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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

> Series F

Yikes

> largest investment in a private database company

I guess this is one of those PR moves that is trying to make something lame sound good? If your customer portfolio includes Walmart, Volvo and AstraZeneca why are you raising money a 6th time?

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Having some department at e.g. Volvo using your product doesn't mean that you have Volvo as a serious customer paying you like they would as a serious customer.

I take your point that this is a really late round of funding, but this doesn't mean they've caught on like they want to yet.

I agree that what you've described is likely the true situation. It just looks funny to see a company claim to be worth $2 billion dollars and namedrop big brands and yet require a 6th cash injection. There is an incongruence there.

But that's how most big tech companies have been operating for the last 10-15(?) years.

How do you think public companies that have never made a $ got there.

True. Private funding rounds this big just weren't available, so these were IPOs instead of round FS.

Redis Labs are more or less doing the same.

IDK, on the one hand it's a late round. On the other, as a CEO, the ability to just immediately raise 325 million dollars is both impressive and appealing. It's insane how far even one million dollars goes, 325 is mind boggling to me.

325M isn't all that much when the company has been growing for over 10 years, doubling its staff count every 2 years, with a bunch of VPs added in, supposedly to figure out how to run professionally 100 nerds. It leads to 4 layers made of directors, senior managers and managers below each VP. Those jobs take a decent pay, and a significant cash bonus. Significant travel and other expense coming from sales folks who won't take airbnb for a 3 days trip in NY, 5 stars sheraton please. Add to that it's pretty common to spend 1/3 of the yearly flow into marketing, your IT, HR and accounting departments having itself large IT expense (concur, service now, etc) you end up with a boat burning 325M per year quite easily.

325M is a shitload of money. I'm not making a judgment on if it's "enough" or a good sign or whatever. I'm just saying it's an insane amount of money.

Series F by itself isn't necessarily a bad thing anymore. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Snowflake all had Series F rounds at one point.

Have any of them figured out how to generate a profit or have they just switched from extracting money from VCs to extracting it from the public?

Is profit not normally extracted from the public? Rideshare costs are definitely increasing as they move towards profitability, this seems to be the expected and reasonable path towards that.

Similarly, Airbnb has been profitable for a while. Snowflake is also moving towards that.

The ability to generate a profit and investment rounds aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you’re focused on growth you’re not going to have profits because you’re going to be spending all of your money on growing. That doesn’t necessarily mean you couldn’t drastically reduce expenditures and become profitable if investment wasn’t an option (or just an unfavorable option)

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