One third wiped off value of GitLab shares, Wall Street didn't like weaker outlook In the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse, this week is not the best time to spook jittery stock markets with weaker than expected financial forecasts, yet that's what GitLab has done. The source shack last night outlined profit and loss numbers for Q4 of its fiscal 2023 ended 31 January, showing a 58 percent year-on-year …
So we can assume investors are disappointed that losses aren't yet a multiple of turnover like a proper unicorn? I think GitLab has probably got a chance in the niche, non-cloud market. Especially, since Atlassian fluffed things so magnificently. The main product benefits from clear focus and a decided lack of feature creep.
Rrrrright... because when you're doing serious security work, you really want a 3rd party to manage your work :-/. Hey, if you get a chance, check out this hot company called SolarWinds.
In some meeting somewhere...
Customer: Do you manage your own Git?
Security firm: No. We're just a computer security company so we're not responsible enough for that.
Customer: Sounds great, you're hired!!!
Once you sell your soul to Wall Street you're at the mercy of stock traders -- you're not a business making widgets, your raw material for the financial services industry. This distorts the operation of business, especially if the business is relying on financial engineering to maximize profitability rather than just being skilled widget makers.
Elon Musk was castigated -- and sued -- for remarking that he'd regretted taking Tesla public and wanted to take it private again. (The speculators rushed to cash in on the prospect but when it didn't materialize they sued him for their 'losses', a suit that fortunately got tossed.) The reason for this is obvious. During the entire gestation phase Tesla's business news wasn't dominated by mundane things like how development was going, long term plans and what have you, it was all about stock price speculation and the war short sellers were waging on the company. A totally parasitic exercise that wasn't interested in the technologies that were being developed and how they could be applied on a larger scale but was only interested in driving the stock price up or down with the sole intent of making a quick killing. This insanity might be the primary way to get rich these days (for those who have money to burn) but its killing industry. Ultimately the only reliable way to make enough money to satisfy these jackals is to do nothing and charge the earth for it (which is why commodity trading -- aka screwing everyone over the price of fuel -- is the big thing these days, especially as a lot of that trading is not only artificial but confidential so that the rubes can't call 'foul' on what's going on.
Publicly traded companies must at least abide by the, admittedly few, rules of the stock exchange. These include announcements which may effect the share price, which is why Musk was censured by the SEC. He knows the rules and it's more than a little disingenuous to try and defend him.
Nowadays, there is very little difference between public and private companies, with many flipping between the two purely for accounting reasons: go private to load up on debt (and make dodgy acquisitions like SolarWorld), go public to get more money from the retail suckers.
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