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> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those
by henning 5y ago
> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.
Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!
- airstrike 5y agoThat's pretty standard for most young and fast growing tech companies
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- AYBABTME 5y agoIt feels like Backblaze has been in the space for a while though? My uninformed picture of them was as a modest small/medium size business with a good niche product and probably some loyal customers type, not as an all-stop-sign-pulled-VC-funded-moonshot startup.
- colechristensen 5y agoI think the deal is they are spending more on growth than their profit, buying hardware for the next several years is expensive and as long as that growth keeps up quite a bit of value is being created.
- windthrown 5y agoAt 14 years old, is Backblaze still considered "young"?
- bpodgursky 5y agoIf you're confident, short it. Make some money.
- henning 5y agoSomebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. They also said the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
- Igelau 5y agoAh yes, the album version of 'All Star' was so much better than the radio edit.
- dnautics 5y agotake out small medium-term, out of the money puts. Be ready to lose it all. Since you are taking a Jem'hadar-level stance on your money (your money is dead, if you are victorious, your money comes back to life), you do not have to worry about solvency.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI guess the fundamentals are solid then.
- jonny_eh 5y agoOr they don't matter.
- carlivar 5y agoIn reality when debt/funding is exceptionally cheap, conditions exist for these sort of companies to be fine. Or to put it another way, when there's few options to park money and expect a reasonable return, risk threshold for unprofitable companies becomes lower. So the market isn't really irrational. You might argue our interest rates and monetary policies are irrational. I would agree with you.
- 5y ago
- enlyth 5y agoAnyone who has been following the recent market would only say one thing: Bullish
- midasuni 5y agoEverything is bullish. Stonks only go up.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThat alone isn't enough of an argument - see Google (pre ads), Uber, Amazon, or anyone else looking to dominate a market. I'd be interested in what their strategy is and what they want to dominate. Corporate backups? The problem is corporate stuff is mostly in the cloud already. Home use it is handy but it is competing with Apple and Microsoft, and I use them mostly for the "Dropbox Reason" that they make it easiest to backup my drive. I never think about them and forget I am a customer. If they could backup iPhones simply I think that'd help but apple probably has that garden walled off.
- croutonwagon 5y agoThey have an s3 api implementation. We offload some of our Veeam backups to it. I think they could compete with an S3 provider that’s better than Glacier or so. Especially if you can start presenting it to say…Linodes or something.
- mitchellh 5y agoEDIT: I’m going to retract this comment for the time being. I think it doesn’t give justice to the complexity of an S-1 and I want to revisit this in the future to add more color. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea or take this the wrong way. Probably a good blog post, one day. :)
- jagtesh 5y agoThanks for sharing this insight! I’ve always wondered the same - why did that X startup I worked at choose to stay unprofitable when they could have paused growth for Y months and turned profitable? Another reason can be - investors are more interested in growth multipliers. X% YoY etc. As long as the potential for profitability exists on paper.
- noogle 5y agoOne thing that is missing is the unit economics and customer subsidization. If the company sells a product worth $5, for $1 (essentially subsidizing the customer), then it cannot become profitable just by a decision to stop growth. So in your example, and offer of 13% annual yield but with %400 commission is not a profitable one.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- darksaints 5y agoWell, before IPOs became a way for founders to cash out, they actually served a purpose for raising money for the kinds of companies that won't be profitable for a while.
- muzz 5y agoSelling into C rounds (and beyond) is the new way for founders to cash out