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> They have software economics, not commercial real estate economics. I don't believe this. Snowflake for instance could be profitable if they chose and they h
by SassyGrapefruit 5y ago
> They have software economics, not commercial real estate economics.
I don't believe this. Snowflake for instance could be profitable if they chose and they have almost no debt. Furthermore their expenses grow logarithmically with their revenue. It doesn't cost much more to have 2 customers as it does to have 1, but the revenue doubles. Their services are an add-on that supplements the revenue from the platform. Its the growth in platform adoption that moves the earnings number.
>They're making hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
No they are losing 10's of millions of dollars a year. Revenue is not earnings. Wework had revenue of billions of dollars a year and but the cost of that revenue meant they had no path to profitability.
I see the same thing here. The bulk of their revenue come from selling services on top of their software. Services have a high COGS. For every service contract you sell you have to pay someone to service the contract. Your costs grow linearly with your revenue. This is the trap yelp fell into. Making billions by paying 95-105 cents for every dollar because opening a new market meant building all the infrastructure for that market.
If hashicorp can't find a way to make the growth in adoption of their software directly influence their earnings I don't think this is a good investment.
- tptacek 5y agoNo. The bulk of HashiCorp's revenue comes from licensing and support. Professional services is a tiny percentage of their revenue. Preemptively: support subscriptions != consulting services. I don't know if HashiCorp is a good investment or not. I'm not investing. But their economics are not Yelp's or WeWork's.
- SassyGrapefruit 5y agoWhat are you on about? When I say "service" I mean people doing things for you. In order to have good economics you have to make money buy selling physical or digital goods. Its because physical and digital goods are intrinsically high margin. Its hard to make a support engineer twice as productive, but it's not hard to halve production costs by leveraging economies of scale. Furthermore, Saying "support != services" is ridiculous. Do you know what you would charge Hashicorp with if they failed to render the promised support you paid for? Theft of service