CEOs, venture backers lose big as LinkedIn, Tableau shares tumble | Hacker News Reader

CEOs, venture backers lose big as LinkedIn, Tableau shares tumble

reuters.com

19 pointsvaulstein10 comments

All SaaS got their faces ripped off on Friday. Basically I think it has to do with Google's stock behavior, which has been pretty disastrous. After posting amazing earnings and 20% growth, it is down $130+ in 4 days. Given that performance, people are selling first and asking questions later, which is why LNKD and Tableau got destroyed on Friday, and why other SaaS like Salesforce did as well. For the stocks that haven't announced yet, the sellers are thinking "Well if Google is down $130, and Salesforce won't have Google's numbers, then it's only going to get destroyed so I should sell now."

Looks like the only few strong companies in the Valley right now are the stalwarts like Facebook, and everything else is at risk of getting whacked sooner or later.

To all those that think "The bubble will burst", they haven't been paying attention to the stock market. Tech is down bigtime in the last year, the bubble has already burst. What we're waiting to see if which companies will survive the fallout, ie. lowered VC funding, harder funding rounds, less revenues, etc. The tide has been going out since 2015, and 2016 is the year in which we find out which unicorns were swimming naked and which weren't.

> the bubble has already burst.

Bubble is bursting. Nobody knows that it has already burst or finish bursting. When I see exodus from Bay Area like the one in 2001-2002 then I will believe the bubble has burst.

Tech-stock wreck destroys $529B this year http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2016/02/05/tech-...

It's semantics, we're saying the same thing. Once the bubble bursts, then the fallout begins. Already we're seeing a few thousand layoffs from established companies (Autodesk, Yahoo, GoPro, Twitter, etc), and I've heard that LinkedIn is going to have layoffs, too.

The consequences of the burst don't necessarily have to be as catastrophic as the dotcom bust, so it may or may not be dire enough affect traffic, commercial rent prices, etc, the same way. I do think that it may be painful, but hopefully it's not filled with fraud like the dotcom bust.

Ok c'mon people GoPro does not belong with Twitter, Yahoo, and Autodesk. Yahoo has been on it's way down for the better part of a decade. If you're going to provide 'evidence' at least make sure it's valid first otherwise your whole argument goes to shit.

Of course they belong. Their inflated stock hit almost $100 less than a year ago and now it's $10. They are in the 90 percent club, like most of tech back in the dotcom bust. They have arrived there faster than others, so why exactly doesn't it belong with the rest of them? Plus, they are having layoffs. It's actually a perfect fit to my argument.

LinkedIn is kind of hard to figure out how their business plan works.

They are a social network for professionals, companies have a profile, people post resume stuff on it, recruiters use it to find people for contracts or jobs.

I have people visit my profile, but I can't see who they are unless I pay a subscription.

I list Visual BASIC 6.0 as a skill and there is still a small demand for work with it in legacy software.

I get all kinds of LinkedIn email from groups I joined, some of the email is basically spam and makes me want to quit the group. I made a message filter in Thunderbird to move all LinkedIn email to my LinkedIn folder. I check it to see if anything important is there, most of it is not important.

Facebook recently made a Facebook at Work site for employees to communicate with each other. I think it competes with LinkedIn.

Facebook at Work is very different from LinkedIn. I doubt they will compete with each other at all - at least not any time soon.

LinkedIn is focused on helping companies find and recruit employees, and also helping job-seekers find new jobs. Facebook at Work seems to be focused more on communication and collaboration within a given company or project.

Of course, it's entirely possible that Facebook at Work would grow into something closer to LinkedIn. Despite LinkedIn having a huge head start in this area, Facebook probably could catch up. Lots of people already have Facebook accounts, and people generally like having fewer accounts for things rather than more. Plus, Facebook could easily replicate a lot of the recruiting features that companies currently pay LinkedIn thousands of dollars per year for.

They have very well defined businesses, actually.

1) Ads 2) Enhanced subscriptions for recruiters 3) Premium subscriptions for end users

It's all advertising and premium subscriptions aimed at the HR Recruitment space.

Take comfort in the fact that the CEOs and venture backers are still head-spinningly rich, as will be their grandchildren.

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