CrowdStrike S-1
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They are not fool proof but I would be extremely surprised if any untargeted malware infected a Crowdstrike enabled device.
They are extremely popular in the market,it's pretty awesome the level of protection they give traditional businesses that don't have large security teams who can't readily adopt to attacker techniques.
They've been spreading themselves a bit thin lately trying to to do things a bit outside of their domain. But as someone that finds it very easy to find fault and criticize, I find almost no bad things to say about their offering (aside from the price tag).
Hope going public won't ruin them. Their threat intel is always a page turner too!
Wow, I knew that they had great revenues and growth but this nugget is now becoming a common theme for all tech companies going IPO these days.
If a dollar in profits taken today is multiple dollars in future profits left on the table, you can see why a business would engineer its finances to plow every cent back into the business.
Obviously, this plan can always go spectacularly wrong, but you can't just point to the strategy itself as evidence that will happen. You need an actual argument to back it up.
Profits are good, but inability to switch from growth mode to profit-taking mode is probably not the risk that should keep you from investing in Crowdstrike; the volatility of the market they're in and their exposure to technological changes is a much bigger concern.
Crowdstrike isn't like Uber, where the dial from profitable to unprofitable is essentially the question about the business. They're an enterprise software company and the majority of their money goes to sales. We have something like 30 years of experience in how these kinds of companies operate and what's going to happen with their financial engineering.
I'm not saying Crowdstrike isn't risky. They're crazy risky and I wouldn't invest personally! I'm just saying, it's easy to get companies like this confused with consumer-facing unicorn companies whose valuations are derived in part by subsidizing their customers. Crowdstrike is, if anything, infamous for the opposite thing (they're expensive).
If you’re not profitable yet then that means there’s lots of room for growth. If companies are going public when there’s still all that room for growth then it means the public gets to share more in the growth.
I think it's a critique that makes sense for some kinds of tech companies and not for others.
And Dmitri Alperovitch seems to see the shadows of the Russian political establishment everywhere he looks, though, which makes Crowdstrike an... interesting choice for that work.
Edit: added the top paragraph.
I don't think the Russia investigation has thing #1 to do with Crowdstrike's IPO or what their business is like, though. That's much simpler: EDR is the new antivirus, antivirus has historically been one of the most lucrative enterprise technology products (to say nothing of security products), and Crowdstrike has a commanding share of the EDR market.
And I think a general willingness to parrot establishment rhetoric is part of why they're as big as they are.
The conspiracy theory here doesn't even make surface-level sense.
Guccifer2.0 didn't really leak anything damning - so perhap this 'leak' was a red herring. DNC insiders could have performed the 'hack' and fabricated the evidence of attribution, then perform the 'leaking' themselves. DNC gets a distraction and makes opponent look friendly w/ foreign power, Crowdstrike gets more revenue from increased paranoia.
Probably incorrect... but more plausible.
Crowdstrike decided to make a series of announcements expressing confidence that there had been Russian state sponsored attacks on the DNC server, and did not offer any evidence of it.
When the US IC released its report, the report referred to the Crowdstrike findings, but also excluded evidence. The report appears to have been copied and pasted from previous releases, and contained virtually no useful information.
Yes, you can trust the US IC that the attack was a state actor quality, Russian sponsored triumph, but these are the same experts who helped sell the Iraq war. We learned very importantly during the Iraq war that we should simply not trust their claims without hard evidence.
They are now trying to sell a war against Iran, and will ilkely use many of the same techniques and tactics to do so.
I despise Donald Trump at least as much as anyone, but I think the Russia narrative was mostly unsubstantiated and largely overblown. Why? Not due to a conspiracy, but for the same simple reason that anything Iran does at present will be framed as highly aggressive and a reason for war -- the centrist view wants it.
It's important not to involve Trump in the reasoning about any of this. Trump liking or encouraging something, or disliking it, etc., has no impact on whether or not it is true. Trump is a clown who should be ignored.
Crowdstrike most likely enjoyed getting a lot of PR for "finding" the Russian attack. But I have yet to see evidence that the attack was actually Russian state actors and was not either someone else spoofing them or a sloppy third tier amateur funded by some pro-Russian oligarch (or similar).
To those promoting the "get tough on Russia" narrative, it doesn't matter, Russia is Russia and it is threatening. But I think we should all take a step back and realize that most parties involved in this have some skin in the game and are apt to use the factual uncertainty to make claims that support their agenda. I'd argue that even the specific attribution of the attack as Russian, and the implication that the server was only attacked by one government/group is agenda-driven, IMHO.
As part of our sales and marketing activities, we sponsor a CrowdStrike-branded professional racing car, which our President and Chief Executive Officer drives in some races at no incremental cost to us and in lieu of us hiring a professional driver. As we do not pay any amounts to our President and Chief Executive Officer under these arrangements, it is not reflected in the above table.
Unless you mean the potential for George to meet his fiery doom in an F1 car, in which case, yes, I agree.
HN is a very entrepreneurial board and we applaud any Silicon Valley company going public.
Crowdstrike is headquartered in Irvine, California (Orange County), and a large number of its engineering teams are actually remote/distributed.
And all of this doesn't matter because the US has injected so much money with QE and so on the economy that even an American kid's 10 year old lemonade shop is worth a few billions.
Also means I'm not buying into any of them until the market slams, which I think is a common theme among many buyers considering the ever-intensifying downtrend in IPO day-1 closing price dips.
The SG&A line item in their financials is relevant to their interests. Specifically, their sales/swag/booze operation cost over twice as much as their R&D operations ( $172MM vs $84MM in 2018 ). Or, to put it another way, getting CISOs sauced outside the Moscone is twice as important to them as actually producing the software for their blinky boxes.
If they can pull another $300MM from retail in an IPO, our blood alcohol content will be secured at cons for another two years, assuming they continue to burn $140MM annually.
Oh, also? Crowdstrike sells endpoint software subscriptions, not "blinky boxes".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdStrike#Russian_hacking_in...
They are extreme users of tech and ingesting/processing more data in real-time than most of us can fathom.