Morgan Stanley Marks Down Its Stake in Palantir, Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

Morgan Stanley Marks Down Its Stake in Palantir, Dropbox

fortune.com

58 pointsktamura48 comments

I recently sense a certain desperation from the large big money funded start-ups. In the last two weeks, I have received $150 in free rides from Lyft and $50 in free food from Sprig. I have been a Lyft user since 2013, and a Sprig user since 2014, using them less and less, but I have never received such a generous credit before.

How have you received these promos? I'd like to use them too :)

I used Sprig a lot in the end of 2014 when I had to say at the office late due to DDoS attacks, but I have no use for it otherwise. I received a poorly penned up email from a recent Berkeley MBA graduate, working for Sprig. It asked to give Sprig another chance and offered the first $20 credit. I used up that credit on basically a single lunch $13+ tax +$2.75 delivery fee. Then suddenly I received a push notification with another $20 credit the next day! Then since I liked that game I invited my dev phone to Sprig and got another $10...

With Lyft, I actually received $150 in credit total. I picked a coupon for $50 at SoMa food park. Then I received $50 credit for my 5 star rating, and then suddenly my dev phone also received the same $50 credit since it had a dormant Lyft account that I only used in 2014: apparently it had a perfect 5 star rating too.

Time to rig up all my dev phones...heh. This is awesome, and kind of crazy. That's so much money to be spending on user acquisition. There's no way even traditional restaurants spend $50+ on customer acquisition. Sprig's margins must be ultra slim. I too have gotten many many free meals from Sprig.

Violating the limit 1 per customer policy is stealing.

EDIT: I wasn't going to engage but with this many downvotes I feel obligated to explain myself. Like I commented below, I'm not trying to tell you how to act. I merely wanted to point out that just because it's easy doesn't make it not wrong. As a group of people who actually run their own companies I would expect us to know better.

Is it stealing if the company gives you the coupons? They could have detected that his account already benefited from a 50$ rebate, no?

Look, I'm not the ethical police or anything, but I think it clearly is.

I had a second phone with an existing dormant Lyft account that I have used in the past, and I involuntarily received a promotion on that phone, in addition to my active phone. Both phones were configured with the same payment method by the way, same name, same card. How is this stealing?

With Sprig, I invited my second dev phone as an experiment, but I have never used the remaining credit- I simply have very little use for their service. And I can prove that. How is that stealing? I think you should be careful laying anonymous accusations.

I wasn't dismissing your point of view, but I still think they could have easily made due diligence and verified if the account already had used a coupon.

it's still stealing if the anti-theft mechanisms in the store don't go off, right? Terms of Service likely stipulate this sort of thing. Just because they aren't enforced with technology doesn't make it legal.

I don't understand how breaking a private organisation's terms of service makes you a criminal. As a taxpayer I don't give a shit what any business's TOS are, and I don't think a penny of my money should be spent enforcing them. Enforce them technically or stfu; it's not my problem and none of my concern. Someone gets too many free vouchers from some retarded dot-bubble startup's shitty software and suddenly I'm forking out for the cops and judges to get involved? I don't fucking think so! Get me on a jury for one of those cases please!

Is it "stealing" if I'm walking by the store and an employee comes out to the sidewalk and offers me free samples, even though they did the same thing yesterday?

Some of you guys have a promising career waiting for you at the RIAA.

What if they said "Please don't take one if you took one yesterday?" Would you still take it?

No, but if I did, it still isn't "stealing," any more than jaywalking is "rape of traffic."

IMHO it'd be more of a Tragedy of the Commons type of scenario, where a few users taking advantage of loopholes in the rules might hose the deal for everybody.

I agree and that's why I've turned down the freebies the Lyft people are always handing out -- they claim it's for new users and I want to respect that. But then again, I also assumed they'd make a token effort to reject people that already have a registered number with them.

Sort of, sort of not. I have a 'two chances' rule, when someone screws up and gives me something extra that I don't believe I should get, I ask them to check it again. If they repeat the offer, I explain that as I understand things I shouldn't be getting the largesse. And if after both them re-checking it, and hearing my explanation snd still wanting to give it to me, I say "Ok, thanks." and move on.

We already have a term for what he did, he broke the terms of service. That was clearly laid out in his comment. I don't think you added any new information to it.

I think you are getting down voted because he explained the entire situation, and you generalized it in a way that strips his actions of context.

For instance if someone told me your were a thief, I would instantly form a poor opinion of you. However I would form a very different opinion if I knew the reason you were a thief was because you posted your bike on craigslist, and then broke the terms of service by re-posting those pictures elsewhere. Thus anyone who introduces you as a thief is doing you and communication a disservice.

Not enough big to fail...

This is just good customer retention. If you haven't had a certain level of activity on apps, the smart move is to give you a bit of an incentive to come back. The fact that these two promos have come within a couple weeks of each other is probably coincidence, tbh.

I'm not 100% sure this is what's happening, but thought I'd share my experience: I used to work at a hedge fund that sometimes held stakes in private companies. Every year, we would have to mark the stakes to market. However, we could not do the valuation ourselves; the valuation was done by 3rd party auditors. And these 3rd party auditors usually have no idea what they are doing. Even if they are Big 4 auditors and the stakes are large :/

Why would a hedge fund hire auditors who don't have any idea what they are doing?

Welcome to the world of auditing. You hire an auditing company that knows a lot, and they send you their newbies.

And you manipulate them by hiring the same auditing firm for consulting and ramp up the pressure when it comes time for them to give an unqualified opinion. Those newbies and the audit partner will be crushed by the avarice of the other partners selling consulting services. Work they would not get if they were not the audit firm.

Whether it's legal or not it is corruption and makes a good case for regulation. If you audit a firm, the audit firm and its related entities cannot sell anything else to that firm and its related entities.

Is it likely? Well who would lobby for it? Who would lobby against it? How much are they willing to spend. Democracy.

There are four audit companies -- PwC, Deloitte, EY, and KPMG -- that together audit 99% of companies in the FTSE 100. If you don't hire them, you get looked at funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Four_%28audit_firms%29

This was a large hedge fund and the auditors were name brand auditors. They still had no idea what they were doing :/

I think you misunderstand the purposes of auditing. They have very strict accounting that they have to follow. There is a degree of "interpretation" on what numbers can be assigned to certain items, but by and large, they just follow a big book of rules. Of course there are certain new business practices that are not reflected fairly and properly by these rules, but that should be the exception, not the norm.

With hedge funds it should be mark to market, not use the big book of rules, as these are available to trade securities. Marking them down would seem correct given the current market situation, depending on what other information there is about trades and offers.

Yes, but is it better or worse than values assigned to companies during various funding rounds?

A few takeaways:

- Morgan owns a small percentage of Palantir, maybe 20 basic points. However, this is big as Morgan and the big i-banks still have a lot of influence on the big money funds. This will scare the LPs off and VC funding will dry up.

- In my opinion, Palantir is still too expensive at ~15B valuation. I mean how can it be more expensive than both Tableau, Splunk and Hortonworks combined in the public market?

- Dropbox seems to be hit the hardest when T. Rowe Price marked it down to just 5B valuation. Still a great outcome if they can exit at the price point, but it sucks for the late investors and recent employees.

I'd be very surprised if dropbox continued to grow. Its position seems extremely limited at best

I don't think they have a choice in the matter at the moment. If they were public right now, they wouldn't be able to justify their PE ratio.

Palantir pulled in about 1b in revenue last year. Splunk 500m, and tableu and hortonworks less than 40m each.

No idea on profit margins here... But it would be surprising if palantir was NOT worth more than these three

Not sure where you're getting those numbers. Tableau is pulling in well over $600M in revenue, and Hortonworks is over $100M, according to their public financials.

Thanks for that. Was using my phone at the time, took the first result from google. Clearly quite old stats. Even the palentir number was from 2014 it looks like. Here's an upvote for the correction.

How much of Morgan Stanley's business is from Primerica, the deceptive MLM company? Primerica bought Smith Barney in 1987 whicu used egregious marketing tactics to build its business. Then Morgan eventually bought them.

If anything, I'd downgrade Morgan Stanley's stock. They were recently fined $3.2 billion for crimes causing the financial crisis. That news broke 1-2 days after Morgan dropped nearly 7%.

No surprise here. As with a lot of these multi-billion dollar valuations there really wasn't a lot supporting the valuations apart from hype and promises of future growth and solid finances. Now that those things aren't panning out there's nowhere to go but down.

Sorry if this is off the topic of Palantir's and Dropbox's diminishing valuations:

I would like to see pushback by consumers against very large Internet companies and corporations in general. Even though some businesses need to be large for economy of scale, I think of non-local businesses as parasites. When local goods and services are not directly exchanged then some remote business entity is sucking off profit.

It seems like huge valuations are all part of a rigged game in much the same way as the military industrial complex and mega sized corporations are rigged games. Except for pushing back as a consumer to prefer smaller and local businesses, I am not sure what else to do.

Why is smaller and local inherently better? In many cases, small and local means less selection, higher prices, and more waste (duplicative inventory, supply chain operations, management, and line staff)

In the context that the large corporations are a net negative for members of the local economy on average at least (wages, jobs). When said economy no longer becomes justifies the operating cost, the large company leaves and those left behind have few options on how the fill the void. <insert Walmart under-cutting small biz example here>

Small isn't better in every way, but one way in which I think they are indisputably better is that the owners a local business are embedded in the same social context as their customers, employees, suppliers and externalities. All business are run by monkeys with smartphones, and they make more humane decision when they have to see and shake-hands with all of their stakeholders at little league on the weekends.

Although, I would argue that often those providing local goods and services don't have the time/resources/knowledge to create the platforms these remote corporations make, which often provide significant improvements in efficiency or increased commerce. I agree that siphoning large amounts of value out of local economies is not a good thing, but I honestly think that that phenomenon is a problem with the way our social structure (and generally conservative taxation/welfare system) works and less a fault of large companies.

What happens after these markdowns to the employees hired in the last 12 months? Presumably their options are now underwater and they have little reason to stay anymore. Will these markdowns lead to a sizable exodus from the companies?

Some companies decide to reprice the options and/or grant more options to help with retention. Also companies with high valuation and closer to an exit give out RSUs (so strike price 0).

And also - the price that employees pay for stock options is the common share price which is appreciably different (2x - 20x) from the preferred price. The preferred share price is what the investors paid, and it is that higher valuation the ms is writing down. There's a much longer drop before employee share are underwater in a pre-public company.

Yes and no. Sure on purely the face of it there is a much bigger gap before they're underwater, but that's because the preferred shares carry some nice benefits: preference, multipliers and possibly some control of the company. Marking down the value of the preferred shares implies that those benefits aren't worth what they paid a premium for, which means that common shares are also less likely to be worth anything, since they generally get paid out only if the preferred shares are converted or if there is money left over after preferred shares get paid off.

DBox is giving out RSUs now, rather than options.

The tax implications on a markdown after the first block of vesting completes is something I don't want to think about...

There is no tax implication right away after 1y. It's only when they get converted to actual shares (which you can sell) you are taxed. In an IPO case that might be a few months after the IPO (still before the usual 6m IPO lockdown). I don't know how it works if RSUs are allowed to be vested for selling on secondary market.

There are more reasons to stay at a company than perceived value of options. Options are only part of overall compensation and, I don't know, maybe you can actually like your job.

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