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Some notes from the S-1: * "Subscription and support" revenue is about $150M, with "professional services" about $30M. This is a software company with a servic
by calcsam 10y ago
Some 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.
- emmelaich 10y agoI'd say their support for on-promises deployments is anaemic too. For an open source product in the same niche, have a look at http://servicemix.apache.org/ http://servicemix.apache.org/ which includes http://camel.apache.org/ http://camel.apache.org/ and other bits.
- phonon 10y agoI would also look at https://zato.io/ https://zato.io/ which is a really nice Python based one.
- orthoganol 10y agoSo basically an API for APIs?
- niftich 10y agoCatchy, but no. Mule ESB is more like a framework for declaratively creating (and executing these) flows that run through a series of components that react to events, in a sort of universal design pattern; these flows then execute in in a runtime that uses SEDA [1]. They give you some built-in components that help in creating APIs, and this design is a good fit for APIs and data munging, but it can be used as "just" a runtime for event-driven code. For a clearer example, see my other post here [2]. Their other products include an API proxy and a client-facing API gateway. [1] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502057 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=502057 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13673158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13673158
- MrBuddyCasino 10y agoWorked with the on-premise version, and I'd avoid it like the plague. Badly designed mix of XML and old-school Java, if it wasn't for political reasons we would have kicked it out.
- kitd 10y ago
- mbesto 10y agoA couple of ways to describe Mulesoft (depending on your background): Enterprise version IFTTT/Zapier, but connects to literally anything Competes with Google's Pub/Sub Cloud version of BizTalk (but way better)
- intrasight 10y agoWould you say that it completes with Azure Logic Apps also?
- mbesto 10y agoWasn't familiar with Azure Logic Apps, but yes it would appear so.
- emmelaich 10y agoThe niche is often called ESB or Enterprise Service Bus but I think a much better description is Integration Service, i.e. something that implements http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/ A good website for info and books about this area. See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8845186/what-exactly-is-apache-camel http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8845186/what-exactly-is-a... which has some useful links.
- mbesto 10y ago> It means growth is pretty expensive, but if they ever want to dial back that growth, they can rake in the $. This is the fundamental premise behind SaaS companies valuations: http://a16z.com/2015/05/15/a16z-podcast-why-saas-revenue-is-worth-more-than-traditional-software-sales/ http://a16z.com/2015/05/15/a16z-podcast-why-saas-revenue-is-... Excerpt from that podcast paraphrased "NetSuite and SuccessFactors had their most profitable years during the economic downturn in 2008"