Hopefully they do. It's crazy to me to think that a company that facilitates sending emails could be worth 10B.

> It's crazy to me to think that a company that facilitates sending emails could be worth 10B.

"that facilitates sending emails"...ha.

Sounds so simple doesn't it? If that's what the market is dictating and its so simple then why not just build a clone yourself? You can be a billionaire too.

These hot takes coming from engineers on HN are getting boring and old. Technology AND business at scale is very different. I'll humor you guys with some stats for a second:

- According to the statistics, more than 600 million emails are sent through the platform every two days.

- Later in 2019, the company announced its annual revenue would reach $700 million

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailchimp

If the sources are correct that they have $300M EBITDA then a $10B acquisition is frankly cheap in today's market.

> If that's what the market is dictating and its so simple then why not just build a clone yourself? You can be a billionaire too.

There's a tons of competition in this space.

I think the biggest component in the valuation here is that they have enough cashflow that private equity can saddle the company with $9.99B in debt and be reasonably assured that they can service the debt for the foreseeable future.

At my company, email is by far the largest online revenue channel besides organic search. Email marketing software is absolutely critical for customer relationship management.

Without these tools, we have no idea whether someone is opening our emails or not. If they're not opening several of our past emails, we remove them from our list. It's good for them, and for us, as we don't want Gmail or Hotmail flagging us as a spam domain.

We want our email list to consist of qualified leads, not just random people who signed up for a white paper and will likely never actually buy anything from us.

By removing non-engaged subscribers, we can then create customer segments to do things like A/B test different offers. Or set up a one-time offer to only a segment of the email list that hasn't previously engaged with us.

Not at all. E-mail is _hard_.

Building a brand in that space is difficult, acquiring competent staff isn't that easy either. After that, you need massive amounts of work for warming new IP ranges up, spend lots of time on abuse management (because spammers will attempt to abuse any new competitor within that space), and probably spend a lot of money on marketing. Because, you know, otherwise people will just go to Mailchimp.

Mail platforms like Sendgrid and Mailchimp are pretty standard purchases for any company that does anything with email (i.e. pretty much every real-world company).

It's crazy to me that Reddit has the same valuation. Frankly, I feel like I live on a different planet from much of the HN hype crowd sometimes.

The HN crowd is vocal about tech paradigms they are familiar with, like social media, online shopping and streaming video.

But when it comes to the actual commercial infrastructure underpinning large swathes of the digital economy, the knowledgeable ones are drowned out by the uninformed bloviators.

This is clear when you look at the comments for stories related to Google/Facebook Ads (the ad product itself), Shopify, Mailchimp/Marketo or Salesforce/Dynamics CRM.

They have really steady cashflow, some measure of lock-in, a strong brand, and access to a gigantic amount of small business customers that would be difficult to replicate. The right acquirer could cross-sell some related market products and make a healthy return in a few years.

Spot on.

The email space has a ton of cash. Frankly I’m surprised it’s as low as 10B. Probably due to the fact that social media is “new” while email is “old.” Hype matters.

Given all the cogent and well formed responses it turns out I should not be surprised. I'm convinced.

I am no longer surprised by the valuation and perhaps it could be higher.