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Mulesoft files for IPO
- msoad 10y agoIf it's anything like Apigee IPO it would be a huge disappointment for their employees
- ultimoo 10y agoWhat went wrong with the Apigee IPO for the employees? I know that they got acquired by Google but I'm not familiar with anything else.
- econner 10y agoQuick research suggests this timeline to me: Summer 2014 Apigee raises last private funding at a $600M valuation April 2015 Apigee IPOs at a valuation of $500M By end of 2015 Apigee closes at a valuation of ~$250M. So the company lost almost 2/3rds of its value probably right as the lockup period was expiring for employees to sell shares.
- charlesdm 10y agoAnother option is that the value dropped because of the lockup period expiring?
- myhrvold 10y agoWell, yes, but the acquisition in Sep 2016 (referenced in another reply to this comment) was just over the IPO price: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/08/google-will-acquire-apigee-for-625-million/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/08/google-will-acquire-apigee... Facebook had a similar valuation decline, then a bounce back. So those who had faith in the company for another year saw modest gains compared to 1.5 yrs ago at IPO.
- bogomipz 10y agoOuch. What is the justification for the lock up period? Is the idea that employees are somehow going to flood the market? Is the volume of vested options for the average worker bee really that high at the time of IPOs? Its seems like the plebes get burned a fair amount.
- econner 10y agoYea, it's to keep the price somewhat stable after the IPO. It's a very standard thing to do and the share price of a company usually drops permanently when the lock up period expires. Maybe a good rule of thumb is 10-20% of the company could be owned by employees at the time of IPO which could materially change the share price.
- hkmurakami 10y agoIt looks like the acquisition price per share ($17.40) was right around their IPO price of $17, so options wouldn't be underwater. But before that the stock traded as low as $6. So during this time the employees' stock was underwater, whereas C level will have been able to sell a portion of their shares at IPO (vs employees waiting for their 6 month lockup to expire). But the stock had recovered to $16+ before the acquisition so... I mean it's a public company. "Up and to the right" isn't always the case
- astrodust 10y agoWhy have I confused Mulesoft with Nullsoft all these years?
- nodesocket 10y agoI applaud Mulesoft for going public. Too often today large (well past series C) tech companies (I won't name any names) refuse to go public and instead continue to take private equity and foreign investment and prop themselves up on absurd valuations with no-checks and balances. Some of these companies are absolute dog shit, yet they continue to receive unlimited funding and insane valuations in a vacuum with no market to short them. Wall Street calls bullshit when they see it, and smart people short bad companies when they find them. Silicon Valley doesn't provide a way to short these propped-up companies, they just continue to self-promote themselves on private equity and foreign investment. Kudos Mulesoft and best of luck.
- hkmurakami 10y agoThere are rumors of Dodd-Frank getting repealed [1]. Afaik Dodd Frank had increased the reporting burden of companies to the point where it was much more difficult to IPO at a .com era revenue stage. So maybe its repeal will have the side benefit of allowing young but operationally strong companies to use IPO as a viable fundraising avenue again. [1] though the Wall Street implications worry me.
- nodesocket 10y agoI believe the market has already baked in Dodd-Frank being repealed. https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=1&chdv=0&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1487376071020&chddm=26588&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NYSE:JPM;NYSE:MS;NYSE:GS;NYSE:WFC&cmptdms=0;0;0;0&q=NYSE:C&&fct=big&ei=xI6nWOHNL8n_jAHphIqQBg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=1&chdv=0&...
- nsp 10y agoI thought Sarbanes-Oxley, which added a lot of reporting/disclosure requirements for public companies and was passed in the wake of Enron and Worldcom scandals in the early 2000s was the primary driver behind the drop in IPOs? What provisions in Dodd frank are there that effect this?
- 10y ago
- openmosix 10y agoLove it. Mulesoft was a customer at my previous company and I always enjoyed working with them. Good luck for their IPO - it's a good thing for the ecosystem to see more tech companies going public this year.
- econner 10y agoWhat exactly does Mulesoft do?
- tyingq 10y agoThe old terminology was ESB, or enterprise service bus. It's Java based, and basically feels something like Tomcat, but with a bunch of add ons. Things like api management, various protocol connectors, data translation, pre-built integrations, and so forth. Like a hub that can run your code, plus talk to most of what you already have.
- niftich 10y agoThey make a couple products that work well together. Mule ESB acts as a container for flows, which are declaratively-written processes of canned components that do a specific thing (like make an SQL query, make API calls, or call your custom code), or EIP components [1] that manipulate the execution flow. They give you a visual editor to drag-and-drop build these flows, or you can write them by hand in XML. You deploy them in Mule ESB and they run indefinitely, accepting messages, say, on HTTP ports, or firing at set times like cron-jobs, or the like; the runtime detects most crashes and restarts the particular flow if something goes weird. If this kinda sounds like Erlang/OTP you're not entirely wrong, but, let's not go there... (okay, so the canned components are sometimes quite nice, whereas in vanilla Erlang you're on your own. The value something like Mule brings is more the abstractions and the ecosystem, even if the Java runtime is of no intrinsic help. Also, see RabbitMQ's slides on Erlang [2]. Mule isn't an outward-facing message middleware like RabbitMQ, but behaves a lot like one on the inside. It also gives canned components to interact with them.) A Mule flow is often basically mid-level business logic plumbing; you don't want to put these flows on the public internet without rate limiting, authentication and authorization -- you want to use some API gateway or proxy in front. Mule has one, called Mule API Gateway, and the front-facing portal API Manager. Then the rest of the 'Anypoint' branded stuff is value-add: metrics, more connectors, SaaS stuff, etc. Overall, it's a pretty solid offering for when you need to do either lots of data munging or you gotta write APIs for a legacy backend; needs common in big orgs. [1] http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messaging/ http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/patterns/messag... [2] http://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/erlang-exchange-talk-final/ex.html http://www.rabbitmq.com/resources/erlang-exchange-talk-final...
- calcsam 10y agoSome notes from the S-1: * "Subscription and support" revenue is about $150M, with "professional services" about $30M. This is a software company with a services side, not the other way around. That's good as software companies tend to be valued around ~10x revenue and services companies only around 3x revenue. * The company made $180M revenue in 2016, growing at ~70% / year, so it's probably on a ~$250M run rate right now. * Last round of funding was raised at a $1.5B valuation. I imagine they'll try for 10-12x revenue, or $1.8B - $2.2B. Twilio is currently trading at around ~10x revenue. * Sales & marketing spend is very heavy -- $122M of their $240M expenses, so about half, were due to sales and marketing. Engineering aka "research and development" only costs them 1/4 of that, or $30M / year. That's...okay I guess? It means growth is pretty expensive, but if they ever want to dial back that growth, they can rake in the $. * Ownership: Big VCs own 68% of the firm, the original founder owns 6%, the current CEO owns 3%, other execs own another couple percent. Ownership of the other ~20% isn't clear, prob split between smaller VCs and employees.
- nodesocket 10y agoNice, thanks for breaking down the S-1.
- funkyy 10y agoGreat comment, thanks for this. This is a time saver for always busy developers!
- pbreit 10y agoHow about a description of what the company does that a mere mortal could understand?
- huddo121 10y agoTheir main product is an Enterprise Service Bus, a piece of technology that is supposed to help make it easy for software developers to integrate with multiple disparate third party solutions (and potentially internal solutions). So you can get a "Connector" for SAP, and another for Salesforce and consolidate, transfer or do practically whatever with the data in both systems, without having a bunch of developers working on an in-house solution to consume the requisite APIs. My one criticism of them would be they focus very heavily on cloud, and their on-premises offering is woefully anaemic, lacking fundamental functionality, such as messaging.
- msoad 10y agoIf it's anything like Apigee IPO it would be a huge disappointment for their employees
- mvip 10y agoWinamp goes public!