Comment by elAhmo 4 days ago
Regardless of the product and idea they had, a company that is 15 years old and raised 10+ billion dollars still needing to raise money after all this time is ridiculous.
Not being sustainable after all this time and billions of dollars is a sign company is just burning money, and a lot of it. wework vibes.
Whenever companies release glowing fluff PR about their amazing financials they key word in there is “non-GAAP.”
i.e. when we exclude a bunch of pesky costs and other expenses that are the reason we’re not doing so well, we’re actually doing really well!
Non-GAAP has its place, but if used to say the company is doing well (vs like actual accounting) that’s usually not a good sign. Real healthy companies don’t need to hide behind non-GAAP.
Yes but free cash flow is free cash flow, and that's what matters for survival (i.e. run-rate). So long as fcf is positive, you'll never go bankrupt.
Really what they don't tell you is how much SBC they have. That's what crushes public tech stocks so much. They'll have nice fcf, but when you look under the hood you realize they're diluting you by 5% every year. Take a look at MongoDB (picked one randomly). It went public in 2016 with 48.9m shares outstanding. Today, it has 81.7m shares outstanding. 67% dilution in 9 years.
This. To me if you are still unprofitable after 15 years you are not really a business.
However genuinely curious about the thesis applied by the VC’s/Funds that invest in such a late stage round? Is it simply they are taking a chance that they won’t be the last person holding the potato? Like they will get out in series L or M rounds or the company may IPO by then. Either ways they will make a small return? Or is the calculus diff?
Why don't early investors put clauses in their investment to protect themselves against being screwed over by later investors? It seems like an obvious thing to ask for if you're giving someone a lot of money, so I'm assuming there must be a very good reason it's not done.
Early investors (the main ones at least) usually get pro-rate rights - which means you can invest in later rounds to maintain your ownership percentage (i.e a later round dilutes your ownership, so you invest a bit until the ownership stays the same).
But the pref stack always favors later investors, partly because that's just the way it's always been, and if you try to change that now no one will take your money, and later investors will not want to invest in a company unless they get the senior liquidity pref.
The VCs should, they're called anti-dilution measures
Its less financially/legally saavy parties like angel investors and early employees who (sometimes) get screwed out of valuation
> However genuinely curious about the thesis applied by the VC’s/Funds that invest in such a late stage round
1) It's evaluated as any other deal. If you model out a good return quantitatively/qualitatively, then you do the deal. Doesn't really matter how far along it is.
2) Large private funds have far fewer opportunities to deploy because of the scale. If you have a $10B fund, you'd need to fund 2,000 seed companies (at a generous $5m on $25m cap). Obviously that's not scalable and too diversified. With this Databricks round, you can invest a few billion in one go, which solves both problems.
I guess making a quick buck pre-IPO? It's essentially lending cash on loose terms.
Why they do it via an equity offering and not debt is unclear. You'd imagine the latter is cheaper for a hectocorn.
Anchoring IPO expectations and hype. 100B valuation is useful.
It does have some good aspects for engineers working with these tools in some cases: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-...
Granted, OpenAI is burning tons of cash as well. The great tech race of cash burning is at full steam!
Its unfair to compare Databricks to OpenAI because they're at very different points in the enshittification[1] process.
OpenAI is still early, burning VC money to acquire customers by operating at a loss. This makes it appear cheap.
DataBricks is further along, attempting to claw back the value they provided to customers by raising prices.
That may be, but our use of DB was 1/1000 of what we do in a month with OpenAI and the bill we racked up was $3,000 in 1 day. We talked with them and because we freaked out and deleted the widget (whatever the connectors are called) they didn't have logs for what we did, so they couldn't refund anything (they were willing). The fact that they couldn't find anything because we deleted whatever it was, that was weird, because they could certainly bill us. We're never using them again.
Them and Snowflake have been in an acquisition race, gobbling up data engineering startups like Pac-Man.
That costs a fair bit of dosh.
What's the end game? What are investors expecting and how are they expecting the company to get $100b in profits and over what period of time?
Being the dominant player, I presume, starve out the rest by being _the_ way to do your big data.
Do we know that they need to raise and are not sustainable? I don't think them raising is evidence of either.
I worked at a place once where the CEO basically said that it's a lot easier to raise money when you don't need it than to raise it when you do. The US economy is looking pretty weird with a bunch of conflicting predictors. Maybe they're buffering for a recession.
Its always true. Whether you are a start up or an individual. People throw money at you when you least need it. But when you do need it, they give all types of hassle
depends on who is making a decision and how exactly is the funding round structured - for some investors, diluting other shareholders is actually a good thing. For existing employees, if they get an option to partially cash out now is probably better than waiting indefinitely for an IPO etc
At that time the Palantit valuation was considered 'hefty / overpriced' at $9B. Current stock price valuation, post IPO is a completely detached from fundamentals ~$378B
if you were to apply the same ratio to Databricks it would have to trade at 42 000 000 000 000 000 USD - enough to buy the entire US sovereign debt, the moon, all earth's minerals with plenty to spare. A completely rational market if you ask me.
it really is the most expensive I've ever came across. It would be a flatout no-go if it weren't for Microsoft pushing everyone onto this platform, supported by their network of really absolutely neutral Gartner friends and Deloittes/KPMG/Accenture/TCS "experts" to recommend what lines their pockets.
They were expecting to be cash flow positive in Jan 2025, according to [0]. That said, it is hard to tell if they actually became cash flow positive since with them still being a private company, they aren't required to release that information.
[0]: https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...