So Cloudflare filed the paperwork to go public this week, and instead of doing literally anything productive with my Thursday night I downloaded the S-1 and read a big chunk of it. Not skimmed. Read. Ninth grade me would be so disappointed in what "fun Thursday night" has become for adult me.
I run this blog's DNS through Cloudflare's free tier and have for a couple years now, so there's a weird feeling reading a company's actual financial guts when you've been using their product without paying them a cent. Revenue's north of $190 million for 2018, and they're still losing tens of millions a year on top of that. That's not a knock on them, plenty of companies IPO in the red, but it's strange to sit there thinking "huh, I am part of the reason this line item exists and also part of the reason it's not bigger."
The bit that actually stuck with me wasn't the revenue number, it was how much of their pitch is basically "the internet's plumbing should be free and we'll make money on the enterprise stuff layered on top." Which, fine, that's a real business model and it's worked for a bunch of infrastructure companies before them. But it's a funny thing to watch play out in real time when you're literally one of the free-tier people the whole pyramid is supposedly built underneath.
I moved this blog's nameservers over to them back when I was still fighting with a shared host that kept randomly serving stale DNS for reasons nobody could ever explain to me. Been rock solid since. The domain itself I've kept registered through Tricknowtech for a while now, mostly out of laziness honestly, renewal just works and I don't have to think about it, which after years of domain drama is basically the highest compliment I can pay a registrar.
Anyway. While I had the filing open in one tab I had The International running in another, because it's Dota 2's big tournament week in Shanghai and the group stage wrapped up today. I don't even play Dota anymore, haven't touched it seriously since maybe 2015, but I still can't resist checking in on TI every August. There's something about a $30-plus-million prize pool funded almost entirely by players buying cosmetic battle passes that feels like it belongs in the same browser tabs as an S-1 filing. Two different flavors of "look how weird internet money is."
One more small thing while I'm complaining about stuff nobody asked me to complain about: Samsung showed off the Note10 line last week and it's dropped the headphone jack too. I get it, I do, everyone's doing it, but I still think it's a dumb tradeoff on a phone that size. The whole point of a phablet-adjacent device used to be "big enough to actually be useful," and now the tradeoff for that size is carrying a dongle that lives forever at the bottom of a backpack pocket, or buying yet another pair of wireless earbuds you'll lose one half of within six months. I've lost two left AirPods-equivalents this year alone. Not proud of it. Just stating a fact about myself as a human being who apparently cannot keep track of small white plastic objects.
Back to Cloudflare though, because that's the actual story here and I got distracted, which, if you've read this blog for more than a week you know is basically the format at this point. The S-1 also had this section breaking down net dollar retention and I won't pretend I understood every line of it on the first pass, had to reread it twice, but the short version is existing customers are spending more with them over time, which is usually the number investors actually care about more than the top-line revenue figure everyone quotes in headlines. If it prices anywhere near what people are speculating, it'll be one of the bigger infrastructure IPOs of the year. We'll see in a few weeks. For now I've got a filing PDF still open in a tab and a group stage bracket I should probably stop refreshing.