Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

Ever deeper into the shitbin we go

Looks to me like fund managers didn't want to be holding long over the weekend, just in case something unexpected drops. At this point, they are nervous as hell.

cartoon reality every fucking day now, don't know how much more I can stand

as I like to tell people there's not a rule that says you have to pay close attention, it won't help anything if you do

ain't that the truth

at least now we'll get to find out who the obedient patriotic companies are

Yerac one of your favorite bad IPOs posted results today and guess what

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/slack-shares-plunge-15-on-weak-earnings-guidance-2019-09-04

gah, so many bad ipos. I didn't even realize Slack went public (why???????) I used it once and it was meh. Although I have had some really good luck with roku, sq and shak. It took a long time though.

ohhh, i was wondering what company WORK was but couldn't be bothered to check. I thought it was just people confused about WeWork.

While not one of the more significant companies out there, I really enjoy the fact that Blue Apron has gone from $140 to $7 per share in the span of two years.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/APRN?p=APRN&.tsrc=fin-srch

absolutely hate that company

It had to do a reverse split a couple of months ago because it was sucking so bad and had dropped way under $1.

I find slack really useful, especially for the highly dispersed team I’m in, but the valuation on the company is ridiculous. Especially considering the alternatives (Microsoft Teams, Google Chat) whilst not quite as good, come free with their respective companies main product suites. (Skype for business, on the other hand, needs retiring with a rusty shovel to the back of the head).

yeah I should have noted split-adjusted $140 to $7 -- effect is the same, a 95% decline in value over two years in an otherwise ok economy. And I hate the company as well.

FWIW I really disliked using slack and hope it never becomes prevalent in my field. It's one of those technologies that generates work rather than saves it.

(Skype for business, on the other hand, needs retiring with a rusty shovel to the back of the head).

I had to install this to talk to one person on one occasion and now it auto-launches every time I turn on my laptop.

lol yeah we unfortunately do use that one

We do a lot of group video calls. I guess it sometimes works ok for that.

I liked using Slack when I was at companies which used it. Now that I'm somewhere that doesn't use it, I don't miss it. We have Chime (dogfooding), which isn't anywhere as full-featured as Slack, but has pretty great multi-caller videoconferencing.

Google hangout is what we use for video conferencing and it is really good, really crisp and stable audio and video. I Had to do a Skype call yesterday and it was completely unlistenable. Zoom is good but, again, I’ve no idea why some people pay it and google, can understand if you are locked to Microsoft and Skype.

Slack is unusual in that it’s enterprise software that users AND it departments like. It’s a good place to work too by all accounts. I hope they do well.

We had our results today. Less disastrous than last time but I think we’re still literally the worst post 2015 IPO in terms of *ratio* of peak private valuation to current public valuation.

did you check fitbit and gopro? although gopro looks to be 2014.

Now I am looking at lists of worst ipos of all time.

Not at my computer but I posted a tweet with a WSJ table of one measure on the uber thread iirc

Slack is unusual in that it’s enterprise software that users AND it departments like. It’s a good place to work too by all accounts. I hope they do well.

Last place I work the it department hated it because of the extra license fee over the Microsoft stack. Keita trying to push everyone to Yammer and Teams. Yammer is terrible, teams is ok but larded up with a lot of Skype for business and SharePoint crap ( SharePoint slack integration is much lighter and better).

I worry that the pressure of quarterly results will encourage slack to add lots of ‘features’ which ruin the core functionality.

Oh they hate it because it’s relatively expensive sure. But it fulfils enterprise IT requirements in a governance sense. And the competitors are not bad so much as in a completely different category. Insanely expensive and users want it and it’s legal for corporate IT and there’s not really another product like it seems like a good business to be in.

I’m buying tons of Slack stock today. Pish posh on this “disappointing outlook”.

levine on wework today is very good

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-09/we-might-not-be-working

did you check fitbit and gopro? although gopro looks to be 2014.

Now I am looking at lists of worst ipos of all time.

― Yerac, Wednesday, September 4, 2019 6:57 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Both now well under a billion market cap. Once unicorns, they are now just horses ready to be taken out and shot.

here's that list i mentioned

for the companies that raised the most money, the return was lower https://t.co/8A0puufhVH pic.twitter.com/c7OgFiHaMg

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) August 27, 2019

wework may be at the bottom of this list (47bn peak to 20bn public cap) if they go ahead with the IPO

I sort of have the impression that wrt the VC funds that invest in these unicorn companies -- (1) a lot of the money they are "investing" is actually someone else's, and (2) they are often earlier investors themselves so they are basically inflating the value of their own investments.

going from 10x to 5x initial investment is not that much of a loss when it was all on paper anyway.

Besides, the funds will cash out as much as possible at 10x.

Oh they hate it because it’s relatively expensive sure. But it fulfils enterprise IT requirements in a governance sense. And the competitors are not bad so much as in a completely different category. Insanely expensive and users want it and it’s legal for corporate IT and there’s not really another product like it seems like a good business to be in.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Wednesday, September 4, 2019 8:06 PM (five days ago) bookmarkflaglink

my company uses an open source slack clone (mattermost) and I honestly can't tell the difference, even the UI looks nearly identical. I have no clue about the security or how we're hosting it but this is a srs ppl fortune 100 company and it's good enough for us.

I would not buy slack stock.

Really it's the pension funds, institutional investors and new money individuals who should be circumspect about investing in these pre-IPO companies through VCs. The VCs themselves have things figured out pretty well.

Meanwhile, I talk smack on Slack, but I wasted a lot of my day trying to organize files in shitty ass microsoft OneDrive. There are some real headsmackingly bad things about it, e.g. if you want to save a file from your web outlook to your onedrive, you can't save it to a specific folder, so even though they're part of the same suite they're integrated really badly.

one thing that sucks about onedrive is how everything you do is in slow motion, all of the time

xxp the pension funds, institutional investors and new money individuals can sell all or some of their stake before an exit. They can benefit from the hype. These investors made out well on funds including WeWork etc.

Yeah it really seems like you don't have to believe in the company, you just have to believe that their story is compelling enough that someone will invest at a higher valuation than you down the road (and even that investor doesn't actually have to believe in the company, etc.). It's turtles all the way down.

you just have to believe that their story is compelling enough that someone will invest at a higher valuation than you down the road

Among brokers this is called the Bigger Fool Theory.

interesting theory, but in order to unlock the full version you must first buy this ship i'm trying to sell you

you just have to believe that their story is compelling enough that someone will invest at a higher valuation than you down the road

https://www.damninteresting.com/the-eponymous-mr-ponzi/

https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/jTBpdHEFJztq67pSEeP5Ag--~A/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAwO2g9NTI4/https://media-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com/creatr-uploaded-images/2019-09/846a7520-d4b1-11e9-a073-0c61c3a66417

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/we-work-super-unicorns-snap-spotify-lyft-uber-165510713.html

Beautiful

You love to see it

I mean caek you specifically do not love to see that tan-colored line but otherwise, cheff kiss

as much as there is some ostensible schadenfreude, can't help but feel that the people who actually deserve to feel the pain are probably not the ones feeling it.

Also kind of sad to think about how companies like Uber and Spotify have managed to actually harm the livelihoods of many people by operating at a loss on VC money.

The well-known fact that Uber set pricing so low that they lost money on each ride is a textbook anti-competitive strategy for achieving a monopoly position and it is an indictment of the FTC that they were not prosecuted for doing this. Even though they haven't yet succeeded in becoming a functioning monopoly, they have repeatedly warped markets to the degree that people running legitimate businesses were irreparably harmed.

Ha yes the tan line! We’re #1!

The sample for that plot is weird btw. There have been succesful unicorn ipos recently (mongo and elastic).

Also re losing money to distort the market, a comparison between wework and it’s nearest competitor is instructive:

WeWork vs IWG (Regus)

Basically the same size in terms of rented desks, different valuation. pic.twitter.com/HwgOl0Dr0h

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) September 11, 2019

Typically companies like to show declining losses as they IPO

A problem for wework: its losses are growing with its revenue pic.twitter.com/NI2AJF81Z6

— Eliot Brown (@eliotwb) September 11, 2019

One of my past jobs I used to review/approve employee private investments and participation in private investments for conflicts and in order to place conditions on them. It's the get stupid wild west out there.