10 votes

Cloudflare files for IPO

6 comments

  1. Deimos
    Link
    Linking directly to the S-1 form for now, I may edit to some kind of analysis/summary of it if a good one comes up. I was interested to see if they'd mention anything about the recent 8chan drama,...

    Linking directly to the S-1 form for now, I may edit to some kind of analysis/summary of it if a good one comes up.

    I was interested to see if they'd mention anything about the recent 8chan drama, and they did! In the "Risk Factors" section, this is included:

    Activities of our paying and free customers or the content of their websites and other Internet properties could cause us to experience significant adverse political, business, and reputational consequences with customers, employees, suppliers, government entities, and other third parties. Even if we comply with legal obligations to remove or disable customer content, we may maintain relationships with customers that others find hostile, offensive, or inappropriate. For example, we experienced significant negative publicity in connection with the use of our network by The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi, white supremacist website, around the time of the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia. We also received negative publicity in connection with the use of our network by 8chan, a forum website that served as inspiration for the recent attacks in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand. We are aware of some potential customers that have indicated their decision to not subscribe to our products was impacted, at least in part, by the actions of certain of our paying and free customers. We may also experience other adverse political, business and reputational consequences with prospective and current customers, employees, suppliers, and others related to the activities of our paying and free customers, especially if such hostile, offensive, or inappropriate use is high profile.

    Conversely, actions we take in response to the activities of our paying and free customers, up to and including banning them from using our products, may harm our brand and reputation. Following the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, we terminated the account of The Daily Stormer. Similarly, following the events in El Paso, Texas, we terminated the account of 8chan. We received significant adverse feedback for these decisions from those concerned about our ability to pass judgment on our customers and the users of our platform, or to censor them by limiting their access to our products, and we are aware of potential customers who decided not to subscribe to our products because of this.

    7 votes
  2. Arshan
    Link
    Cloudflare is one of the few tech companies I am generally okay with. They provide significant contributions to open source projects, see their suspiciously 256 open projects on github. They are...

    Cloudflare is one of the few tech companies I am generally okay with. They provide significant contributions to open source projects, see their suspiciously 256 open projects on github. They are maintaining their focus on being an internet infrastructure company and are not trying to do everything. Also, they provide ddos protection for free for many sites. Overall, a company I generally like, which is quite uncommon.

    5 votes
  3. [4]
    nic
    Link
    The $3.6 billion dollar valuation is in line with similar recent IPO's, but I feel like everyone has forgotten what the dot com crash did to unprofitable tech companies. Everyone wants to buy the...

    The $3.6 billion dollar valuation is in line with similar recent IPO's, but I feel like everyone has forgotten what the dot com crash did to unprofitable tech companies.

    Everyone wants to buy the next FANG, but when the market crashes, how low will these valuations go?

    4 votes
    1. [3]
      stu2b50
      Link Parent
      Does that apply to Cloudflare? According to a quick google (and albeit dubious sources), Cloudflare has been profitable since 2014. And I'd believe that--they have an insane amount of corporate...

      Does that apply to Cloudflare? According to a quick google (and albeit dubious sources), Cloudflare has been profitable since 2014. And I'd believe that--they have an insane amount of corporate customers. The last time Cloudflare had an outage, a nontrivial part of the entire internet's traffic went down.

      Like the WeWork IPO seems a bit dumb, but Cloudflare? I think Cloudflare has a pretty stable base, pretty easy monetization paths, and a pretty tangible, and useful, product.

      4 votes
      1. Deimos
        Link Parent
        It's possible they were profitable before, but now they're losing a lot of money (emphasis mine):

        It's possible they were profitable before, but now they're losing a lot of money (emphasis mine):

        We have experienced significant growth, with our revenue increasing from $84.8 million in the year ended December 31, 2016 to $134.9 million in the year ended December 31, 2017 and to $192.7 million in the year ended December 31, 2018, increases of 59% and 43%, respectively. Our revenue increased from $87.1 million in the six months ended June 30, 2018 to $129.2 million in the six months ended June 30, 2019, an increase of 48%. As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for the years ended December 31, 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively, and $32.5 million and $36.8 million for the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, respectively.

        5 votes
      2. nic
        Link Parent
        Negative cash flow similar to the net losses from 2016 onwards, according to their S1.

        Negative cash flow similar to the net losses from 2016 onwards, according to their S1.

        2 votes