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Day: February 10, 2021

Bumble prices IPO at $43 per share

by Alex Wilhelm

This afternoon Bumble priced its IPO at $43 per share, ahead of its raised IPO range of $37 to $39 per share.

Bumble filed to go public in mid-January, and offered up its first price range on February 2. That range, $28 to $30 per share, wound up coming up short. Bumble raised its price range to $37 to $39 per share earlier this week.

Before counting a possible underwriters’ option, Bumble raised $2.15 billion by selling 50,000,000 million shares in its public offering. The company will begin to trade tomorrow morning.

Bumble’s debut comes amidst a number of other 2021 offerings, including MetroMile’s SPAC-led public combination earlier this week. Other well-known companies are anticipated to list this year, including Coinbase and, perhaps, Robinhood.

The public offering of Bumble shares comes after a sustained period when one company, Match, was presumed to be the only possible public dating company. However, the smaller Bumble has proven that there is room for at least one more.

TechCrunch explored Bumble’s financial results here, if you’d like more.

Bumble files to go public

Data Update 4 for 2021: The Hurdle Rate Question!

by Aswath Damodaran

What is a hurdle rate for a business? There are multiple definitions that you will see offered, from it being the cost of raising capital for that business to an opportunity cost, i.e., a return that you can make investing elsewhere, to a required return for investors in that business. In a sense, each of those definitions has an element of truth to it, but used loosely, each of them can also lead you to the wrong destination. In this post, I will start by looking at the role that hurdle rates play in running a business, with the consequences of setting them too high or too low, and then look at the fundamentals that should cause hurdle rates to vary across companies.

What is a hurdle rate?

Every business, small or large, public or private, faces a challenge of how to allocate capital across competing needs (projects, investments and acquisitions), though some businesses have more opportunities or face more severe constraints than others. In making these allocation or investment decisions, businesses have to make judgments on the minimum return that they would accept on an investment, given its risk, and that minimum return is referenced as the hurdle rate.  Having said that, though, it is worth noting that this is where the consensus ends, since there are deep divides on how this hurdle rate should be computed, with companies diverging and following three broad paths to get that number:

1. Cost of raising funds (capital): Since the (Read more...)

Data Update 4 for 2021: The Hurdle Rate Question!

by Aswath Damodaran

What is a hurdle rate for a business? There are multiple definitions that you will see offered, from it being the cost of raising capital for that business to an opportunity cost, i.e., a return that you can make investing elsewhere, to a required return for investors in that business. In a sense, each of those definitions has an element of truth to it, but used loosely, each of them can also lead you to the wrong destination. In this post, I will start by looking at the role that hurdle rates play in running a business, with the consequences of setting them too high or too low, and then look at the fundamentals that should cause hurdle rates to vary across companies.

What is a hurdle rate?

Every business, small or large, public or private, faces a challenge of how to allocate capital across competing needs (projects, investments and acquisitions), though some businesses have more opportunities or face more severe constraints than others. In making these allocation or investment decisions, businesses have to make judgments on the minimum return that they would accept on an investment, given its risk, and that minimum return is referenced as the hurdle rate.  Having said that, though, it is worth noting that this is where the consensus ends, since there are deep divides on how this hurdle rate should be computed, with companies diverging and following three broad paths to get that number:

1. Cost of raising funds (capital): Since the (Read more...)

Scalarr raises $7.5M to fight mobile ad fraud

by Anthony Ha

Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.

At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut down Zenna completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.

The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).

Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.

She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.

“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and (Read more...)

These 3 enterprise deals show there’s plenty of action in smaller acquisitions

by Ron Miller

Since the start of the year, I’ve covered nine M&A deals already, the largest being Citrix buying Wrike for $2.25 billion. But not every deal involves a huge price tag. Today we are going to look at three smaller deals that show there is plenty of activity at the lower-end of the acquisition spectrum.

As companies look for ways to enhance their offerings, and bring in some talent at the same time, smaller acquisitions can provide a way to fill in the product road map without having to build everything in-house.

This gives acquiring companies additional functionality for a modest amount of cash. In smaller deals, we often don’t even get the dollar amount, although in one case today we did. If the deal isn’t large enough to have a material financial impact on a publicly traded company, they don’t have to share the price.

Let’s have a look at three such deals that came through in recent days.

Tenable buys Alsid

For starters, Tenable, a network security company that went public in 2018, bought French Active Directory security startup Alsid for $98 million. Active Directory, Microsoft’s popular user management tool, is also a target of hackers. If they can get a user’s credentials, it’s an easy way to get on the network and Alsid is designed to prevent that.

Security companies tend to enhance the breadth of their offerings over time and Alsid gives Tenable another tool and broader coverage across their security platform. “We view the (Read more...)

How To Spot Fake News

by Omri Wallach
This post is by Omri Wallach from Visual Capitalist

How to Spot Fake News

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How To Spot Fake News

“Fake news” used to be a relatively uncommon problem, but over the last decade, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing consumption of news and articles has caused misinformation to run wild.

Far from a new concept, misinformation and cherry-picked stories have been used throughout history as a form of propaganda or information warfare. However, the rise of social media as a hub for sharing articles has spread “fake news”—false or misleading information presented as legitimate news—all over the internet.

Fueled further by increasing polarization, as well as the use of the term by former U.S. President Donald Trump to also refer to negative coverage (whether legitimate or misinformed), it seems more difficult than ever to separate trustworthy from misleading sources.

With this in mind, we combined guidance from non-profit journalism project First Draft News and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) to create this guide for understanding “fake news” and how to spot it.

The Different Types of “Fake News”

In order to spot (Read more...)

Crunchbase And Angular: Why We Made The Transition

by Jaclyn Robinson

In November of 2017, Crunchbase.com relaunched on a brand-new web platform. We transitioned millions of Crunchbase users to the new site, and we did it with almost zero downtime and no negative impacts to our SEO (in fact, the relaunch yielded some meaningful improvements). The new web platform was built to enable years of growth for our site, our products, and our company, and the technology decisions we made then are just as important today as they were when we started the transition.

Of the many decisions we made in that process, one of the most critical was to build the front end of our new web platform on Angular. We evaluated the landscape of great frameworks at our disposal and landed where we did for a number of important reasons. We still believe the decision we made was the right one, so I want to share a bit about why Angular is a great forward-looking choice for Crunchbase and many other organizations. I also want to share the reasoning so others facing similar decisions can take advantage of our experience and insight.

 

A bit of Crunchbase history

Prior to 2017, Crunchbase.com was built on a Ruby on Rails monolithic architecture. This served the site incredibly well in the early years, allowing Crunchbase to grow from just a few thousand users a month to millions of users. 

In 2015, Crunchbase spun off of AOL/Verizon, and embarked as a private company on its own adventure with a core mission (Read more...)

Crunchbase And Angular: Why We Made The Transition

by Jaclyn Robinson

In November of 2017, Crunchbase.com relaunched on a brand-new web platform. We transitioned millions of Crunchbase users to the new site, and we did it with almost zero downtime and no negative impacts to our SEO (in fact, the relaunch yielded some meaningful improvements). The new web platform was built to enable years of growth for our site, our products, and our company, and the technology decisions we made then are just as important today as they were when we started the transition.

Of the many decisions we made in that process, one of the most critical was to build the front end of our new web platform on Angular. We evaluated the landscape of great frameworks at our disposal and landed where we did for a number of important reasons. We still believe the decision we made was the right one, so I want to share a bit about why Angular is a great forward-looking choice for Crunchbase and many other organizations. I also want to share the reasoning so others facing similar decisions can take advantage of our experience and insight.

 

A bit of Crunchbase history

Prior to 2017, Crunchbase.com was built on a Ruby on Rails monolithic architecture. This served the site incredibly well in the early years, allowing Crunchbase to grow from just a few thousand users a month to millions of users. 

In 2015, Crunchbase spun off of AOL/Verizon, and embarked as a private company on its own adventure with a core mission (Read more...)

Listing Requirements: From Junior Explorer to Global Mining Company

by Nicholas LePan
This post is by Nicholas LePan from Visual Capitalist

Listing Requirements for a Mining Company

Making it to the Top: Listing Requirements From Junior Explorer to Global Mining Company

Only a few companies ever meet the listing requirements of global stock exchanges, but the effort to list can be worth it.

In 2019, Newmont produced 6.3 million ounces of gold and earned a net income of $2.9B and returned $1.4B to shareholders in dividends.

This infographic from Corvus Gold looks at the requirements and stages a mining company could face along its journey from a mineral prospect to a global mining company.

The Odds of Discovery

There are 510 million km2 (196,900,000 square miles) on the surface of the Earth and the crust is on average 40 kilometers thick (24 miles). Somewhere in there lie the next deposits of gold.

Mineral exploration companies use drill bits that range in diameter from 76-320 millimeters to explore the subsurface. The deepest drill hole is the Kola Superdeep Borehole which measured 12.2 kilometers (7.6 miles). However, most mineral exploration companies rarely drill longer than a kilometer.

Finding a gold deposit, let alone an economic one is akin to using a hair to find a needle in the proverbial haystack. To mitigate this, a typical junior mining company improves its odds by building a portfolio of properties that show potential through hints of gold and other minerals revealed from surface sampling, aerial magnetic surveys, and historic data.

Then, to dig even deeper, a company can raise capital privately for the properties that show potential. Valuations of these mineral (Read more...)

Words Matter With Perception

by Jeff Carter
This post is by Jeff Carter from Points and Figures

I was reading this old blog post from 2011.  It’s called Minimum Viable Personality and it’s about the “personality” of your company when you startup.  Personality also becomes your corporate culture.  Corporate culture affects how your company and employees think, act and imagine when it comes to growth and servicing customers.

Feel free to flip over and check out the post. I am not going to repost the entire thing here.  But, I was thinking about how you say what you say really affects the mindset.

The words you choose to talk to your customer or your market segment about yourself or your company really matter on the way your perceived.  It could mean the difference between making a sale, or not.

A couple of examples.  In 2001 when my family and I were on vacation, we had 14,000 gallons of water leak out of an upstairs toilet and destroy our house.  In the aftermath, when I was trying to communicate with the insurance representative who was in charge of rebuilding our house, I could never get through to her or get my point across.  Our friend up the street, Leo, was in the insurance business and could translate for me.  The words he used to describe the same situation were different, and she understood.  Things got done.  I am eternally grateful to Leo.

Words are loaded with many meanings depending on the context, how they are used, and the way the person on the other end has been (Read more...)