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Squarespace to Go Private in $6.9B All-Cash Transaction with Permira
- tracker1 2y agoI still need to get all my converted Google Domains out of Squarespace as it is... I got about 20% done a few months ago... I kind of wish the process were a little easier.
- berkeleyjunk 2y agoIt is interesting how most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I have tried to investigate why but could not find a good explanation to why this number is so prevalent.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dannyw 2y agoIt’s probably just a good rule of thumb. 10%? Go away. 20%? You can certainly negotiate it up to 30%. 30%? There’s considerable value here, and threats to walk away will be felt. 40%? Why, when you can get it to 30%?
- Karellen 2y agoWhy is that a better rule of thumb than, e.g. 5%/10%/15%/20%?
- skhunted 2y agoBecuase it is the one that the system has evolved to consider the rule of thumb. The equilibrium appears to be 30% above asking and, and least local to our time period, appears to be stable.
- Karellen 2y agoI... what? Great-Grandparent> most M&A transactions trend to have a 30% premium above the trading price. I [...] could not find a good explanation to why You> It’s probably just a good rule of thumb. Me> But why is 30% better than 15%? You> The equilibrium appears to be 30% above asking I still don't understand how that's supposed to explain why 30% is the stable value, instead of another, as the GGP was asking. How does what you are saying add anything more than "It is what it is" to the discussion?
- tam123--- 2y agoThe point poorly expressed is that public markets transactions are highly scrutinised, and it is easy for shareholders to be highly litigious toward the directors. The directors therefore have a strong incentive to only accept offers at a normal premium to current price, which seems to be about 30% by back of the cigarette packet maths. Bidders therefore have an incentive to bid around 30% so their bids are more likely to be accepted. The key thing is an incentive to avoid liability and get deals done. If the equilibrium was 80% then bids would be all at 80% and there would be less of them.
- cpdean 2y agounrelated, i'm trying to figure out where the phrase "back of the cigarette packet math" is more common than saying "back of the napkin math".
- skhunted 2y agoSometimes complicated dynamical systems have equilibria that just are without a known reason. I can see that once 30% gained a bit of traction is just coalesced into an equilibrium. The common decision making analysis of just looking at what others have done and basing your decisions on that mean that things evolve to wherever “monkey see, monkey do” gains traction.
- ryandrake 2y agoNot every number has to be derivable through some kind of formula. Realtors tend to take 6% as their commission. Why not 6.5%? or 5%? The answer is that sometimes they do, but it's just traditionally by default 6% unless one or more parties chooses to negotiate it. There's no math.
- matwood 2y agoRemember that shareholders are in the stock because they expect some type of risk adjusted return. 5% is out because that's the risk free return. 7-10% can be gotten with lower risk by index investing. 15-20-30 we're starting to get into a range where the investor is willing to part with their stock given the risk they took on. 30% tends to be enough to get everyone to sell. If it was a hot, fast growing company, it would be higher - if it was possible to get everyone to sell at all.
- cactusfrog 2y agoYou have to pay enough to convince everyone to sell. The trading price is the marginal price of buying one more unit of stock, not a representation of the stock price at which every owner will sell.
- mattmaroon 2y agoWell, you have to pay enough to convince the board to force everyone to sell and not risk being sued for not doing their fiduciary duty. But yeah, that’s the gist of it. if you were to attempt to simply buy up all of the shares on the open market, it would cost more than whatever it closed at the day before you did that, all else being equal
- adtac 2y agoThat explains why there's a premium but not why the premium is ~30%.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoit has to be high enough to give the board enough cover that they're doing their fiduciary duty to existing shareholders
- adtac 2y agoMaybe I'm missing something basic but that still doesn't explain why it's 30% and not 50%. I don't think purely qualitative arguments work here.
- cpdean 2y agoIs there a way to search for lawsuits from shareholders when the price per share of going private was less than 30%? There's probably no mathematical model here but more a way for the sale to insulate itself from getting dragged into litigation.
- bluehatbrit 2y ago
- pclmulqdq 2y agoI have seen the same. There's likely a sort of "market price" effect here. If everyone is doing it, you should do it too. Some premium over the stock market price is expected - you are buying out all shareholders, not just the ones who want to sell at the current stock market price - but you would not expect "flat 30-40%" to be the premium.
- bwilliams18 2y agoHigh enough to clear the fiduciary duty bar of acceptance, but not so high that the acquirer feels like they're over paying.
- debacle 2y agoThere is a baseline trading volume that still expects to have access to the stock. As you buy more stock, less stock is available to buy, driving up the price.
- infecto 2y agoThis is not the case because these deals are done privately to the board. Once an investor cross the 5% mark they have to file and companies may adopt a poison bill without the boards blessing.
- bombcar 2y agoIf everyone does 30% it quickly becomes what "you should do" and anything lower is looked at with suspicion, and anything higher is suspect from the other side or a "what do they know we don't" viewpoint. In many transactions, being like all the other ones is the way to go.
- dboreham 2y agoWall St has rules of thumb like any field. 7% commission, 30% premium, 10% layoff, etc.
- makestuff 2y agoIt could be that is the number we always used, and deals seem to get approved with that number. Anything less might be questioned as not enough premium since there is precedent for a 30% premium during a buyout.
- swyx 2y agojust works out to be a socially accepted level where the board has no choice but to accept the tender offer i guess. but nothing stopping it being 40% or 10%.
- adtac 2y agoThe other replies explain the 30% with circular reasoning and I don’t find them convincing, so here’s a more absolute and testable hypothesis: at the average rate of S&P500 return adjusted for inflation, 30% is about 3-5 years of investment. What if that’s the average period of investment (i.e. time between buy and sell) for a typical retail investor for any given stock? If that’s the case, 30% is the minimum premium at which not only are you speedrunning returns for existing investors, you’re also doing it for the average person who was going to invest in Squarespace today.
- financetechbro 2y agoGood effort to think outside the box but this is just an “acquisition premium”. Nothing to do with the public markets. It is a very well know concept in the M&A world
- berkeleyjunk 2y agoI thought about that too, but realized that it is double counting the returns. If you look at the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) method for valuing the company, the current value of the company is already the sum of the discounted cash flows from the future. i.e. the next 3-5 year returns are already priced into the pre 30% hike value.
- adtac 2y agoDCF and other tools to value companies make sense when the valuation is somewhat stable, but the real world often isn't. MSFT was worth $1T a few years ago because the world presumably expected $1T in profits over the lifetime of the company. But OpenAI came around and suddenly they're worth $2T. It wasn't because their lifetime doubled, it was because most people perceive AI as a major advancement. I believe this is the primary thrust behind the S&P500's 7-10% annualised returns in the last 20 years because most of the gains have come from the top.
- matco11 2y agoIt’s a “control premium”. The way the theory explains it is that you are making an offer to acquire control of the company, so you pay a control premium above what others are willing to pay on normal transactions in the market. In practice, how big of premium the acquirer pays is influenced by considerations specific to the history of the company, the shareholder base, its share price history, etc. …but theory and practice do link together, and you can trace the historical trend of control premia paid have changed over time, or even how they change from country to country.
- CPLX 2y agoImagine ranking all the shareholders of the company. For each, you've asked them how much you'd have to give them to convince them to sell. At the top of the list would be the one who is the most interested in selling, and thus is willing to take the lowest price. At the bottom of the list would be the person who is the least interested in selling, and is demanding the highest price. In order to buy one share you ask the guy at the top of the list. But to get the whole company you need the guy at the bottom of the list to agree too. That's definitely not a perfect analogy at all, there's more subtlety than that. But it accurately describes the underlying dynamic. For the stock market quote, you're always talking about the guy at the top of the list.
- BytesAndGears 2y agoOr at least, the 51st percentile… But I think you’re spot-on. If someone owns the stock, usually it’s because they think the company is worth more in the future than it is currently. And you need to convince the majority of the shareholders to sell it to you now. So you need to take into account their expected future value on holding, and give them a reasonable risk-adjusted premium for that expected future value of their shares.
- airstrike 2y agobuyers and sellers have a range of values where they are OK transacting, and historically those ranges has tended to overlap at the 30% point more than at, say, the 15% point because of those precedents, taking anything below a "standard" premium opens the door for shareholders suing the board for a breach of their fiduciary duty, arguing they should have waited for a better offer. it's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. pay more than 30% and the buyers' shareholders will argue the same which is not to say there aren't 10% or 80% premium transactions, but there's a higher bar to be met before everyone is willing to go outside of the 25-40% premium range (my own numbers)
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> why this number is so prevalent It comes from a 2004 Delaware court case, which found “recent appraisal cases that correct the valuation for a minority discount by adding back a premium ‘that spreads the value of control over all shares equally’ consistently use a 30% adjustment” for the control premium [1]. (Under Delaware law, shareholders are entitled to the pro rata share of a company’s fair value. The courts can and do revise merger prices to reflect this.) Also, this one is a 15% premium [2]. [1] https://casetext.com/case/doft-co-v-travelocitycom-inc-2 https://casetext.com/case/doft-co-v-travelocitycom-inc-2 [2] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/squarespace-to-go-private-in-6-9b-all-cash-transaction-with-permira-302143410.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/squarespace-to-go-p...
- jkaplowitz 2y ago> Also, this one is a 15% premium [2] Really? The sub-headline near the top of your link says 29%, so basically 30%.
- JumpCrisscross 2y agoIt’s “a premium of 15% over Squarespace's closing share price of $38.19 on the NYSE on May 10, 2024,” the last business day before the buyout was announced. That said, you see the bankers bending over backwards to find a metric that satisfies Doft.
- jkaplowitz 2y agoAh, good catch, yes.
- shostack 2y agoCan you ELI5 this?
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Can you ELI5 this? Companies have big shareholders and small. Absent controls, the big shareholders (and management) have an incentive to negotiate deals that are better for them than for the small shareholders. Delaware is good at designing these controls, which is why savvy investors like companies to be based there. One of these controls allows shareholders to sue if they think the company they own stock in was sold too cheaply. In those cases, the court will step in to check the math. That happened in Doft. Most of the case revolved around comparing Travelocity’s value to Expedia’s. But buying a share in Expedia is different from buying all of Travelocity, because the latter lets you e.g. pay yourself—the owner—all the money in the bank account as compensation or unilaterally sack management. The value of this privilege is called the control premium. After the court valued Travelocity conventionally, it added a control premium of 30% to come up with the final enterprise value. Why 30%? Because that’s what most valuation consultants did. What Doft changed was now that convention was cited in case law. So a shareholder who is upset about their shares being sold at a 15% premium can credibly threaten to sue and win, which companies want to avoid, and so we get this circular convention of a 30% control premium (loosely defined) being the norm for converting companies from widely-held (usually public) to narrowly-held (usually private).
- moomoo11 2y agoCan someone explain why this is happening? Thanks! Personally having used squarespace I'm not a fan of their product, but that's beside the point!
- dannyw 2y agoPE realises you can fire most of the team and stop R&D, jack up prices by 50-100% due to lock in, and have something low risk that returns like four times bonds.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoWhat R&D was Squarespace doing over the last 10 years?
- ThrowawayTestr 2y agoTheir website builder and templates I imagine
- pclmulqdq 2y agoWhat part of a website builder and template engine is fundamentally new and uncertain? Squarespace certainly does a lot of development, but "R&D" (especially when it comes to things that PE firms will cut) usually means completely new stuff with significant uncertainty in terms of revenue impact. If Squarespace, for example, had been a significant contributor to HTML standards to make website rendering easier, I would be unhappy about a loss of R&D.
- dartos 2y agoAll software companies have R&D going on constantly. “How do I push this user metric” “How do we increase conversion” “How can we increase conversion for our customers” “Can square space be easier to use”
- itsoktocry 2y ago
- swyx 2y agohow odd, all my google domains just transferred to squarespace today. now thru no consent of my own all my domain and payment information are belong to this private equity shop i dont know anything about that is also likely to strip it for parts. idk how to feel about that
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- smithcoin 2y agoI feel terrible and I’m transferring everything elsewhere immediately.
- Vvector 2y agoIt was announced in mid-2023, and google sent out numerous emails to account holders over the last six months. https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?hl=en https://support.google.com/domains/answer/13689670?hl=en Feel free to migrate your domains somewhere else. I chose CloudFlare
- ziddoap 2y ago>It was announced in mid-2023 The Squarespace acquisition of Google domains was announced, yes. I don't recall seeing anything about Squarespace immediately going private and being beholden to an investment firm showing up in those emails. >Feel free to migrate your domains somewhere else. Thanks for the permission, that's exactly what I and I'm sure many others are about to do. Too bad the timing of this announcement is days after the migration from Google to Squarepspace, so I'm not actually allowed to migrate my domain for 60 days :)
- blackhawkC17 2y agoIt must be nice for the founder to pocket $2 billion in cash from selling his company. For users, on the other hand, I'll hardly trust a PE firm with a SaaS product. There's just too much incentive to jack up prices to service the debt taken to acquire Squarespace, and cut costs on customer support and building new features.
- throwaway12301 2y agoSoon, most of the engineering and support will be over in India. I'd make a joke about innovation, but not sure how innovative Square has been the last five years.
- mattmaroon 2y agoSquarespace, very different company, though they do compete to an extent. I’ve seen a lot of changes from Square, though half of them were bad.
- schreiaj 2y agoSquarespace. Different company than Square.
- ethbr1 2y ago> I'd make a joke about innovation, but not sure how innovative Square has been the last five years. Honestly, isn't that a great match for PE? Once a company has run its innovation sprint, convert it to keep-the-lights-on and cut costs. In return, PE gets to buy a revenue stream.
- dpflan 2y agoHas the trend of PE owning things increased in the last decade? Has PE gotten more money in the past years so that they can hoover up companies?
- cpach 2y agoI don’t know but I guess it’s cyclical?
- manifoldgeo 2y agoFor a more long-form answer to your question, I recommend checking out "Plunder - Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America" by Brendan Ballou [0]. He gives some insights into the tactics used by private equity firms to acquire, gut, and destroy existing companies and profit by doing so. Refs: 0: https://www.plunderthebook.com/ https://www.plunderthebook.com/
- criddell 2y agoWhat solutions does he propose?
- bdavisx 2y agoThe tax cuts passed during the Trump admin have funneled a lot more money to people who were already rich.
- ipqk 2y agoAbsolutely, especially healthcare. Nearly everything PE touches gets worse. The only ones that benefit are those that work for PE companies (and esp. the partners).
- ants_everywhere 2y agoIPOs have been declining for a while, which leaves private sale as a more attractive alternative. Here's an article from last year, but if you search "IPO drought" in a news search engine you can find a lot of more recent articles https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/01/the-current-ipo-market-factors-in-its-decline-and-reversing-the-trend/?sh=445d619a2c31 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/02/0...
- daft_pink 2y agoWait, squarespace isn’t a division of square?
- berkeleyjunk 2y agoNope. Totally different company and founded about 5 years earlier than Square.
- jpgvm 2y agoThis makes the Google registrar change even worse. I need to get my act together and transfer my .dev domain. :/
- zer00eyz 2y agoThis was my visceral reaction as well, but does it really make the change worse? There are tons of business that are private that are doing great. I host with OVH they are private, lots of the businesses I have worked for have been private. Candidly without the pressure of "this quarter" it might be a good thing for Squarespace.
- ardme 2y agoprivate is not the same as private equity which typically means an external manager is extracting as much from the business as they can. Its often at the expense of longer term growth too.
- psini 2y agoIf we are talking about the same french hosting company, they have been public since late 2021
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- komali2 2y agoYeah what an annoying one two punch. I was going to transfer everything to cloudflare but apparently cloudflare can't handle .dev domains.
- Jyaif 2y agoIf I read this (hard to find, hard to understand) page correctly, they do. https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/ https://www.cloudflare.com/tld-policies/
- ziddoap 2y agoI believe they added support for .dev in mid-2023, if I'm not mistaken. Unfortunately because the domains were just transferred days before this announcement, we're locked in for 60 days.
- fred_is_fred 2y agoLooking forward to all my podcasts being sponsored by Permira in the future.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- weatherlight 2y agoPrivate equity will only own about 20% of the company, only 20% of the stock was public to begin with. Why is everyone singing songs of doom and gloom?
- Unfrozen0688 2y ago[dead]
- keiferski 2y agoThis is a bit disappointing, as I really like Squarespace's website builder. IMO it's far superior to anything WordPress, Shopify, or Wix have put out in the last decade.
- wintermutestwin 2y agoWhen I was choosing between squarespace and Wix, sqspace didn’t have a simple backup/restore function. Maybe they do now? That’s a really big product hole.
- keiferski 2y agoI honestly don't remember. I just used it for one site and enjoyed their page builder.
- renegade-otter 2y agoThe gold rush is over - private equity is going to squeeze every little drop from the companies that have been built and we will move on to Web 3.0 - which will be just like web 1.0 - self-hosting, link directories, newsletters, and guestbooks.
- thiago_fm 2y agoI can't wait for this time to arrive, sick of big companies controlling everybody's attention
- nicbou 2y agoAs much as I'd like to see a web 1.0 revival, this won't happen. The traffic is controlled by Google and social networks. Most people don't have the skills needed to run their own website. A lot of valuable content is created by people without these sorts of skills.
- QuarterReptile 2y agoIf the web progresses in a bad enough direction, it will happen.
- smallmancontrov 2y agoThat's a function of technology. It would absolutely be possible to integrate something like Nextcloud into operating systems or devices. It will never happen, because every party in a position to do such an integration is also in a position to become a middleman and extract money, which is much more profitable.
- komali2 2y agoI'm curious what an integration would look like. Are you thinking Google Play Services but Nextcloud Services instead?
- magicalhippo 2y ago
- jesprenj 2y agoI don't understand how capitalism works now. So can people just forcibly buy stocks from you for $44 now?
- positr0n 2y agoAcquisitions work the same as they always have. Roughly, if half the voting shareholders approve of the deal it will go through. Edit: from the first result in Google: > Casalena and long-term investors General Atlantic and Accel, which make up about 90% of the Squarespace’s voting shares, have agreed to vote in favor of the transaction. So I guess the shareholders mentioned in the subheading of the linked press release own a majority.
- freeAgent 2y agoThey must have super-voting shares...probably from being early (pre-IPO) investors.
- etothepii 2y agoIt's not forcibly; a company is a group of people that sign a special type on contract (often called memorandum of association and bye-laws but other terms exist.) That contract can govern all manner of different circumstances including the circumstances in which the allocation of shares are transferred. Sometimes only a motion of the board is required, sometimes additionally a motion by a general meeting with various options for requiring super majorities across and within the different classes can be required too. Fiduciary duties often require the Board to act in the objective best interest of the members. In my opinion it is better model to think of a company as a club (hence shareholders often being called a Member) rather than something that you own.
- freeAgent 2y agoThere will be a shareholder vote, but they only need a majority to approve the sale (assuming their equity shareholder structure is "normal" and voting rights exist for common shareholders). However, the majority of any given public company tends to be owned by institutional asset managers like Blackrock and Vanguard. They owe a fiduciary duty to their customers to act in their best interests, and when a deal offers those shareholders a large margin over the market value of their holdings, it's almost impossible for them to vote against it, even if they wanted.
- can16358p 2y ago> Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access web.prd.q4inc.com > Why have I been blocked? This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. What?? I'm just trying to open the page in the link.
- klysm 2y agoThat will show up as a prevented attack in some dashboard
- can16358p 2y agoBut why? I'm behind a CGNAT (if that's the trigger because of possible same external IP with bots that have nothing to do with me), there's nothing I can do.
- klysm 2y agoShit code executing security theater so an executive can check a box and cover their ass. It doesn't matter if it actually works or not.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoI always wanna know who’s pushing these deals through because there’s like a handful of five or 10 people who are making this happen because they see some kind of “strategy” somewhere Fundamentally these are the people who are fucking everybody over and it’s really literally just a handful of managers at these massive private equity funds
- ziddoap 2y agoThe timing of this is borderline malicious. My domain was just transferred to Squarespace from Google on April 24th, which means that I cannot transfer it for 60 days. This news means I want to transfer it -- I'm sure I'm not the only one -- so it's awfully shitty of them to wait until just after domains were transferred to announce this. While I was previously on the fence about keeping my domains with Squarespace, mainly because of laziness, this announcement and the timing of it means that I will be transferring my domains the minute I'm allowed to.
- DataDaemon 2y agoToday, the AI can do it for you.
- daveaiello 2y agoI think a lot of tech companies are getting lost in a situation where Venture Capitalists ideally want to invest in companies that will eventually fit in the large capitalization growth stock category. But many tech companies will never fit that model. Squarespace is an example of a company that was never going to fit that model, for a host of reasons. Furthermore, if a company is highly unlikely or never going to become a large cap growth stock, providing extra working capital, acquiring ancillary services, funding additional advertising and marketing, will not change those prospects. Only revolutionary increases in functionality will.
- armchairhacker 2y agoI hear that PE destroys products and culture to make money at all costs, but i don’t get how that can net them back the >$6 billion they paid for a company with <$300 million yearly revenue and negative profit.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- djbusby 2y agoThey gonna increase prices
- njovin 2y ago...likely while worsening the customer experience (less hands-on support, less engineering, less reliability). For a company like SquareSpace unless they're massively overspending and they are rife with inefficiencies I don't see how this works out for the PE firm.
- xyst 2y agonot just increase prices but likely saddle the company with mountains of debt (which happens to be owned directly or indirectly by the PE firm). red lobster acquired by Golden Gate PE in cash deal in 2020 [1] red lobster subsequently squeezed for any value at all costs (cuts in labor, switching suppliers) [2] [1] https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/asian-investors-buy-control-red-lobster https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/asian-inv... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/food/red-lobster-seafood-restaurant-bankruptcy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/03/food/red-lobster-seafood-rest...
- throwaway5752 2y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...
- mason55 2y ago
- tomrod 2y agoIf there wasn't incentive to change after the Google Domains transition before...
- xyst 2y ago> Permira, the global private equity firm current Squarespace users about to get gouged
- darig 2y ago[dead]
- jasonjmcghee 2y agoI've been procrastinating transferring my domains after Google sold them to squarespace. Now they're getting sold again... Are domains the new junk loans?
- refulgentis 2y agoNo, domains are not junk loans
- htrp 2y agoWait until you get Domain Backed Securitization.
- NewJazz 2y agoOh gosh wait until Amazon sells securities based on their v4 addresses then aggressively starts making their services v6-first lol.
- dawnerd 2y agoConveniently after taking over all of Google Domains too! I missed transferring a couple of domains before the cutover and now I’m in squarespace hell trying to get them out. They make it so much harder by putting artificial delays on everything.
- johnbellone 2y agoI was about to go start the transfer process. How bad of a time am I in for?
- Dowwie 2y agoIn other words, it's a great time to build the next Squarespace.
- pier25 2y agoThere's Wix, Webflow, and others already. Seems pretty crowded.
- msoad 2y agoMost young folks don't understand URLs anymore? "Find us on App Store" or "Find us on Social Media" is the new internet. QR codes that takes you directly into a walled garden is the new web.
- judge2020 2y agoId argue that QR codes are doing pretty well at keeping bespoke URLs alive (although it pains me to see people use qrco.de or other qr code generators that automatically shorten the URL and thus could, at any point, maliciously redirect people to ads or malware instead. I don't see bitly doing this but it's unnecessary risk).
- keane 2y agoI agree, it's sad to see the QR URL redirects which may go offline and are presumably tracking when a pure option is built into the OS: https://education.apple.com/resource/250011714 https://education.apple.com/resource/250011714
- kevinmchugh 2y agoI see people using "linktree" to crosslink all their different social media accounts together and it really bums me out in a way I can't describe.
- rchaud 2y agoLinktree became the go to because social media networks only give you a single link to display on your bio.
- seaucre 2y agoPodcast market is about to crash.
- sparker72678 2y agoThis. YouTube video sponsorships, too.
- shostack 2y agoWhy do you say that?
- dilyevsky 2y agoThey buy a lot of ads/sponsorships
- ak217 2y agoWould be really interesting to see a quantitative analysis of how this acquisition impacts the podcast/youtube ecosystem. I feel like Squarespace's podcast ad market share was a big deal 5 years ago but podcasts and youtubers have grown and diversified a lot since then.
- wnevets 2y agoI mentioned this already in a different thread but private equity behave just like adware companies that buy popular chrome extensions then ruined them for a quick buck. [1] [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/malware-vendors-buy-chrome-extensions-to-send-adware-filled-updates/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/malwa...
- Jupe 2y agoI'm worried -- and perhaps over-reacting here. To me, this leads to a question: "Why should a company go public at all?" The growing number and net worth of so many equity firms, as well as very, very wealthy individuals, seem to indicate that the value stream of public investment isn't _really_ needed at all. At least for the right product / market. I mean, the hassles of public stock (of which there are many: filing constraints, very "impressionable" public opinion, entanglements with Wokeism vs. Conservatism, etc.) Basically, my thought here is that "Billionaires breed billionaires." They do not, in any way, breed richer "masses" investing their 401Ks.
- baggachipz 2y ago[flagged]
- nojvek 2y agoTime to build a squarespace competitor! I remember TravisCI being bought by PE. As soon as announcement came out, we migrated out of it just in time before they jacked up the prices 2X. Don't know where TravisCI is nowadays.
- toddmorey 2y agoIt’s like a huge if in statement: Forward-looking statements often contain words such as "expect," "anticipate," "intend," "aims," "plan," "believe," "could," "seek," "see," "will," "may," "would," "might," "considered," "potential," "estimate," "continue," "likely," "expect," "target"
- gruez 2y agoThat's boilerplate for basically anything that a public company sends out, otherwise they might get sued for securities fraud if their statements don't come to pass.
- orangesite 2y agoI find private equity's enthusiasm adorable but the temporary hiatus on anti-trust enforcement that first gained momentum during the Reagan era is no longer in effect. Some expensive lessons are about to be learnt. (assuming democratic governance remains in effect, otherwise all bets are off)
- toddmorey 2y agoFor dev tools does this more realistic funding environment preserve the status quo (same companies & offerings if at higher prices), lead to more consolidation, or lead to a return of smaller players?
- jumploops 2y agoThanks to Google, I’m now a Squarespace customer… Does anyone have a new favorite domain registrar? I miss being able to search the search capabilities of Google Domains, specifically the exact match and TLD-specific filtering.
- resource_waste 2y agoIt happened. My decision to pick wordpress paid off.
- treyfitty 2y agoSquarespace was my first experience with a hellish technical interview process back in 2014. I went through like 4 initial screens/take-home assignments for a {something} Analyst role that was considered entry level. I eventually gave up, and from that moment on, I hated Squarespace as a company. These take home assignments weren't even relevant for the role, yet they thought it made sense to inject it into the process. I'm glad they're 1 step closer to their demise.
- lnxg33k1 2y agoSome companies use interviews processes not to test your knowledge but to check the level of inhumanity you’re willing to accept while working there
- dgellow 2y agoI always understood it as an artificial way to reduce the applicant pool. Too many people apply, you just want to make it annoying to keep a number of people you have capacity to review in depth. It’s really shitty, of course.
- to11mtm 2y agoOh it's still allowing for self-selection of people who like abuse.
- _2d30 2y agoStock price up ~88% over the last two years and just valued in an all-cash deal at $6.9B. Yup, they’re right on the verge of that demise.
- agrajag 2y agoThis is some serious cherry-picking. It's going private at a price below the initial IPO price of $48 from 3 years ago, and has generally significantly underperformed other tech stocks. They might not be about to die, but they're not exactly healthy either.
- telotortium 2y agoDoes this mean more or less money for YouTube sponsor ads?