny's a coder! I think this is actually pretty incredible. They got trader who's been there for 35 years writing his first Twilio app (and first app ever) live and it works. It feels like an awesome message that we can empower people to code with the right tools and they can feel incredible doing it. Well done, Twilio! Edit: And we just finished a conference call with Kenny that he created and we all chanted his name. This is amazing.
- marcos_placona 10y agoThe most epic thing I've seen today! Always nice to see people running their first line of code
- throwaway6497 10y ago
- ajaimk 10y agoExciting day indeed.
- a13n 10y agoWhile that sounds great for Twilio (and in some ways it is), it's actually a bit of a bummer because this means they left around $90M on the table. This is because of how IPOs work: In an IPO, the company (eg. Twilio) sells the issued shares to an underwriter (eg. JP Morgan) at an agreed amount (eg. $15) and then the underwriter turns around and sells those on the market for whatever people will pay for them (eg. $24). If those first shares get bought for less than the offering price ($15) the company got a good deal on their shares and the underwriter loses money. If the shares get bought for more than the offering price, the company loses money and the underwriter profits. This is one way underwriters make money, by being able to turn around and sell those shares to the public market for more than they bought them for. Twilio issued $10m shares at $15 and the market opened up 60%, so they raised $150M and left $90M on the table. 10m shares * (24 - 15) $/share = $90M
- dnadler 10y agoA big (and important) reason IPOs are frequently priced below where they open is that the underwriter is try to ensure that the IPO is fully subscribed. If the IPO opens below the IPO price, then the new shareholders won't be too pleased, and will be less likely to purchase shares of the next IPO. Too many investors losing money on IPOs --> less demand for IPO shares --> less capital available to (generally) smaller companies. On the other hand, if investors are constantly making money from IPOs, there will be much more demand in the future, and capital will be much easier for these companies to access.
- pilom 10y agoBut why should Twilio care about the next guy in line? Their job is to get the best deal on capital they can get and giving some of that available capital to the underwriters is a bad idea from a shareholders perspective.
- akgerber 10y agoThese days, the purpose of an IPO is as much or more to provide liquidity to insiders as it is to actually raise capital.
- wslh 10y agoJust read here [1] the Twilio net profits are these: 2013: -$26.9m 2014: -$26.8m 2015: -$35.5m 1/1-3/31/2016: -$6.5m [1] https://twitter.com/jammasternate/status/737314901572616193 https://twitter.com/jammasternate/status/737314901572616193 Edit: removed note against HN policies.
- kevinburke 10y agoShut the company down, someone's onto us
- dang 10y ago> being downvoted in HN for publishing this? Crazy The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to do this. Please reread them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nieksand 10y agoThe net profit numbers by themselves don't tell you much about the health and prospects of the company. One big issue is that customer acquisition cost tends to be upfront whereas the life time value lags behind. E.g. you have to hire sales people now, it takes X months for them to become productive, and another Y months for those new customers to fully onboard. So to put those numbers in to context, you would have to look at revenue growth, margins, customer churn, cac, ltv, etc.
- wslh 10y ago> The net profit numbers by themselves don't tell you much about the health and prospects of the company. I am not saying they do but they help to discuss the IPO.
- kumarski 10y agoI'm not from this part of the world, but what I've found is that if you can juice your growth numbers for the public markets or raise more investor money on the notion that you'll blitzkrieg the market, LTV matters less and less for public markets. Even SalesForce and Amazon sort of go by this model. They make no profits. I'm not sure if I agree with this whole thing, esp. given the coliseum of a city they're building while being not-profitable, but I do understand some of the context of why the companies are valued so high.
- jboydyhacker 10y agoOne wonders what is the competitive threat here? Is it that Apple and Google introduce their own messaging infrastructure for developers?
- FilterSweep 10y agoNexmo or Plivo, but neither appear to be doing too well comparatively...... [0] although Plivo appears cheaper from other comments posted here. [0] (paywall warning: "display:none;" the interstitial modal window) http://stackshare.io/stackups/twilio-vs-nexmo-vs-plivo http://stackshare.io/stackups/twilio-vs-nexmo-vs-plivo
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- thecourier 10y agoFor a company with a yearly gross profit of USD92 millions and net losses of USD35 millinos, I cannot imagine who is buying shares at a USD1.8 billion market cap. Are we in the 2000 again?
- kumarski 10y agoI wrote a blog post about their API - IPO. At one point when I was building a SAAS sms app, I emailed 579 SMS providers to find quotes on better pricing. https://medium.com/@datarade/twilio-ipo-thoughts-997c36c9440c#.j8fn79aik https://medium.com/@datarade/twilio-ipo-thoughts-997c36c9440... One thing that I find incredibly surprising is that they often white-label and sell on top of other providers like infobip/nexmo. They don't have tier 1 connections and as well they don't scale very well internationally.
- desireco42 10y agoI think this is a deserving company with genuinely useful tools. On top of it, it is super easy to use Twilio to automate telephony, so I am happy for them.
- yueq 10y agostock price on IPO day is not helpful. You should better check it out after 3months or after first ER.
- ProfChronos 10y agoBased on IPO stock price ($15) and market cap ($1.23Bn) and Twilio's revenue run rate around $150M, so that's x8.2 for Revenue and x20.5 for EBITDA (40% margin seems reasonable in the telcos industry). Pretty strong figures - AT&T trades at 5xEBITDA - but not excessive. They might have chosen the bear/base case for the IPO pricing given i) the IPOs of tech companies that got delayed over the last months ii) their unique situation as a pure API player - they're the only one out there with that positioning
- mbesto 10y ago> and x20.5 for EBITDA (40% margin seems reasonable in the telcos industry) There EBITDA appears to be negative. 40% margin is "Gross margin" and is certainly not a valid EBITDA figure.
- ProfChronos 10y ago40% is a valid EBITDA margin for telcos. Twilio is indeed slightly negative in terms of adjusted EBITDA (around -5%) but market cap of tech companies is usually rather based on NTM EBITDA or industry average EBITDA - see prospectus of IPOs
- mbesto 10y ago> market cap of tech companies is usually rather based on NTM EBITDA This is almost entirely false. > 40% is a valid EBITDA margin for telcos Uh what? I didn't state that 40% wasn't valid. I simply stated that gross margin != EBITDA.
- sakopov 10y agoIs anyone on here buying shares?
- PostThisTooFast 10y agoWhatever "Twilio" is...
- erubin 10y agoI used Twilio to make a simple SMS wrapper around an app. It took maybe 30 minutes and I had never used it before. Very cool product.
- HNSucksAss 10y agoWhatever "Twilio" is.