Comment by sjoedev

Comment by sjoedev 3 months ago

3 replies

Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I’m wary of what might happen when they need to become profitable. Could this be another case of a company offering an excellent, cheap product while being propped up by investors, only to later have an “enshittification” [2] phase where they aggressively cut corners and increase prices to make a profit?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/NET/financials/annual...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

gruez 3 months ago

>Cloudflare is not profitable [1]. I’m wary of what might happen when they need to become profitable

The unit economics are sound. They have 76% gross margin, so it's not like they're selling $10 movie tickets for $8, and unlike companies like uber, they're probably not using their marketing spend to buy revenue (eg. spending $20 in promo credits to get $50 worth of sales). There's nothing wrong with a business that "unprofitable" when their unit economics work out, and are plowing their profits back into expanding the business.

ganoushoreilly 3 months ago

Leaving out stock compensation in a non-gaap perspective would show they are close. Granted compensation is a real cost to value of shares, It's not as wide a delta as many other companies.

I would suspect they're going the other way and will continue to double down into new areas of services to expand their product line.

adrr 3 months ago

Cash flow positive. Margins look healthy. Spend lots of R&D which i would attribute to having $1.6B(2023) of capital on hand and being cash flow positive.