Personally, I see these kinds of things as a failing of the US's macroeconomic policy since 2010 first (ZIRP), and the failing of the board and VCs second, before dicing up the blame amongst c-suite and executives. The incentive structures start from the top.
Massive addressable market, pretty mediocre state of the art, problem that people already spend real money to solve (poorly). $3B is high, but I can see a world where it’s justified.
Employee count seems high but I would imagine a disproportionate number are sales/marketing because, again, addressable market is huge and competition is fierce.
Postman… the addressable market is just not that large, especially for the features you actually pay for.
There's definitely value in the space, but I struggle to imagine how the ends (capturing that value) justifies the means (how they're pursuing that value).
If you know your way around CalDAV [1], you can build the most valuable 20% of their features in a weekend. A team of 3-4 could build the most valuable 80% in a month or two. In fact, some people have not only done that but kept going, and we have FOSS tools like https://cal.com as a result, that are arguably easier to use.
As a board member/founder/executive, one has to in the mirror each night, and feel confident saying "I'm running this company responsibly".
Especially if you're working in a purely digital space (which Calendly is), you have to bend really far to justify hiring that many people. IDK, maybe I'm a standard deviation or two away from norms on frugality, but this baffles me.
[0]: To contrast, WhatsApp sold in (!) 2014 (!) with 32 engineers (~50 total heacount), servicing 450mm active users. So, Calendly have 10x the headcount, on .2x the valuation.
If calendly links improve the top-of-the-funnel size by X% it would be very easy to justify paying them large amounts of money to do so. If I’m employing 50 recruiters why wouldn’t I pay calendly $100k/year or more to make them X% more effective?
You could argue for building your own, but it doesn’t make sense for every business to build their own, and I think it’s obviously the type of tool where a prototype would be easy to make but getting enterprise-ready would be challenging.
In practice if calendly gets a large share of the market and really can charge 100k/customer, competitors will pop up quickly and force pricing far lower.
For a long while many tech companies had no serious competition as startups stayed in their own lane, but thats no longer true.
E.g. people were saying the same things about Zoom and Slack, but now they’re a dime a dozen.
Amazon just launched a tiktok clone. Nothing is safe from competition, so dont expect outsized margins to last forever in your forecasts. First movers get a few years of runway before profitability will be pressured
Sure, every company has competitors. That doesn’t mean $3b is an unreasonable valuation.
Just commenting on the apparent assumptions made using the analysis above. Zoom is still worth $20B, but there were many who said it was worth far higher because they didn't consider or discount competition at all.
However, I also think Zoom is likely to fall quite a bit more from here. Their revenue is flat YoY and still valued at 30 PE.
Identical competitors is popping up easily by offering the exact same service. It is a simple concept and the fact is that the only innovation they can add is adding very simple bells and whistles. The barier to this industry is virtually non existing.
Nothing is stopping Google or Microsoft to build their own integrated calendly like app. Considering platform risks, I don't believe any SAAS whose core offering relies on external API to have a sustainable revenue model.
What is your opinion about Microsoft Teams?
I have done couple of gigs for a Azure shops. It is borderline admirable how one client vehemently adhered to the MS teams. Even to the point of using Teams integrated Onenote for software design. Everything that was supposed to be written went to onenote on teams.