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I get sent calendly links all the time by recruiters on LinkedIn, no idea what their economics look like but I can see a $3bn valuation being totally reasonable

I get sent calendly links all the time by recruiters on LinkedIn, no idea what their economics look like but I can see a $3bn valuation being totally reasonable since they are directly enabling a profit center (for external recruiters) and critical business function for both 3rd and 1st party recruiters. If calendly links improve the top-of-the-funnel size by X% it would be very easy to justify paying them large amounts of money to do so. If I’m employing 50 recruiters why wouldn’t I pay calendly $100k/year or more to make them X% more effective? You could argue for building your own, but it doesn’t make sense for every business to build their own, and I think it’s obviously the type of tool where a prototype would be easy to make but getting enterprise-ready would be challenging.

adam_arthur 4y ago
Its the same flawed analysis people use for many of the tech or story stocks. In practice if calendly gets a large share of the market and really can charge 100k/customer, competitors will pop up quickly and force pricing far lower. For a long while many tech companies had no serious competition as startups stayed in their own lane, but thats no longer true. E.g. people were saying the same things about Zoom and Slack, but now they’re a dime a dozen. Amazon just launched a tiktok clone. Nothing is safe from competition, so dont expect outsized margins to last forever in your forecasts. First movers get a few years of runway before profitability will be pressured
- opportune 4y ago
  I have no idea what calendly’s financials and growth look like and can’t say whether the valuation is reasonable, I just think they have a solid product that definitely adds value in a way that you can easily attribute to revenue or important hiring metrics. Sure, every company has competitors. That doesn’t mean $3b is an unreasonable valuation.
  - adam_arthur 4y ago
    $3B may definitely be reasonable depending on the numbers. Just commenting on the apparent assumptions made using the analysis above. Zoom is still worth $20B, but there were many who said it was worth far higher because they didn't consider or discount competition at all. However, I also think Zoom is likely to fall quite a bit more from here. Their revenue is flat YoY and still valued at 30 PE.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Nothing is safe from competition, but I'd say Amazon making a TikTok clone is more of an instance of sticking a trendy social feature in where it doesn't belong than a true threat. It's the same driving force that led all of the companies, including the likes of LinkedIn and Pinterest, to introduce Snapchat-type Stories a couple of years ago.
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  If memory serves Bezos knew Amazon had about 5 years before the competition caught up. That's why he started AWS.

adam_arthur 4y ago

Its the same flawed analysis people use for many of the tech or story stocks. In practice if calendly gets a large share of the market and really can charge 100k/customer, competitors will pop up quickly and force pricing far lower. For a long while many tech companies had no serious competition as startups stayed in their own lane, but thats no longer true. E.g. people were saying the same things about Zoom and Slack, but now they’re a dime a dozen. Amazon just launched a tiktok clone. Nothing is safe from competition, so dont expect outsized margins to last forever in your forecasts. First movers get a few years of runway before profitability will be pressured

opportune 4y ago
I have no idea what calendly’s financials and growth look like and can’t say whether the valuation is reasonable, I just think they have a solid product that definitely adds value in a way that you can easily attribute to revenue or important hiring metrics. Sure, every company has competitors. That doesn’t mean $3b is an unreasonable valuation.
- adam_arthur 4y ago
  $3B may definitely be reasonable depending on the numbers. Just commenting on the apparent assumptions made using the analysis above. Zoom is still worth $20B, but there were many who said it was worth far higher because they didn't consider or discount competition at all. However, I also think Zoom is likely to fall quite a bit more from here. Their revenue is flat YoY and still valued at 30 PE.
Apocryphon 4y ago
Nothing is safe from competition, but I'd say Amazon making a TikTok clone is more of an instance of sticking a trendy social feature in where it doesn't belong than a true threat. It's the same driving force that led all of the companies, including the likes of LinkedIn and Pinterest, to introduce Snapchat-type Stories a couple of years ago.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
If memory serves Bezos knew Amazon had about 5 years before the competition caught up. That's why he started AWS.