Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

wellll amazon has for some years now been in a position where they could generate profits whenever they want to by laying off arbitrary numbers of software developers working on things that do not matter whatsoever, but they keep hiring those people and leasing office space in order to avoid having to return cash to investors

~disruption~

AWS as a division is profitable (and a non trivial fraction of total amazon revenue), no? xp

that also. In a different time AWS would've been spun off years ago, investors would've demanded it be unyoked from the retail business probably.

Right so where are the useless engineers? In the retail division?

Yeah like there are huge teams of people developing features nobody asked for and nobody will use. but to be clear AWS also launches two dozen services a year that don’t have an appreciable number customers.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ECWqfbCXUAAU-Ws.jpg

Wait what?

wut

corporations are people

obnoxious, silly rich people

Early this year, WeWork unveiled its new corporate brand: We Co. It then sought to acquire the trademark to “we.” The name was owned by We Holdings LLC, which manages some of the founders’ stock and other assets. WeWork said it paid the founders’ company $5.9 million for “we” this year, based on a valuation determined by a third-party appraisal. WeWork legally changed the company name last month.

the twist is that WeWork CEO Adam Neumann owns We Holdings LLC, so he paid himself $5.9m for this trademark

the saudis dumping money into softbank dumping money into we co. dumping money into its ceo's bank account for funsies.

Cui bono tho

This is good

https://stratechery.com/2019/the-wework-ipo/

I am suspending my policy of not reading random articles people link to so that I can consume every take on this batshit We IPO

already read it

i have to read all the articles

i've decided that i will not be devoting any portion of my considerable budget for tech investments to WeWork. however, i do want to look into the possibility of leasing half a square foot in a nearby office, see what i can do with it

could grow a small snake plant

I might be wrong, but I don't think Amazon ever operated at Uber levels of just burning through billions of dollars in losses every single year -- I thought they used to just operate at a narrow loss because they were plowing everything back into growing the business and using low prices to gain market share.

correct

So...today, then.

“I have no idea how the president thinks he can order companies to stop working with China. I’m baffled,” said Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Are you? Are you really? Maybe you are a FUCKING IDIOT

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