New Relic files S-1 for IPO

http://newrelic.com/press-release/20141110

by neom • 12 years ago

116 51 12 years ago

newrelic.com

jasondc• 12 years ago

Link to actual S-1 document: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1448056/0001193125144...

kiyoto2• 12 years ago

The consistency of their gross profit (around ~80%) is very impressive.

pdq2• 12 years ago

It's a software company. Since there's virtually zero cost of goods, you expect a high margin.

They are burning a large amount of cash on sales/marketing. Presumably this is forward looking, so it's probably not a big deal (ie upfront costs to get long, multi-year contracts).

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

And that makes founder Lew Cirne 2 for 2 with Wily (acquired by CA) and now New Relic. Not too shabby.

vm• 12 years ago

Founder Lew Cirne still owns 27.3% of the company (wow!). More than any investor or other shareholder. He raised $200M+ and took little dilution. Awesome to see a repeat entrepreneur who knows what he's doing when fundraising.

mors_ontologica• 12 years ago

The Founder's Dilemna's had a good writeup on him. He knows what he's doing.

pdq2• 12 years ago

Now I see the rush for New Relic to acquire Ducksboard. Should be good for the team, since they apparently took a large amount of shares through the acquisition.

duckduck• 12 years ago

100k shares at $17 estimated value, it is 1.7MM. Together with 2.3MM in cash, at 4MM it is not really a "exit" but more of an acquihire. There seems to be a performance-based additional 2MM, but still fairly small.

dkhenry2• 12 years ago

Is it just me or do those numbers look really bad for a software company.

They spend as much on General Administrative as they do on R&D and they spend 3.6x , more on marketing and sales then they do on R&D.

spullara• 12 years ago

Enterprise software companies spend a very small amount on R&D. Usually < 15%: http://www.zdnet.com/r-and-d-spend-critical-but-no-fixed-for...

dkhenry2• 12 years ago

I didn't really think of New Relic as "Enterprise Software". They are a SaaS Company. Most of the reason enterprise software has so little R&D is because they spend all their resources customizing deployments for enterprise customers.

pbreit• 12 years ago

It's you. For all the large and growing enterprise software companies you're going to see very heavy sales & marketing.

For example, Zendesk was nearly identical: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1463172/0001193125141...

zinssmeister• 12 years ago

Two impressive things: Founder still owns more % than any investor (27.3%) and his Directors & VPs (12 people) together own 68.3% !

dangoldin• 12 years ago

The 68.3% includes the 27.3% but still amazingly impressive!

andrewf• 12 years ago

The percentages in that table (68.3% for directors and officers, and 22.0% / 5.6% / 4.9% / 13.6% for four significant investors) add up to 114.4%.

I obviously don't understand what it actually represents :) Can somebody explain?

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Their April round of $100M with a valuation of $1+B so figure that post money on the IPO they will be $1.5 - $2B making 13 new multi-millionaires in the San Francisco and probably take 13 houses off the market[2].

And the roughly 6,000 people in their networks will say "Man I could have been doing that gig, only a matter of time until I find the one that makes me rich!" and the circle continues.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/28/cloud-app-monitoring-compan...

[2] One allowed exemption for insider selling without filing with the SEC is certain types of mortgage expense. (which I think is still intact post STOCK act but I'm not sure so don't trade on that before checking with legal counsel)

minimax• 12 years ago

I actually googled around for SEC form 4 exemptions related to mortgage expenses and couldn't find anything, which kind of makes me think there is no such exemption. Are you sure you didn't just dream this up?

viscanti• 12 years ago

Those Directors/VPs/Founder were likely already pulling a decent salary (as execs in any industry do). They could likely afford an apartment in the city, so it should be a zero sum transaction for housing (12 houses might be purchased and 12 lower cost housing options - relatively - will come on the market).

Housing prices in SF will be unaffected by this. The issues are much more nuanced (and mostly regulatory). This trope of "Post-IPO tech people are ruining the housing market" isn't helping anyone, and might serve to confuse some people unfamiliar with the actual housing market issues in SF.

inthewoods3• 12 years ago

A few thoughts on this:

- VCs got beat up on this deal. Sounds like he just handed them a term sheet and said take it or leave it. I don't know how you raise $200m and still control 27.3% as a founder and 68.3% as a company. That is great negotiating on his part - very, very impressive.

- Only raising $100m in the public markets is smart as well - small float will mean more chance for the stock to do well (not always obviously).

- Employees (below the Director/VP level) seem likely to be the odd man out here - you've got those guys owning 68.3%, VCs probably own most of the rest. Rank and file likely own very, very little. I'm wondering if that will lead to an exodus of employees.

- I didn't see any mention of their churn rate in any of the documentation - did I just miss it?

Lew and these guys have played the VC/public markets game about as perfectly as you can imho.

nemo44x• 12 years ago

They will likely raise much more than 100 million. That is the "default" setting for the S1. Also, if the IPO goes well expect the underwrite to green shoe some more.

aacc1313• 12 years ago

Note - the 68.3% includes the key VCs, who are executive directors. The balance is divided up among the other investors and the employees. If you think about it, the founding group/top management team can hope to retain ~30% if they have solid up rounds. Lew, I think, is the sole founder and has a chunk of that 30%. Very impressive indeed, especially given the large fund raise to date.

inthewoods3• 12 years ago

Sales and marketing are roughly 1-to-1 with revenue growth, and the spent over $100m in 2014 to make $63m in revenue. I don't find these metrics particularly encouraging. Now this is a SaaS business where you're betting on LTV - but these metrics are tough imho.

verelo2• 12 years ago

While I agree regarding the revenue growth, as someone who uses the service heavily in production, there is significant lock-in and the product is great value. If they continue to innovate this could be a good bet (one i will consider making personally)

inthewoods3• 12 years ago

What's the lock-in? Are you saving the data?

prostoalex• 12 years ago

There's barely a tech site where you won't be offered a free t-shirt or similar reward for installing their free client.

Their downloads graph probably looks up and to the right.

fredsted• 12 years ago

$100m

Now I know why I've been seeing them everywhere for the past year.

supercoder• 12 years ago

I found their sales team incredibly pushing, bordering on aggressive.

I was happy enough on a free plan and they were trying to get me to go to the next tier up which was $200 a month. Must have received about 10 emails from them trying to 'work out a deal'. I would have just been happy with some pricing in the middle but the jump was far too high. Anyway whole thing left a bad taste in the mouth.

baskind• 12 years ago

I bet NewRelic spent at least $1m on T-Shirts & RC Helicopters

xpose2000• 12 years ago

I think it's a great company but their risk factors section in their filing is fairly alarming:

- We have a history of losses and we expect our revenue growth rate to decline. As our costs increase, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to achieve and sustain profitability.

- These investments may not result in increased revenue or growth of our business. We also expect that our revenue growth rate will decline over time. Accordingly, we may not be able to generate sufficient revenue to offset our expected cost increases and to achieve and sustain profitability. If we fail to achieve and sustain profitability, our operating results and business would be harmed.

xwowsersx• 12 years ago

Are there any filings that don't state such risk factors? Seems fairly boilerplate, no?

djyaz1200• 12 years ago

Yes boilerplate

matthewmcg• 12 years ago

Yes and no. In theory, the SEC's rules[1] require that the risk factors be things that are unique to the company (i.e. not risks that apply to stock offerings generally). The factors you mention are common among new companies but wouldn't be included for more mature companies.

Sometimes these factors are helpful. Sometimes they seem to represent the product of a particularly imaginative lawyer or accountant. RSA once had a risk factor stating that if an efficient means of factoring primes were developed their business might suffer.[2]

[1]http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/229.503

[2]http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/932064/00009501350200... search "prime"

gatsby• 12 years ago

Very standard stuff:

FB: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120... (Page 18)

Zendesk: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1463172/0001193125141... (Page 4)

booger1• 12 years ago

Looks like they have a run rate of over $100M (25M in subscription revenue last quarter) -- seems like they spent $100M to get to $100M+ in run rate - typical saas model in early days

jgalt212• 12 years ago

LTV. That's the key. With interest rates this low, you can pretty much justify any sales and marketing expense so long as customer attrition is low.

If New Relic has a USP (I am not qualified to weigh in on this), then I think they can go public and reward their investors with at least a market level return.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

They occupy a niche that Google has a hard time making work for them (too complex) and Adobe so far doesn't really shine there either. Cue a takeover by one of these two at some point in the future.

blumkvist• 12 years ago

Event tracking is very small and new part of their business. There are a lot of other startups that do it. New relic's bread and butter is APM.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1OE9W5H&c...

eloisant• 12 years ago

What they provide is something that would make sense in Analytics. So who knows, maybe some day Google will annound Customer Analytics as a part of Google Analytics... For free!

It's not like they would be starting from scratch.

jarjoura• 12 years ago

Hmmm... wow I lost my bet that GitHub would have been the first of the hipster Ruby on Rails companies to IPO. Though, I'm still betting they will be next. New Relic is a great company that makes it very easy to keep on top of your application servers. I look forward to this infusion of cash taking them to the next level. Congrats team and good luck with the process!

bdcravens• 12 years ago

What exactly is a "hipster Ruby on Rails company"? For better than half their life (founded in 2008, mentioned they made the switch in this 2011 article: http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/7/18/new-relic-architec...) the piece that collects data was ported to Java. Also, I'd think Twitter was far more hipster. :-)

modoc• 12 years ago

Keep an eye on New Relic. Not only are they emerging as a really dominant player in the APM space, but their heading into a very interesting space with the evolution of their Insights platform. My $20 is they will push hard into the BI and analytics space and could end up competing with Omniture and similar players (successfully I think). This is a strong company with big dreams and a good long term vision.

New Relic files S-1 for IPO

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