There are definitely profitable tech companies out there which are still hiring, but they are largely private. Some may have $35B valuations and a few thousand employees, but don't find it worthwhile to go public.
There are definitely profitable tech companies out there which are still hiring, but they are largely private. Some may have $35B valuations and a few thousand employees, but don't find it worthwhile to go public.
If you give out stock (say, an employee stock ownership plan or options), you are already subject to SOX. https://www.bradley.com/insights/publications/2004/03/sarban... shows an older article about some of the other reasons you might be subject to SOX.
Further, if you give out options, your employees might expect to be able to sell those. So, once you normalize options, you have set yourself on the path to either acquisition or IPO. Once you take venture capital, they will want a way to sell their shares at the highest price, which means acquision or IPO. So, while you can point to ESRI or Basecamp or any number of private companies, they are in the minority.
If you can bootstrap a company (or rely on alternative funding sources to VC), and you can make it profitable enough to hire employees at market rate without the lure of options, and you can fend off any VC-backed competitors who can undercut you on cost and hire a larger team, then you're golden. However, there's more than an adverse selection problem going on here.
That’s not a fair statement. Amazon is an online retailer but only achieved profitability due to AWS. I don’t think their retail business is even profitable now if you slice it out.
Amazon was profitable in 2002 to 2006 before introduction of AWS services of S3 and EC2 in 2006:
https://dazeinfo.com/2019/11/06/amazon-net-income-by-year-gr...
Amazon's retail operation is profitable on its own. They just have lower profit margins than AWS.
Which is exactly what you would expect. Retail is notoriously low margin.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122414/operating-pr...
Judging by the numbers you provided it appears Amazon was barely cash flow positive during your specified time frame.
A positive +net income is net profit. The "net profit" has more expenses subtracted than "operating profit" but "net income" _is_ profit.
[fyi I wasn't the one that downvoted your comments.]
Netflix
(If you want to be pedantic, they were unprofitable for "year", not "years" after IPO)
Ebiester’s initial comment on becoming profitable after IPOing with losses allows for either as a follow-up. We seem to have taken opposite readings without ill intent on either side.
In their 20 years they've managed to burn 10s of billions of dollars and they're still burning cash. Best case scenario they are still a decade away from generating more cash than they've consumed.
Sustained profitability is a different hurdle.
"Your margin is my opportunity" as a famous business leader is fond of saying.
For another counter-example, take any business with low barriers to entry. Sure, one set of competitors go out of business, but you have new ones. Retail outlets tend to be a good example. Top retail brands change regularly as new ones come in and push old ones out. This has been going for as far back as I have looked. Therefore any retail brand should operate as if it will happen in the future as well.
As a thought exercise, imagine WeWork drove every office rental company out of business in the United States by running at a loss. To make a profit, they would have to raise their rents. When they do, any company can re-enter the market by buying or building office space to compete with them.
In some markets that is justified. Those where significant infrastructure is needed to compete. For example Amazon's network of warehouses and datacentres would be hard for a competitor to replicate at scale.
For other markets, that's not justified. For example Uber, a small scale competitor can operate with some taxi's and an app. They won't have all of Uber's capabilities for sure, but they can compete in a locality.
Amazon's bottom line might not have been that great, but most of the difference from the top-line regularly consisted of dumping money into expenditures in areas that were pushing huge revenue growth.
It seems like people are suggesting analysts are dumb and didn't really dig beyond a basic top-line vs bottom-line glance when discussing Amazon's business model.
Why do you say this? I find it unlikely that building out 2-day delivery was a major short-term driver of revenue. It was developing their moat. Similarly, building out a fulfillment service that directly cannibalized existing business was not a short-term revenue generator.
Edit: Ah yes I forgot Airbnb
However, the Amazon model (and to a lesser extent the Uber model, etc.) was to continue penetration pricing as well as plowing every dime made over costs into growth. It made the company look overvalued but the share price was in retrospect justified.
Key difference! A lot of these grow fast companies don’t even cover costs.
I've been trying to build a mental model around this i.e., what options do companies have to utilize profit?
1. Distribute to shareholders -- dividends. 2. Distribute amongst employees -- salary increase, bonuses. 3. Add it to their pile of cash. 4. Invest in growing the business. 5. Something else!?
Perhaps a combination of all four?
I guess Apple does mostly #3 which is how they are now sitting on a huge pile of cash. Perhaps it's a signal that they don't need cash to grow their business or maybe they don't see how to grow either.
Whereas Amazon genuinely believe that investing in growth is the best return the cash from profit can earn. I guess it makes sense, e-commerce is still about 10% of retail in US alone. So there's a big room for growth.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/startups-investing-in-st...
https://www.businessinsider.com/to-4-corporate-venture-capit...
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/pitfalls-financi...
https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0103-63512018000200549...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308901243_Financial...
Apple does all of these things. Recently their cash hoard has declined, while they continue to buy back stock, and increased their dividend. They also do acquisitions all the time, but since they usually buy technology and talent, most of those have a small price tag. The biggest exception since NeXT is probably Beats, which was $3 billion.
Apple has occasionally used their cash reserves to spur growth by cornering the market on new technologies. The two I can recall are the time they prepurchased almost the entire global supply NAND flash memory while launching the iPod Nano, and buying up almost every new copy of a certain CNC machine when they launched the "unibody" Macbooks.
(1) Show profit: distribute it, put it into a bank, etc. You pay the tax on the profit; if you pay yourself a few million, this is taxed at 40-50%. Assume that your shares grow, too.
(2) Do not show profit: invest everything! Always be a wee bit in the red. Assuming your company actually grows from the investment, Your market share increases, your cash flow grows. Most likely your shares grow comfortably with that, too, at least in the long term. But you don't pay the tax on the profit. You pay the tax on the capital gains, but it's much lower. You don't pay yourself anything, because you can sell a small bit of shares to get these few millions you need.
Now, who in their right mind would show profit if they can show more growth instead?
Apple would be happy to do that, too, but they have no room to grow, it seems. Same with Google; though they invest a lot, they don't seem to find another seriously growing niche. Amazon can pull that off, though, and they gladly do. When Amazon becomes predictably profitable, it would mean they ran out of fruitful growth / investment ideas.
That’s absolutely not true for these companies.
One of the most underrated aspects of Amazon is Bezos’s realization that he didn’t need profits to make a lot of money as long as his cash flow was positive. It gave him tremendous flexibility because he could spend a lot more than his competitors, and as an added bonus, it reduced his tax bill significantly.
I think this was and still is a common misconception, and the interesting thing is that Bezos has talked for a long time about how they are not (and should not) be optimizing for profit, and that they are looking at free cash flow as their One Metric That Matters. Here's an old shareholder letter from 2004 where Bezos explains his reasoning:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312505...
A summary on this misconception from Vox:
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...
Well, one of the reasons we throw around the "fake it until you make it" term is that some companies don't "make it", and if they're big enough it's a big deal (e.g. Theranos). That an extremely changed market causes a lot of these companies to start having problems sooner isn't really a surprise.
Summary: exception proves the rule?
A lot of these companies are probably run by assholes, too. But just like being an asshole doesn't make you a Steve-Jobs-like-company-savior, being unprofitable doesn't make you Amazon. All it means is that you work for an asshole, and your options won't likely ever be worth anything.
(It's that Amazon was always profitable at margin, and invested profits into real growth not bribing customers.)
That is very debatable. Regardless, it's the not the meaning I was using.
"If there wasn't a rule, then you wouldn't call that an exception."
A business model that yields a reliable 10% profit margin, but with a low overall volume and low growth is not suitable for any VC-backed company. So that's a space where bootstrappers only have to compete against other bootstrappers.
The reason you need public markets is because if you are actually worth $35bn, you can't get liquidity anywhere else...$35bn is an oddly specific number but it is far larger than most people in tech understand (just for scale, Koch Industries is probably the most valuable private company in the US...it is valued at what ~$75bn, Mars is another one...that is is around ~$50bn...if you have a tech company at $35bn, some VC somewhere has just lost a fuck ton of money).
The reason a private company that is "worth $35bn" doesn't come to market is obvious...it isn't worth $35bn.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle...need I go on?
Understandably though maybe you need the liquidity public markets can provide for a giant undertaking, thinking of Tesla here, then look at all the hoops Elon has had to jump through to maintain some semblance of his control.
My point is, I'm sure there are private tech companies worth some multitude of billions but the powers that run them value their control and don't need the liquidity of the public market and so taking the company public would just complicate their interests.
A super quick search shows me there are at least 26 private tech companies valued at greater than 1bn not sure how many of those don't ever intend to go public but I'd guess a few.
The only two reasons I can think of are:
It gives your employees a cash out plan if you used RSUs/Options/Ownership in the company as an incentive for hiring.
Some businesses benefit from going public by it adding credibility (and open financial books). Some very large enterprises (Fortune 100, major governments) tend to look more preferably to publicly traded companies so it makes sense for the business to go public to go after these customers.
There are also ways to defend against "public involvement" in publicly traded companies that have been around forever. Look at Facebook and the NYT's stock class structure, for example.
It's also finally easier to get liquidity when you aren't desperate for it, and the public markets position you for it in a good way.
We are accountable to the people, we are a meritocracy that makes great decisions...but we won't let you vote.
When people start talking a lot about control (it is kind of a tech bro meme at this point), you can be sure that they are the kind of person who shouldn't be in control.
And btw, the cost of screwing minority shareholders has been basically zero in the US (you usually only see this kind of emerging markets) but it never stays zero. And typically, these companies will trade at a discount.
In reality, you have to give up control. When you take outside money, which you will have to do, then you give up control. I have no idea why people view this as particularly problematic (again, this is the CCP approach)...if you don't like oversight or accountability, don't start a company. Simple.
(Tech CEOs seem to write about this endlessly...you will notice that there isn't a particularly consistent position. They like juicing the stock market so they can bump their pay package but they don't like the oversight. These two things are connected. The reason public markets can produce bad outcomes is because they become linked to CEO pay...in tech, there is a CEO celebrity culture which always sees people side with executives...but most of these people are incompetent...Facebook's executives seem to have legendary status, despite them managing to literally destroy a monopoly...so when you see someone saying they want to retain "control", I would ask why. It usually indicates incompetence).
Do you have any specific thoughts on them?
Though we may see more companies choosing RSUs or equivalent to provide cash compensation in proportion to stock value increases, instead of increasing their shareholder base, which might be an interesting development.