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Arsenic Lupin posted:Square is what lets small vendors (craft fairs, bubble tea shops, like that) offer credit-card services (A) by wi-fi or cellphone (B) without a large investment in hardware. Yeah, Square is all over that market and has been for quite a while - it's somewhat invisible to the user but it's been legitimately good for small vendors from everything I've heard, especially if you know how CC/Debit fees are structured through more traditional means. ShadowHawk posted:My intuition is that the most vulnerable sort of companies are: Yahoo has been in slot 2 for something close to a decade, especially after opting out of the search market. Many years ago (before Marissa) the joke was that Yahoo US was worth -4B, as you could take it's stock valuation and subtract it's holdings in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. At this point most startups may not have an exit plan, but as long as their founders and early VC have one they are OK in the sense that they achieved some of what they set out to do. I suspect a lot of companies will end up in that 3rd option - being milked by insiders/executives on their way down as long as they can, purging employees along the way. New executives will come in and continue the process, but realistically they are aware enough to know that they aren't going to turn it around, but they will get 10M+/year in the process. At this point the cash-rich giants are well aware that the market downturn is coming (or here) and know that they can scoop up what they want for much better prices. This also includes the labor market shifting back to something more normal (but ideally not the mess it was in the early 2000's). Overall there's lots of companies that can survive the downturn and have good core businesses, but a lot of them are too big for various reasons and their expansions in to other areas haven't panned out. There is another set of companies that are highly vulnerable, and that's companies who primarily sell/license to startups and smaller tech companies. During the 90's the Aeron chair was the widespread and understood example, but I'm thinking more about hosted services like github, atlassian, teamcity, jenkins, artifactory, cloudera, etc. Big companies will build their own solutions based off of open-source tech or whatever they've had running for a decade. Really small ones will use the free version or open source, but the area between the two is where you get people paying for those hosted services. If a whole crapload of their customers are suffering from the downturn, those companies will as well. Controlling external costs is one of the first things companies will do when looking to get their cash flow under control. edit: turns out there is a github story already http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-2016-2 Expect this to repeat itself across a lot of the industry. Pervis fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Feb 7, 2016 |
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Feb 7, 2016 17:20
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Theranos is looking like it will probably become a fraud case, not just a collapse. Theranos didn't realize this isn't the 90's anymore and healthcare isn't the best field to do that type of fraud. Alternatively we'll get to see just how ineffectual our legal system is.
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Feb 9, 2016 16:34
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Arsenic Lupin posted:It'll all come out in the court case(s), but I wonder what they did with all the venture money. Research that just didn't pan out? A creator who is sure that just a little more time and it will all come together? I think they built some really nice looking facility on Page Mill road, so I imagine they had to pay for that. They finished building it last year I think.
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Feb 9, 2016 23:53
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Non Serviam posted:It's a remarkably high part of their expenditure, even compared to, as another poster pointed out, Boeing. It costs Boeing a ton of money to actually build and service aircraft, and that's not included in R&D. IIRC software developers of all types are generally included under R&D when it comes to finances, and that's going to be one of the largest expenses in a software or internet services company. You would need to compare Twitter to things like Facebook or Google or Microsoft to get a good picture.
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Oct 11, 2016 16:45
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I had the sense that he was saying that valuations are now serving the secondary market, without any interest in the viability of the company or product themselves. That's what I got. There's lots of stories from the last bubble about this kind of stuff, but externally it's not as easy to tell which company is the kind to be highly-targeted to get bought out vs the "go public and be giant" folks that buy in to the hype. It's also nice seeing someone basically call out that getting a vertical monopoly and leveraging it in to other markets or market segments is what's going on and what Wall St is largely looking for post-IPO. In terms of viability, a lot of these ad-based services are running in to the problem where the ad market is highly competitive and can't grow exponentially unless the companies buying the ads are both growing and willing to throw larger amounts of money in to ads. There's a problem when consumers themselves aren't having an increase in money to throw at things. Growth in mobile and internet ads can and has come at the expense of newspapers, cable TV, etc, but there's limits on just how big all of this can go. They also have to grasp (see Reddit) with the issue that advertisers want value out of their ads and not the risk that their ads are going to show up next to some incredibly racist/horrible poo poo that might go viral.
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Dec 11, 2016 18:39
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Tuxedo Gin posted:Not only is the rent moving up, but most of the people who are moving there are the angry inland conservatives that are sick of our hippy governor spending their tax money to protect immigrants. Arizona? It's funny because a lot of the liberal areas that were up and coming tech replacements/hubs 15 years ago are now fairly expensive or equivalent (Seattle and to a certain degree Portland), the ones after that (Boulder/Denver, etc) that are still in blue-ish states are pretty close, but the places conservatives said would replace the valley 15 years ago haven't in any appreciable way. It turns out that lower taxes and lower salaries does not necessarily mean better business opportunities.. especially with the outright xenophobia lately from red areas. Industry-wise it feels like we're going through another wave of departures/retirements like the early 00's where people cashed out (or bailed because startups were all dead) and left for cheaper areas if they were in the latter part of their career, or the young moved to places they could afford a house but still had a future. A ton of people I grew up with and worked with moved to Portland and Seattle a decade ago rather than buying here, and lately a lot of (mostly conservative) folks in their mid-40's that I know have left for Idaho/Arizona or moved back to their home state.
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Mar 9, 2018 07:49
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