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>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

>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. So what's the best ownership structure? Public companies have their issues (short-term thinking), acquisitions have their issues (getting closed down)... I mean, cutting costs and upping prices isn't awesome for the customer, but do you have more faith in a company that's scraping by versus working to be profitable?

coldpie 2y ago
What evidence do you have that the new owners are interested in making Squarespace profitable or sustainable? PE firms are the "selling the car for scrap" of business acquisitions.
- cinntaile 2y ago
  They're trying to buy it and probably do some rationalizing to increase profitability. Classic PE play.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  But can they "sell it for scrap" for more than they bought it in the first place?
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Presumably, or else they wouldn't have bought it. Plenty of ways to make a profit while hollowing out a company: fire as many employees as possible, steal as much as possible from their employees and vendors, raise prices on customers, make closing customer accounts as difficult as possible, do some silly accounting tricks to make someone else hold the bag, try to find someone to fob off the brand name to for a few bucks once there's nothing left to extract. The usual stuff, they know the routine.
smaudet 2y ago
> do you have more faith in a company that's scraping by versus working to be profitable Working to be profitable is not correlated with well-functioning. Its usually correlated with enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and poor functioning. The most profitable (at least in the short term) is to provide a costly product that you took no time to produce, with zero support.
- sgc 2y ago
  When I read the comment you are responding to, I just chuckled and thought of Amazon, which famously did not turn a profit for decades and nevertheless, proved to be one of the best run companies during that period (for investors - obviously their treatment of employees is miserable).

coldpie 2y ago

What evidence do you have that the new owners are interested in making Squarespace profitable or sustainable? PE firms are the "selling the car for scrap" of business acquisitions.

cinntaile 2y ago
They're trying to buy it and probably do some rationalizing to increase profitability. Classic PE play.
prmoustache 2y ago
But can they "sell it for scrap" for more than they bought it in the first place?
- coldpie 2y ago
  Presumably, or else they wouldn't have bought it. Plenty of ways to make a profit while hollowing out a company: fire as many employees as possible, steal as much as possible from their employees and vendors, raise prices on customers, make closing customer accounts as difficult as possible, do some silly accounting tricks to make someone else hold the bag, try to find someone to fob off the brand name to for a few bucks once there's nothing left to extract. The usual stuff, they know the routine.

smaudet 2y ago

> do you have more faith in a company that's scraping by versus working to be profitable Working to be profitable is not correlated with well-functioning. Its usually correlated with enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and poor functioning. The most profitable (at least in the short term) is to provide a costly product that you took no time to produce, with zero support.

sgc 2y ago
When I read the comment you are responding to, I just chuckled and thought of Amazon, which famously did not turn a profit for decades and nevertheless, proved to be one of the best run companies during that period (for investors - obviously their treatment of employees is miserable).