Cloudflare Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2020 Financial Results

I tell myself that any explanation might be a neat story, but what evidence is there that isn’t just someone’s opinion? (Not much, usually.)

If you know that FB, GOOG, PINS are all having amazing quarters, you might see SNAPs price rise in advance of their earnings because if some other big ad/social network giants are doing well, surely SNAP will too!

Then there are truly amazing beats or misses by companies and the street tracks those as well.

A more recent example might be Lyft & Uber. Lyft actually came in at the top end of QoQ rev growth and cut losses well. Uber's options market and stock immediately reflected Lyft's earnings report even though Uber was still 24 hours away from reporting. Uber's report was good not great but the stock had already gained in the day prior and thus not much left to squeeze up.

Just my 2 cents on how some of these things happen

And yeah agree Twitter always seems to be missing from engineering hype. I guess their open source and engineering out in the open is a shell of what is was.

Tesla pays low, software isn't the main focus. Salesforce is a b2b company, that i don't think most people actually like? Do they pay like other companies or have unusual or interesting software engineering problems?

That isn't too bad. And considering they are still innovating and working on products that directly competes with AWS and EC2, all of a sudden $28B valuation isn't so crazy. AWS is $40B revenue alone and still growing 33% YoY. The whole Cloud industry still have room to grow with no ceiling in sight.

While the whole stock market is definitely bubbling at the moment. I wouldn't say Cloudflare is overvalued on its growth factor.

That's what I'd worry about, too: for a large company, there's a fairly large cost to dealing with each new vendor. Once Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. has a CDN which is competitive for your needs someone is going to ask whether the extra benefits are greater than the cost of managing a contract, security, training, etc.

It reminds me a lot of Dropbox and the situation where for years Dropbox's value proposition was "yea OneDrive and iCloud provide the same service, but people like Dropbox because it is independent, unbloated, and simpler to use". But over time that's become less true, and as more and more companies move to using O365, they end up getting OneDrive as part of the deal anyway. And once you're already working in an environment with OneDrive, why continue using Dropbox?

That's funny because in the late 2000s, people said that FB was doomed as soon as Google would decide to compete.

Google could replicate this, as could Amazon (that would be more my bet personally), but Cloudflare has no vendor lock allowing customers to use any infra. Google could do the same, but it would almost always have better and more robust support on GCP, and that would create a disconnect. Same for Microsoft and Azure. They're incentivized to vendor-lock you into their compute services. Cloudflare isn't.

But, there is room for multiple competitors across the space. For instance Akamai is still a dominate player in the CDN space and Fastly has been strong. Luckily there are plenty of businesses available that they all can eat. Google muscling in might hurt Cloudflare down the line, but it wouldn't necessarily reduce the staying power of Cloudflare. Again, it's hard to achieve and undo their physical network distribution.

Good - CloudFlare has never been profitable once.

Like Google+, Friendster and Myspace?

Then they did that.

They had a halfway decent reason for the first one (the racist site they censored was claiming their continued existence was tacit endorsement by Cloudflare, a lie) but once they crossed that line they didn't go back.