Canva becomes Australia’s only privately backed tech startup to be valued at $1B
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Very cool product.
It has thrown their stock through the roof. Their stock was essentially dead in the water from 2000 to 2012. $30 to $185 since then. Pull back on their chart to the max time frame, and it's hilarious looking in the spike versus the past.
They've been given a ~60 PE ratio, for 15%-20% growth and a rather old-fashion boring product. But it's cloud! Recurring revenue! Throw enough of that together with a stock market bubble and you get a 80% jump in the stock in one year.
That's the most plausible argument in favor of Canva getting their crazy valuation, it matches the insanity of Adobe's valuation. It's obvious what happens on the back side of that insanity too.
Cloud was the old (but still functional) blockchain when it comes to buzz words.
It is definitely not a replacement, but people often use Photoshop for touching up photos and create small banners and stuff like that, which Canva does wonderfully and helps you out with templates.
I don't particularly like Snapchat, I do however entirely get why it's valuable. There's room to debate whether it's worth $5 billion or $15 billion, I don't believe there's any room for debate on whether it's worth billions. It has had its market value validated at or above those levels for years now, from VC to public investors. It has maintained a large userbase for years as well.
Snap also has 30-40 times the revenue of Canva, which makes the point about how lucrative those hundreds of millions of users can be.
These things come and go. I remember using Yahoo! Messenger...
They're executing really well in key areas.
According to my friend who works there, they haven't really been trying to monetize yet so perhaps the investors think that when they try to monetize it will be easy to be profitable?
At least when comparing to FB, FB's path to monetization seemed more difficult in my opinion.
You're asking for the core mechanism of wealth creation in technology to be dispelled.
If enough people, over a credible amount of time, say that a company is increasing in value, and if they back each such assertion with a small percentage of that stated value, then eventually said company can be taken to the public who hopefully will agree and put up their money to validate the game.
You are correct, however, selling 0.00001% of my company to some schmuck for 100$ does not mean people are willing to give me 1 billion dollars for te rest of it. Many so called "unicorns" seem to be closer to that scenario than to actually having a market valuation of 1 billion dollars.
Thus the company is not actually worth Y valuation and pretending otherwise ignores the terms of the deal.
EX: If the company is nominally worth 1 billion at the time of investment, and later sold for 900 million the last investor may actually have profited via money that early investors never received.
what is, or is not referred to as a "unicorn" is not a core mechanism of wealth creation.
all they said was "I wish ... call companies unicorns when they “profit” a billion dollars a year."
obviously the valuation mechanism can't change, but we could all agree to be less impressed by noisy valuations, and more impressed by realized profits.
(Well, I guess it's public now.)
Are they excluded for going public? Weren't they over a billion well before that?
Or did they not take outside money?
[1] http://www.afr.com/leadership/entrepreneur/atlassian-leads-c...
I understand that doesn't mean they aren't primarily operating out of Sydney, although I don't know how one would say that definitely given the distribution (unless eg that's where all their core management operates?). How many employees do they have in Sydney? Where does the top management primarily operate from?
As for top management, I believe both their co-CEOs are Sydney-based, and Mike Cannon-Brookes is well known for his occasional forays into Australian politics and public affairs...
Based on sightings of dudebros wearing branded shwag in coffee shops and bars around here, I'd say quite a lot...
Currently 1053 - by far our largest office. According to our people directory, we have no active employees in the UK.
Similar story with most other AU companies that have reached that level, local IPO early or reach the valuation without institutional money. The latter also meaning valuation is pure external speculation.