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Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me gi

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Khan Academy has an amazing collection of videos on finance. I highly recommend it for understanding cash flows, enterprise value, etc. It's helped me transition (one foot out the door) from tech to finance.
- artemonster 6y ago
  Any other good sources, like books or articles ?
  - ab_testing 6y ago
    The valuation of current tech companies is way astronomical compared to what is considered normal for mature companies. The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. Similarly the P/E ratio for S&P companies used to be in the 15-25 range to the considered normal . However with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000. And the market considers that normal behavior now.
    - throwawayyipyip 6y ago
      Well, to some extent it is. You can argue both ways, and in Zapier's case, I'd say it's overvalued as the 10-15 range assumes obtaining a monopoly. I don't see how Zapier will do that since there's also IFTTT and other services I've tried. With that said, consider huge successes like Amazon. Huge successes like Amazon have been generating much more profit compared to what they were projected to earn in 2010 [1]. I picked 2010 since 2 things are out of the way: the tech boom and the credit crunch. Moreover, people understood that Amazon was here to stay. Despite that, 10 years later, they make 20 times as much profit. If investors knew that 10 years ago, I'd bet that the price would not have been about 130$ since according to Google Finance, the diluted earnings per share (EPS) is about 42$, which is about 30% of the 2010 stock price. Mind you, in 2010, investors already put crazy multiples on stocks like Amazon. Yet, their prediction on how much money it would make has been underestimated back then. If the estimates of 2010 were correct, you'd expect Amazon to now have an EPS of like 6.5$ (130/20) since by conservative measures, the P/E ratio is in the 15-25 range. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm not the sharpest cookie in the jar. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in... [2] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=MAX https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=MAX
      - valzam 6y ago
        However, Amazon never pays dividends. And you probably cannot really vote on anything with your stock either. So what's the point? There is an interesting article about Facebook with a similar opinion. Zuck owns the majority vote and they never pay dividends. What's the point of owning the stock?
        mdeck_ 6y ago
        The point is that (a buyer expects that) the value of the stock itself is increasing. Whether it pays dividends is not the pertinent question.
        jurassic 6y ago
        Dividends are taxable while price appreciation doesn’t become taxable until you sell. Unless you need income, it’s more tax efficient to shareholders if the company reinvests free cashflow in continued growth.
        chii 6y ago
        > What's the point of owning the stock? to sell for capital gains when it is higher in the future. Dividends aren't the only way to generate a profit. And for a lot of high income earners, dividends are very tax inefficient as well.
        ByteJockey 6y ago
        There's a term for when everyone buys something just because you can sell it to someone else for more later. It's called a bubble.
        chii 6y ago
        It's only a bubble if it busts. And stock does have value, and if the business it represents have growth, the equivalent value must also grow. And in any case, if someone else feels that the stock is worth more, and thus pay more for it, what's the problem?
        6y ago
    - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
      > However with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000. And the market considers that normal behavior now. That's not normal, it's pure stupid. So if you don't think there are people sitting on the sidelines watching idiots bid up shares way, way beyond the replacement value of companies, you're not watching the same thing happen that others are. Do people even understand what these numbers mean? It means after expenses, assuming no future growth, that's how many years it would take to make back your investment. Do you know why a P/E ratio of 15 was historically considered high? Because even with modest growth, no one wants to wait 15 years for corporate revenues and acquisition costs to break even. News flash, 15 to 25 years isn't normal. The average company doesn't even make it 15 to 25 years these days.
      - Silhouette 6y ago
        This argument is based on the idea that stock markets should price rationally based on value, but evidently that's not really how the markets work. Share prices have -- and need -- very little connection to any "true" value of the business whose stocks are being traded. For the basic investment strategy of trying to buy low and sell high, investors win if the stock subsequently goes up and lose if it subsequently goes down. The reason for the change, if there is any logical reason at all, is largely irrelevant. Assuming any sort of pricing rationality risks the well-known problem that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. It should never have been possible in a rational market for the recent WSB pump-and-dumps to work, yet many billions changed hands as a result. Not that I have much sympathy for the losers on that one, because it should also never have been possible in a rational market for the short-selling strategy that left them vulnerable to work either. Both groups got away with something dodgy for a while and then some of them lost a lot of money when the house of cards fell. Whether this disconnection of prices from real value is a healthy way for stock markets to operate as a key element in our financial systems is a separate question, and it's one that a different and probably much smaller group of people care about. As a footnote, it's probably worth mentioning that some businesses, including tech stocks, don't necessarily follow the traditional models for either growth or dividend payments. So although those P/E ratios might be considered very high by traditional standards, those traditional rules of thumb aren't necessarily useful in these cases, even if we only look realistically at the potential for future profits. A high-growth tech startup might have low earnings in the early days and rely on some big investments for funding instead if it's building a huge user base without yet having a firm strategy for monetization, for example. That doesn't mean it won't have genuine potential to earn a huge amount of money from that huge user base later on if it does find the right monetization strategy.
    - formercoder 6y ago
      So the theoretical reason for the high values of tech companies is that margin is one of the biggest drivers of value in a dcf, due mostly to the non linear nature of division. However, many of the tech companies we’re seeing don’t have near those margins, they are in fact negative.
    - bryik 6y ago
      > ...with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000 What "internet" company has a P/E ratio above 100? Facebook: 25 Apple: 31 Netflix: 81 Google: 36 Netflix is close, I guess.
      - jaxn 6y ago
        Shopify: 420 Square: 513 Salesforce: 95 Zoom: 149
    - quickthrowman 6y ago
      > The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. You’re off by anywhere from 2-20x on the price to sales multipliers. At one point Snowflake had a market cap of nearly 200x the projected sales of the next twelve months. Before rates started creeping up, most SaaS was trading between 20-40x NTM and up to 60-80x on upside spikes.
- syndacks 6y ago
  Curious to hear why you left one for the other. Not too often you hear that move. How is it going so far?
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I fell out of love with tech, and found more leverage in finance. I still write code (Python) for myself for fun, but would rather live in Excel versus VS Code and k8s 50 hrs a week (I squeeze in commits on my open source projects when the family has gone to bed). I’m semi retired in my late 30s, so it’s gone well. I am so extraordinarily thankful for the experiences and opportunities I’ve had, but recognize when it’s time to close a life chapter.
    - anonymouse008 6y ago
      If you’re willing to offer advice, when did you make the switch and how? That’s quite a jump, and usually upon entering finance you end up with different tasks to fill up a 50+ hour week. PE/IB/etc ... only way you strike rich with easy schedules is a family office?
djrogers 6y ago
I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming. Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability. For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are other servothay do the same thing, but none that I’ve found do it as easily and as well as Zapier.
- hooande 6y ago
  why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation
  - alvah 6y ago
    Because you don’t “just hire a developer”, and you certainly don’t do anything close to that for most of the needs Zapier addresses.
  - pmart123 6y ago
    BC you have to maintain the code then. Also, a non-engineering team member can quickly get an integration they need done without waiting for a developer.
  - Silhouette 6y ago
    why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? Because developers are relatively expensive. Because hiring anyone requires identifying someone who can do the job and trusting them to do it well. And even before that, you have to figure out what the job actually is. Because hiring anyone requires some sort of contract, and that has legal implications that might require approvals etc. As a developer with the required knowledge and skills, these services offer little value to me, but I'm not their target customer. That knowledge and those skills are the result of decades of study and practice, which is experience that most people don't have, and for all of those people the cost/benefit comparisons are going to look completely different.
narrator 6y ago
>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks and feels though, you can figure out what is going to work and what isn't. Twitch.tv is something that amazed me that it became so big. I don't really play video games. Who would spend hours watching people play video games? I couldn't understand this phenomenon because I was limiting my exposure to people only inside my own little bubble of reality. I think one can't be a good investor without constantly developing ones empathy because the appeal of various things is difficult to grasp intuitively without a person who would be the customer in mind. Personally, I think it's important to spend time with people one has nothing in common with to develop this broader empathy and thus be able to pick up on these trends.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jojobas 6y ago
  There was already plenty of middleware tools that allowed API to API translation. They all (and I assume Zapier is no exception) only allow "no code" integration in only the most basic scenarios. I don't think it has much to do with empathy, much rather unbounded money printing of late.
- xwolfi 6y ago
  Dentists lack empathy: they cant understand how most people think and never explain how they think outside of their bubble. Our startup, Dentir, makes you do things dentists do :p
  - rtpg 6y ago
    The core difference being that “put value X from system S into value Y in system V” is actually conceptually extremely simple, and is mostly encumbered by machinery around it and “incidental complexity”. Dentistry _is_ all the complexity and the skill of , like, drilling into your mouth or whatever.
wombatmobile 6y ago
The $5b valuation is speculative. Only $1.3m has been raised, which is less than 0.02% of that valuation.
- anonymouse008 6y ago
  Or you could say $1.3m of a theoretical $5bn demand curve has been tested, at one point.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
Why are you assuming the value VCs give it is even close to an honest estimation of its value?
sgpl 6y ago
I think another thing to keep in mind is that wikipedia pages don't tell the whole story. So you shouldn't feel bad about being way off. Investors assigning value have access to other metrics not visible to us - customer numbers, growth numbers, revenue and what the revenue growth looks like, internal product roadmaps and other areas of growth, etc.
tamrix 6y ago
Me: I'll sell you 0.0000001% of my company for $1. You: sure Me: My company is now worth $10B! Hackernews: wow that's so amazing! One day in going to be rich doing startups too!
warent 6y ago
I was shocked by how low the number is! My guess was that Zapier was in the 10s of millions
iambateman 6y ago
Despite the replies, I thought this was a good take. $5,000,000,000 is a truly unimaginable amount in both senses of the word unimaginable. I couldn’t tell the difference between a $5B and $7B company, for example. And it’s especially hard to tell for a service which is, somewhat by nature, invisible. But my smart, non-programmer friends love Zapier and I imagine many of their customer relationships will be multi-decade. There really are so many odd businesses in the world.
- abraae 6y ago
  I think of a billion as (very roughly) half of a cruise liner or half of a casino in the strip in Vegas. Not sure how accurate that is but at $5b, I imagine zapier as a cruise ship tied up alongside a glittering glass casino.
JohnJamesRambo 6y ago
Maybe valuations are just way astronomically off right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/warren-buffett-s-favorite-valuation-metric-is-ringing-an-alarm https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/warren-bu...
specialist 6y ago
Word. IIRC, Microsoft acquired CompareNet for $400m in 1999. Scripts for scrapping prices. Written in Perl. I always get stuck on the little questions. Like: Does it work? Is idea worth doing? How big is the market? (I mention CompareNet because I had some contact with one of the founders. It's my IRL example that I never figured out how to play this game.)

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Khan Academy has an amazing collection of videos on finance. I highly recommend it for understanding cash flows, enterprise value, etc. It's helped me transition (one foot out the door) from tech to finance.

artemonster 6y ago
Any other good sources, like books or articles ?
- ab_testing 6y ago
  The valuation of current tech companies is way astronomical compared to what is considered normal for mature companies. The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. Similarly the P/E ratio for S&P companies used to be in the 15-25 range to the considered normal . However with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000. And the market considers that normal behavior now.
  - throwawayyipyip 6y ago
    Well, to some extent it is. You can argue both ways, and in Zapier's case, I'd say it's overvalued as the 10-15 range assumes obtaining a monopoly. I don't see how Zapier will do that since there's also IFTTT and other services I've tried. With that said, consider huge successes like Amazon. Huge successes like Amazon have been generating much more profit compared to what they were projected to earn in 2010 [1]. I picked 2010 since 2 things are out of the way: the tech boom and the credit crunch. Moreover, people understood that Amazon was here to stay. Despite that, 10 years later, they make 20 times as much profit. If investors knew that 10 years ago, I'd bet that the price would not have been about 130$ since according to Google Finance, the diluted earnings per share (EPS) is about 42$, which is about 30% of the 2010 stock price. Mind you, in 2010, investors already put crazy multiples on stocks like Amazon. Yet, their prediction on how much money it would make has been underestimated back then. If the estimates of 2010 were correct, you'd expect Amazon to now have an EPS of like 6.5$ (130/20) since by conservative measures, the P/E ratio is in the 15-25 range. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, I'm not the sharpest cookie in the jar. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/net-in... [2] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=MAX https://www.google.com/finance/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=MAX
    - valzam 6y ago
      However, Amazon never pays dividends. And you probably cannot really vote on anything with your stock either. So what's the point? There is an interesting article about Facebook with a similar opinion. Zuck owns the majority vote and they never pay dividends. What's the point of owning the stock?
      - mdeck_ 6y ago
        The point is that (a buyer expects that) the value of the stock itself is increasing. Whether it pays dividends is not the pertinent question.
      - jurassic 6y ago
        Dividends are taxable while price appreciation doesn’t become taxable until you sell. Unless you need income, it’s more tax efficient to shareholders if the company reinvests free cashflow in continued growth.
      - chii 6y ago
        > What's the point of owning the stock? to sell for capital gains when it is higher in the future. Dividends aren't the only way to generate a profit. And for a lot of high income earners, dividends are very tax inefficient as well.
        ByteJockey 6y ago
        There's a term for when everyone buys something just because you can sell it to someone else for more later. It's called a bubble.
        chii 6y ago
        It's only a bubble if it busts. And stock does have value, and if the business it represents have growth, the equivalent value must also grow. And in any case, if someone else feels that the stock is worth more, and thus pay more for it, what's the problem?
        6y ago
  - andrewmcwatters 6y ago
    > However with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000. And the market considers that normal behavior now. That's not normal, it's pure stupid. So if you don't think there are people sitting on the sidelines watching idiots bid up shares way, way beyond the replacement value of companies, you're not watching the same thing happen that others are. Do people even understand what these numbers mean? It means after expenses, assuming no future growth, that's how many years it would take to make back your investment. Do you know why a P/E ratio of 15 was historically considered high? Because even with modest growth, no one wants to wait 15 years for corporate revenues and acquisition costs to break even. News flash, 15 to 25 years isn't normal. The average company doesn't even make it 15 to 25 years these days.
    - Silhouette 6y ago
      This argument is based on the idea that stock markets should price rationally based on value, but evidently that's not really how the markets work. Share prices have -- and need -- very little connection to any "true" value of the business whose stocks are being traded. For the basic investment strategy of trying to buy low and sell high, investors win if the stock subsequently goes up and lose if it subsequently goes down. The reason for the change, if there is any logical reason at all, is largely irrelevant. Assuming any sort of pricing rationality risks the well-known problem that the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. It should never have been possible in a rational market for the recent WSB pump-and-dumps to work, yet many billions changed hands as a result. Not that I have much sympathy for the losers on that one, because it should also never have been possible in a rational market for the short-selling strategy that left them vulnerable to work either. Both groups got away with something dodgy for a while and then some of them lost a lot of money when the house of cards fell. Whether this disconnection of prices from real value is a healthy way for stock markets to operate as a key element in our financial systems is a separate question, and it's one that a different and probably much smaller group of people care about. As a footnote, it's probably worth mentioning that some businesses, including tech stocks, don't necessarily follow the traditional models for either growth or dividend payments. So although those P/E ratios might be considered very high by traditional standards, those traditional rules of thumb aren't necessarily useful in these cases, even if we only look realistically at the potential for future profits. A high-growth tech startup might have low earnings in the early days and rely on some big investments for funding instead if it's building a huge user base without yet having a firm strategy for monetization, for example. That doesn't mean it won't have genuine potential to earn a huge amount of money from that huge user base later on if it does find the right monetization strategy.
  - formercoder 6y ago
    So the theoretical reason for the high values of tech companies is that margin is one of the biggest drivers of value in a dcf, due mostly to the non linear nature of division. However, many of the tech companies we’re seeing don’t have near those margins, they are in fact negative.
  - bryik 6y ago
    > ...with these internet companies, they usually do not turn a profit or if they do, their PE ratios usually lingers in from ~100 to 1000 What "internet" company has a P/E ratio above 100? Facebook: 25 Apple: 31 Netflix: 81 Google: 36 Netflix is close, I guess.
    - jaxn 6y ago
      Shopify: 420 Square: 513 Salesforce: 95 Zoom: 149
  - quickthrowman 6y ago
    > The average price to sales for S&P used to be between 1.5-2.5 for many decades. However for these newly IPO companies the price to sales ratios are around 10-15. You’re off by anywhere from 2-20x on the price to sales multipliers. At one point Snowflake had a market cap of nearly 200x the projected sales of the next twelve months. Before rates started creeping up, most SaaS was trading between 20-40x NTM and up to 60-80x on upside spikes.
syndacks 6y ago
Curious to hear why you left one for the other. Not too often you hear that move. How is it going so far?
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I fell out of love with tech, and found more leverage in finance. I still write code (Python) for myself for fun, but would rather live in Excel versus VS Code and k8s 50 hrs a week (I squeeze in commits on my open source projects when the family has gone to bed). I’m semi retired in my late 30s, so it’s gone well. I am so extraordinarily thankful for the experiences and opportunities I’ve had, but recognize when it’s time to close a life chapter.
  - anonymouse008 6y ago
    If you’re willing to offer advice, when did you make the switch and how? That’s quite a jump, and usually upon entering finance you end up with different tasks to fill up a 50+ hour week. PE/IB/etc ... only way you strike rich with easy schedules is a family office?

djrogers 6y ago

I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming. Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability. For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are other servothay do the same thing, but none that I’ve found do it as easily and as well as Zapier.

hooande 6y ago
why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation
- alvah 6y ago
  Because you don’t “just hire a developer”, and you certainly don’t do anything close to that for most of the needs Zapier addresses.
- pmart123 6y ago
  BC you have to maintain the code then. Also, a non-engineering team member can quickly get an integration they need done without waiting for a developer.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? Because developers are relatively expensive. Because hiring anyone requires identifying someone who can do the job and trusting them to do it well. And even before that, you have to figure out what the job actually is. Because hiring anyone requires some sort of contract, and that has legal implications that might require approvals etc. As a developer with the required knowledge and skills, these services offer little value to me, but I'm not their target customer. That knowledge and those skills are the result of decades of study and practice, which is experience that most people don't have, and for all of those people the cost/benefit comparisons are going to look completely different.

narrator 6y ago

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks and feels though, you can figure out what is going to work and what isn't. Twitch.tv is something that amazed me that it became so big. I don't really play video games. Who would spend hours watching people play video games? I couldn't understand this phenomenon because I was limiting my exposure to people only inside my own little bubble of reality. I think one can't be a good investor without constantly developing ones empathy because the appeal of various things is difficult to grasp intuitively without a person who would be the customer in mind. Personally, I think it's important to spend time with people one has nothing in common with to develop this broader empathy and thus be able to pick up on these trends.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jojobas 6y ago
There was already plenty of middleware tools that allowed API to API translation. They all (and I assume Zapier is no exception) only allow "no code" integration in only the most basic scenarios. I don't think it has much to do with empathy, much rather unbounded money printing of late.
xwolfi 6y ago
Dentists lack empathy: they cant understand how most people think and never explain how they think outside of their bubble. Our startup, Dentir, makes you do things dentists do :p
- rtpg 6y ago
  The core difference being that “put value X from system S into value Y in system V” is actually conceptually extremely simple, and is mostly encumbered by machinery around it and “incidental complexity”. Dentistry _is_ all the complexity and the skill of , like, drilling into your mouth or whatever.

wombatmobile 6y ago

The $5b valuation is speculative. Only $1.3m has been raised, which is less than 0.02% of that valuation.

anonymouse008 6y ago
Or you could say $1.3m of a theoretical $5bn demand curve has been tested, at one point.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

Why are you assuming the value VCs give it is even close to an honest estimation of its value?

sgpl 6y ago

I think another thing to keep in mind is that wikipedia pages don't tell the whole story. So you shouldn't feel bad about being way off. Investors assigning value have access to other metrics not visible to us - customer numbers, growth numbers, revenue and what the revenue growth looks like, internal product roadmaps and other areas of growth, etc.

tamrix 6y ago

Me: I'll sell you 0.0000001% of my company for $1. You: sure Me: My company is now worth $10B! Hackernews: wow that's so amazing! One day in going to be rich doing startups too!

warent 6y ago

I was shocked by how low the number is! My guess was that Zapier was in the 10s of millions

iambateman 6y ago

Despite the replies, I thought this was a good take. $5,000,000,000 is a truly unimaginable amount in both senses of the word unimaginable. I couldn’t tell the difference between a $5B and $7B company, for example. And it’s especially hard to tell for a service which is, somewhat by nature, invisible. But my smart, non-programmer friends love Zapier and I imagine many of their customer relationships will be multi-decade. There really are so many odd businesses in the world.

abraae 6y ago
I think of a billion as (very roughly) half of a cruise liner or half of a casino in the strip in Vegas. Not sure how accurate that is but at $5b, I imagine zapier as a cruise ship tied up alongside a glittering glass casino.

JohnJamesRambo 6y ago

Maybe valuations are just way astronomically off right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/warren-buffett-s-favorite-valuation-metric-is-ringing-an-alarm https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/warren-bu...

specialist 6y ago

Word. IIRC, Microsoft acquired CompareNet for $400m in 1999. Scripts for scrapping prices. Written in Perl. I always get stuck on the little questions. Like: Does it work? Is idea worth doing? How big is the market? (I mention CompareNet because I had some contact with one of the founders. It's my IRL example that I never figured out how to play this game.)