Tintri IPO boots up after it tries turning itself off and on again After pulling its IPO yesterday, all-flash and hybrid array startup Tintri repriced its shares at $7 to $8, down from the previous $10.50 to $12.50 range. It offered 8,572,000 shares at this price, lower than the original 8.7 million. That means it should raise $60m instead of around $110m, and the company’s valuation is …
While I get that the dumber Wall Street folks - the followers - will just lump all "Tech IPOs" into a "Oh that's bad" based on the fizzle that was TinTri, the smarter ones will be savvy enough to recognize the differences between Nimble, Pure, Nutanix, and TinTri.
Nimble made it to IPO first, and did it while taking under $100M in total VC money. That stock went to $58.00/share. It hung around $25.00-$30.00 until the now VP of Sales at Cohesity (then at Nimble) proved that he had trouble telling the truth and could not forecast with any degree of accuracy.
Pure and Nutanix took far more money and therefor diluted the stock much more for the shareholders (including those early employees that get paid more in options), resulting in a lower share price initially. If they can execute flawlessly, never miss or restate projections, they will likely do ok with the lower share price. One miss, though, and watch half the valuation or more just go *poof* as Nimble saw.
TinTri is just a hot soup of a mess. Look at the numbers taken, including a damned "F" round. The product may be very good but there are other factors that seem to matter just as much or more to Wall Street. TinTri did not IPO because they wanted to, they did it because they have to if they want to keep the lights on much longer. The reswizzle of the IPO share price was indicative of that.
Now, TinTri has a new problem, the same that Pure and Nutanix does...if they cannot reliably and consistently "Beat and Raise", that publicly traded stock will fall very quickly. Pure seems to be struggling against this somewhat, Nutanix seems to be doing pretty well so far. TinTri, well, if they can't even forecast an accurate share price, how well do you think they can forecast sales and Y/Y growth?
Not sure if Nutanix is doing so well.
Trying to boul the ocean by building an "everything platform" all at once, requiring ridiculous amounts of developers.
$100m in losses per quarter. But because those losses are mostly stock to employees, they "don't count". A) they do, B) good luck getting good developers without it, C) the best folks left for Cohesity, incl the founder. All that's left are the raging assholes like Dheeraj the CEO and D) they aren't Uber which billions in the bank. Even Ubers investors are getting nervous.
There's a VC cash crunch in the valley. If these yahoos (not just Nutanix) don't start posting profits or at least a path to profits, things will get very ugly
If that is your perception, you don't know where to go for funding, your idea is out of fashion, or you don't have a good pitch. I think that the "Class of 2008" storage startups were a good model for how a market can evolve from VC money, and we are now sitting through the ending credits. Remember Whiptail, Nimbus, Starboard, Tegile, Pernix, X-IO, Coraid, and the rest of the "Also rans"? If there is not a lot of appetite for tier 1 storage startups these days, it reflects the saturation of startups for the space.
Class of 2016 appears to be data management. Rubric, Cohesity, Komprise, Catalogic and the rest. Just as in 2011 it wasn't at all clear how the Flash market was going to evolve, the class of 2016 should provide plenty of fodder for snarky commentards and a great place to fling piles of cash in hopes of that 20:1 payout.
After all, a fool and his money are some party.
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