Last quarter they had negative operating margins of over 20%. That’s not really marginal. Considering they already do over $500mln in revenues and are growing mid 30s it’s very possible they never make a profit.
A big chunk of software VC success over the past 20 years has been public markets accepting loss making companies and giving them a lot of credit for potential future margins.
It's still indicative of VC culture that the CEO calls the company a success after IPO. Rather than, say, after the company is profitable. (I have a couple shares of NET, so I'm optimistic they'll be profitable eventually. But sometimes their path to getting there seems lackadaisical.)
I don’t think IPO was success. It was just another fundraising event. Another step in the journey. And, per this discussion, the end of our VC journey and beginning of our public company journey.
“Profitability” is a funny term on Hacker News. Think most people here aren’t accountants so they think of profitability as: do you have more cash in the bank at the end of the period than you did at the beginning. That’s “free cash flow profitable.” By that measure, we’ve been profitable the last ~12 months and have said we expect to be so every year going forward. We’ve had non-GAAP operating profits even longer. So next up is GAAP profitability, which I am confident we’re on a path to. We want to emulate Microsoft’s accounting financials, not Salesforce’s.
Even that won’t be “success.” Just another step in the journey. Success to me is living up to our mission of helping build a better Internet. Don’t get me wrong, financing and accounting milestones are all critical to us doing that. If we were burning through cash it would be hard for us to fulfill our mission. But I show up to work every day because I see the positive impact our team is making toward a more secure, more reliable, faster, more private, and more efficient Internet for everyone. Only steps toward that represent success to me.
> “Profitability” is a funny term on Hacker News. Think most people here aren’t accountants so they think of profitability as: do you have more cash in the bank at the end of the period than you did at the beginning. That’s “free cash flow profitable.”
no, I look at your financial statements and look for Net Income
(more or less the only number that can't be manipulated by clever tricks)
Would any business leader say anything like, "we have no idea if we'll ever be profitable, or what we would need to do to get there?". Everyone made fun of Softbank's presentation on Wework[0], but it just looked to me like a simplified outline of nearly every over-confident business presentation I've seen in my life.
