standapart

Perhaps Plume will be the next company to be sued by Texas...

tl;dr

The author discovers the wild world of financial engineering and "float".

Instead of settling usage changes for it's image service with a single charge, Cloudflare settles it with two charges in such a way that the customer "floats" Cloudflare money for some portion of their billing cycle.

This is the bullshit that you start to do when you become publicly traded. It adds zero value for the customer.

Your investors need liquidity and private markets won't give you the valuation that you need.

So get Google to buy Wiz for their nascent services play and plow the cash into this.

Smells like July of 2000.

A master class in enterprise software sales fit into a single comment. Bravo!

However, scaling will get you your next round led by Nvidia... I mean Microsoft... I mean AWS...

If Figma continues along this path I worry that they are doomed.

Generally, there are three paths to profitability: 1) increase pricing, 2) decrease expenses, or 3) offer new products and services with superior margin.

It seems like Figma has chosen to implement 1) but sell it to customers as 3). However, in contractionary periods like we are in now, 1) does not work -- no matter how much lock-in you have and how you sell it.

Weirdly, they don't preference contracts for shell corps owned by, say, poor white trash from Middletown, Ohio -- despite these people meeting your definition of "someone who historically hasn't been paid well".

But I digress. In the biz, if the contract has to be trafficked through a shell corp where the owner takes a 20% cut, everyone simply bids a 20% higher rate.

It's the taxpayer's prerogative if they would rather their government pay an inflated contracting rate -- as opposed to using that money for education, infrastructure, social services, etc.

Weird... Things are starting to smell a lot like 2020, again...

Exactly -- and CZ was always the fall guy. Yi is the mastermind.

Some stories don't have a hero.