P/E is back. Funny how irrational exuberance is seen as a normal market and a return to fundamentals is a financial crisis.

This is a delightfully succinct way to put it, going to steal this one!

The phrase "irrational exuberance" is sprinkled throughout John Bogle's book, Don't Count On It. (At least I think I'm remembering that correctly. But some Google brought up Alan Greenspan as using the phrase a lot.)

If you don't recognize the name, he founded Vanguard and the first index fund.

Greenspan gave it to the world:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_exuberance

If you look at P/E then the current "collapse" isn't nearly as worrisome and realize it's just the inevitable result of market self correction vs human emotion, market Always wins. I personally believe the massacre will be over in a couple or three weeks.

You may want to go see what $COIN's P/E is and get back to me.

What’s the forward P/E? Nobody has any idea because their profits depend on so many fickle variables: crypto prices, crypto trader enthusiasm, and competing exchanges not entering a race to the bottom that would put pressure on their margins.

No one knows anyone's forward P/E.

We can’t literally know anything about the future. But we have a much better idea of the possible range for AT&T’s 2023 earnings than Coinbase’s. (Not saying you should invest in AT&T either.)

5.76

Like half of NASDAQ has lost ~50%, a quarter have lost ~75% and 5% have lost ~90% of their value from their highs. Coinbase is not an outlier, basically everything growth and risk on is getting dragged out behind the shed right now.

Coinbase has a P/E of 5.8, which means the market thinks profits are going to shrink in the future. It's the opposite of a growth stock.

Ex-growth. Which, as long as companies don't outgrow expectations in perpetuity, is the final destination of all growth stocks.

My personal rule is living expenses should be salary-bounded, as you can’t have security if you’re living off equity.

But everybody assumes a risk level they’re comfortable with, this works for me.

Probably works in some parts of the country but it doesn’t work in SV unless you’re mega-wealthy already and paid off your house.

It works if you live by yourself in a 1BR. To pay the mortgage on a family home you probably need to sell RSUs. It is also super risky to to buy a house you need RSUs to hold on to - exactly the kind of risk that is unreasonable if you have a family.

It's not impossible to afford a house in the Bay Area on just cash compensation, if you're a dual-finance/tech/legal/medical couple and both partners have risen to mid-levels in their organization. L6/E6 cash compensation is about $225K, two of them is $450K, figure 50% out for taxes/401k/benefits and you're taking home about $225K/year or about $18K/month. PITI for a $2.5M home (20% down) is about $14K, so you've got $4K/month to spend on everything else. That's just barely enough - it's like someone making $48K/year but having no housing expenses, which is tight but lots of people do it.

Most people in SV do this. So, it’s pretty normal actually.

That's just totally disconnected from reality. The majority of Silicon Valley homeowners don't receive any equity compensation. You should walk around and talk to regular people sometime.

(The numbers may be different if you look solely at recent buyers in a certain limited set of neighborhoods.)

Those are the "already mega-wealthy." Their mortgage bills are low because they have enormous home equity.

And property taxes pegged to the value of the home in 1985!

Then there's going to be a lot of foreclosures soon.

Yup, I think the housing market got totally overheated on the back of RSU values going through the roof.

Now that even Apple and Google are well off peak, I’m super curious what happens next.

I do live in SV, not wealthy to start with, and rent my home. About half my comp is equity and it goes to paying down student loans, savings, and the like.

At current housing prices my rent is 1/3 of a mortgage payment. Buying in this market doesn’t make sense.

Down 71% from the recent peak, still up 264% in the past 2.5 years.

Small consolation for all of those people with big equity packages on recent prices.

When Robinhood's stock tanked, employees were given a bump in equity. I suspect Coinbase will do the same if they haven't already.

Coinbase also gives 1 year grants, so employees would be less affected then those from companies with 4 year grants.

It could dilute the stock and further hurt it though no?

Probably not materially. I also assume they have a pre-allocated pool for their ESOP or equivalent.

Cloudflare’s value, as a business, is in their crack team of amazing neteng talent.

All these employees could just leave if they wanted to. If you are a public company and your worth is so heavily dependent on talent, how do you mitigate that risk?

Is there a future for football player style contracts for engineers, where you are tied in to a team for N years, and with a requirement that another team has to pay big money for your contract if they want you to transfer?

> football player style contracts for engineers, where you are tied in to a team for N years, and with a requirement that another team has to pay big money for your contract if they want you to transfer?

i.e. golden handcuff equity grants with vesting schedules? Top performers in highly demanded areas can have some or all of their remaining equity bought out.

It definitely ties the value of the contract to the stock price. In a way the company is leveraging its stock - significant declines hurt talent retention, and significant gains help it.

That’s different. You are talking about doing a deal with the player.

I’m talking about Company X having to pay off Cloudflare-the-business if they want Team Cloudflare’s top network engineer to transfer to Team Company X, mid contract.

That only really works in professional sports because each team is part of a league which enforces operating rules, including rules about player contracts and trades. No such "league" exists in the tech industry, and any attempt to form one would likely be a criminal violation of antitrust laws.

Gosh. Are sports stars really so different as employees? I suppose they get paid so much specifically to endure such odd employment circumstances.

Sounds like servitude or serfs? Elite sport is one thing but for mere mortals I guess it would become extremely abusive.

There are only about 1700 NFL players total at any given time. Most of those guys have amazing natural talent, honed by 10+ years of intense training that would crush most of us.

Network engineers are comparatively far more expendable and easily replaceable. It's not nearly as hard to learn as NFL level football.

Maybe. The best engineers are also naturally talented. It is a fact that to be a good engineer you need to be very smart. You can get by with just a CS degree and a Cisco certificate, but you won’t be a game changer.

How many Principle Engineers are there at the FAANGs? How important are they to the business, and how long did it take them to get to that level, in their careers?

I am not convinced that there is any natural talent involved in being a good network engineer.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth

Now add football (soccer), basketball, baseball, hockey, volleyball, and we're at probably tens-hundreds of thousands of professional athletes with multi-year contracts.

Cloudflare might have been a frothy valuation, but it's still growing 54% YoY. I'm buying at these prices.

($NET bagholder)

Same here. I bought their stock on several occasions, and a few times near the peak. I regret the timing, but not the decision to invest in this company.

Guess I'll buy some cloudflare along with hashicorp

lol yeah cloudflare and AWS ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

add Samsara to that list

Its surprising to see companies like CF being down. Like, they are the foundation on which apps and services are built. They are like the water supply, to the restaurant.

Is it a correction to true value or an over-reaction to market sentiment?

Just because a company provides genuinely useful and important products doesn't mean it's not overvalued.

> They are like the water supply, to the restaurant.

Even actual water companies get overvalued. Just look at American Water Works or Essential Utilities Inc stock.

A little over a year ago, there was an incident with a lot of sites being down and Cloudflare/Lumen being involved (per Hacker News chatter, I only ready about the incident here). I bought a few shares of each, at around 39 and 11. While NET is down significantly from the peak, they have both worked out OK so far (LUMN has been paying $0.25 per quarter dividend). LUMN has been paying down debt and has good cashflow. They are contrasting and yet in a similar space.

> tech darlings are no longer darlings and are being hammered across the board.

Good, let it fall much more.

Coinbase was never a darling for anything but the out of touch uninitiated (marks) in the 'crypto markets' because only MTGOX was ever this incompetent and amazingly useless at what they do. Be it from canceled purchases, reversed transactions, inappropriately flagged, suspended, or canceled accounts etc... There history is one of perpetual incompetence with little to save them other than being backed by the tech oligarchs and VC.

Armstrong's appearance on the all in podcast just reminded me why their is so much distrust in this space as a result of people like him, all they wanted to do was virtue signal to one another about being a 'non-woke' worksplace. But they never addressed this very clear and glaring issue: the IPO was over-inflated and their relevance in this space is based on convenience of an ever smaller demographic. I wish they got to how and why they acquired 21, but that would require a level of transparency that I don't think he is capable of.

I hope Jack eats Armstrong's fucking lunch and just fights a war of attrition from his cut of the Twitter Buy out by Elon.

I don't think there is a place for Armstrong in this ecosystem since he sided with Ver and set us back for several years, but it's with absolute schadenfreude that I look at this YC backed unicorn go down in flames.

Just like how Altman turned out to be a conman pushing Worldcoin, Armstrong is of same SV insider ilk.

What that looks like maybe horrible since they hold so much BTC, despite supposedly being advocates of the BCASH fork during the Segwit/USAF wars.

I heard the podcast and honestly didn't see it like this. I saw Armstrong as a driven guy that puts business first. I don't think the "non-woke" communication was intentional, it was forced. The guy wanted the company to move forward and saw himself discussing other things that were not important for the future of the company.

Where I felt it was a but empty was on the part where he talked about the mission. I felt like he's trying to find a reason for them to exist when in fact their success until today is from retail investors pumping Crypto. I don't think there's much good in the world coming from their actions.

PS I don't have any Coinbase shares.

> I heard the podcast and honestly didn't see it like this.

Are you at all involved in the Fintech or Bitcoin ecosystem? This is a critical component of why I view him as such, his co-founder is ex Goldman Sachs. He is backed by the SV VC Powerhouses that these 3 supposedly lambast, but have had dealings with in the past (Sequoia et al).

> I saw Armstrong as a driven guy that puts business first. I don't think the "non-woke" communication was intentional, it was forced. The guy wanted the company to move forward and saw himself discussing other things that were not important for the future of the company.

That means his optics worked, likely only on the uninitiated to this space because this was extremely political in nature, again look back to the Segwit/USAF wars we went through. It's all there, Armstrong sided with a bunch of conmen for his own personal gain and still has one of the largest BTC holdings. This was the equivalent of insider trading on top of racketeering.

> Where I felt it was a but empty was on the part where he talked about the mission. I felt like he's trying to find a reason for them to exist when in fact their success until today is from retail investors pumping Crypto. I don't think there's much good in the world coming from their actions.

This is a matter of interpretation, and depending on what period you're talking about in Coinbase's history it can vastly differ: initially they were onboarding many more into something seemingly too arcane for the average retail customer to grasp after the collapse of MTGOX this was necessary as most exchanges operated on too far of the fringes. What they did was simplify this for the layman, who couldn't understand the initial complexity of the tech: you use to have to run your own node on QT before webwallets/mobile wallets were a thing. This was daunting for me when I began, too, but I unlike most became obsessed what this tech's possibility ever since and it began my career into tech.

I won't go into why Bitcoin has helped many more than the average affluent HN tech worker will ever grasp here, but in short their ability to onboard many into this ecosystem allowed for immense upward mobility for generations that have been only marginalized and relegated to poverty in even developed nations due to inflation and higher costs of living and stagnant, if not negative/declining wages relative to expenses.

Coinbase many lists alts, most of which are pump and dump schemes for sure, but the fact remains that even in this current down-turn if you DCA into BTC for several years prior to 2021 you'd still be looking at really nice returns.

I'M MAKING IT VERY CLEAR I WANT TO SEE THE DEMISE OF COINBASE!

I wont bore you with the tech side either, frankly I think it's not worth my time and you can look at my post history of you want more context about why that is, but the short of it is Armstrong represents a point in which VC and it's expand and moat to IPO and cash model was institutionalized in what was before fertile ground for experimentation trying to move away from this model--BTC-e still remained the most reliable exchange until it was seized by the Feds outside of it's jurisdiction.

I swear, we can write like 50 movies of just the last 13 years of BTC history, but all anyone wants to focus on is Silkroad.

I sold enough to pay off double my initial investment, so i'm not too mad about cloudflare, but i agree and will be buying more.

Good time to change jobs and lock in a strike price?

I did that in 2008 by going to Salesforce. It worked out really well. Highly recommend.

So you stayed for the entire 4 year vest then?

Three and a half years, vested most of it, and then a bigger opportunity came knocking.

maybe not yet, unless a super early company, since no one is worth the round they raised in the last 6mo, which is what determines the strike price you'll get today. You're either looking for a down round, or a company that hasn't gone up yet.

Or a public company that took it in the chin over the last 4 months. With public companies you get the market price at the first board meeting after hiring, and you don't take quite as much risk of your stock being totally worthless as you would with a down round or unknown company.

is it still called a "strike price" when dealing with RSUs?

I agree with you but I took parent to imply startups & options

Generally not but I think parent probably was referring to RSUs but could’ve worded it better

Are the strike prices calculated on the start date then?

The average price over the previous month (with Meta at least)

::cries in almost vested RSUs that I really need::

Don't see all that much value in them honestly. Way too expensive and centralized

Mongodb is also taking quite a beating. Probably doesn't help that sqlite has been all over the front page lately (e.g. right now).

I hate mongodb with a passion so maybe that's bringing it down

MongoDB are basically their Atlas product right now, and AWS has a number of offerings aimed right at it.

I'm surprised Google hasn't been more aggressive in this space, but Google cloud strategy has never made terrific sense to me.

Google's fairly recently acquired Snowflake is their answer to MongoDB in the cloud.

Google didn't acquire Snowflake - unless you know something the rest of the world doesn't ;-) But if they did, how would it be "an answer to MongoDB"? i.e. MongoDB Atlas. AFAIK, MongoDB is focused mostly on the operational database market, not the offline analytics market. Would love to understand that part - thanks!

Huh?

Sqlite is not a server side database

Won’t expectations for startup equity be even worse then? Hard to see any IPOs or good exits in this environment

One has to be crazy to IPO now yes..I'd wait a couple of years.

Hence rsus are still more attractive than late stage equity - I might have this choice coming up between companies to join

RSUs have always been more attractive statistically than equity in a private company.

Could be a good time to switch companies and get a new grant on the other hand.

in fairness, coinbase was never ever a darling :(