Permira completes Squarespace acquisition after upping bid to $7.2B | Hacker News Reader

Permira completes Squarespace acquisition after upping bid to $7.2B

techcrunch.com

43 pointsBrajeshwar24 comments

Make no mistake, in a private equity acquisition like this where the company is earning around $50mil profit on a billion dollars revenue, they will cut costs to make their money back.

This PE firm led acquisition of Zendesk for $10bil in 2022 and McAfee for $14bil in 2021

They've spent over $30billion dollars on just these 3 acquisitions in 3 years. Many of which would be part financed.

Culture after zendesk goes acquired (including 8% layoffs 2023) https://www.teamblind.com/post/Zendesk-changes-after-going-p...

Squarespace financials https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/sqsp/financials/

More info on this PE firm https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permira

Are we entering a new Gordon Gecko era? Greed is good!

I guess they can make a heck of a lot just by cutting the podcast sponsorships.

I need to move my domains that got dumped on squarespace after Google abandoned their domain registrar.

I coincidentally just initiated my transfer out yesterday. I had been putting it off since it's slightly annoying, but didn't take too long.

I've been transferring mine to Cloudflare as they come closer to renewal. Unfortunately Cloudflare doesn't allow punycode domains right now and I have one domain with an æ that might get orphaned.

Mine got moved over and haven't really looked into it. Why are you moving off?

For me, because I don't want to give any more money to the PE parasites of the world.

Others may be more concerned about the inevitable decline of customer service and product quality when these things happen.

im not entirely sure their support could get any worse?

I just went through this and they will make the process be as slow as legally possible.

Also if you were using google workspace, that also got transferred to them as a reseller. You have to do this somewhat confusing process of deleting your workspace account at squarespace to get it to transfer back to google. The remainder of the month you paid for at squarespace is just lost, and you’ll need to set things up again with google. I didn’t explicitly reenable Gmail and started to have all my mail bounce.

There has to be an easier way than that?

I've had good luck with Cloudflare

That's what I did. I moved my .dev domain to cloudflare as soon as I could.

I wonder if they will change their ad spend. It feels like half the podcasts and youtube channels I frequent are sponsored by them.

I can't tell if this is good for Squarespace customers or not.

Publicly traded companies have some pressures that are unhealthy, so moving back into private ownership might be good.

From my casual browsing of their Wikipedia article, Permira doesn't seem to be a vulture capital firm.

shrug emoji

They are a private equity firm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...

Even worse!

It's going to be bad for customers. They should expect everything to slowly deteriorate in quality as prices continue to climb.

For all of their faults, public companies largely attempt to continue existing. And initiatives that my not be immediately profitable can still have a positive impact on stock price if the market agrees that they will result in long-term growth for the company.

PE is often about extracting as much money as possible in the shortest timeframe possible and the company's continued existence is largely irrelevant. This is why they so often cut expenses to the bone, and bury the company in the maximum amount of debt that can be serviced by current cash flows.

Between this and the Wordpress drama this really sucks for people who don’t know how to code. I really wish some of the static site frameworks made things easier for non coders. I’m just sitting here on the sidelines drooling over all these headless CMS-es you guys get to play with but I don’t have time to learn js/ts/css/html right now.

How long does it take a non-coder to learn web development anyway? This guy on Quora says 3-6 months until you’re able to build a basic project. Does that sound about right?

* https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-it-take-for-a-non-coder-...

As a game dev, I found Jekyll really easy to get on to. Nice way to write blog posts. Easy to tweak the html/CSS/JS when needed

https://jekyllrb.com/

Thanks for the recommendation and the link. I’ll check it out. Appreciate it.

You can host a blog using it using GitHub pages for free.

I wonder if this means the “podcast sponsored by Squarespace gravy train” for the last decade might end? I hope not as they sponsored a few I like but I think Linode stopped sponsoring podcasts when they got acquired.

Ad sponsorships in podcasts have already been on a steady decline for a hot minute. I expect they'll keep sponsoring shows they know they can safely get a return on, but I'd be surprised if they expand their ad spend.

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