CrowdStrike S-1 (opens in new tab)

It's a filing for CrowdStrike to go public. They open their books for the public to view.

HN is a very entrepreneurial board and we applaud any Silicon Valley company going public.

Because they are the ones who blamed Russia for the DNC hack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrowdStrike#Russian_hacking_in...

The only thing most HN'ers know about Crowdstrike is that they were involved in the Russia hacking attribution in 2016-2017. But this is a major tech company S-1 --- Crowdstrike is one of the more important security product companies of the last few years --- and tech company S-1's generally get warm coverage on HN.

Just to add, the relative lack of comments here is related to the density of information presented here relative to the age of the submission (so people haven't gotten through it yet).

Because it's yet another very unprofitable company's IPO... with a potential "profit window" in 10 centuries, when flying cars are a reality, robots take over the earth etc.

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.

HN has quite a few infosec professionals who have obtained a fair bit of swag and gotten reasonably drunk on CrowdStrike investors' dime at various security conference booths/events/parties.

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.

George Kurtz is not a Democrat. Crowdstrike is also a giant in this field. I assume the connection is, the DNC wanted to go with a safe, big name.

So is FireEye (and FireEye is inqtel/cia funded). Crowdstrike are the best in the game.

They were also on retainer for many republicans. They are an American cybersecurity company.

That's because Crowdstrike hires plenty of ex-NSA/CIA, who are usually the people FBI would love to hire. Doesn't mean they're the best in the industry but definitely in that mega-corp/gov tier they seem to be #1.

Fun additional detail:

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.

Are you sure that's his annual compensation, or is that just a one-time options amount?

Yes, and usually for a pretty straightforward reason: these companies are investing substantial sums of money into buying market share, and, when they (a) win themselves a defensible position in the market and (b) generate enough revenue to prove the market to investors, they can cut back on those expenses and take profits. Meanwhile, investors are looking for growth and, more generally, future profits; nobody's all that interested in taking a Crowdstrike dividend this year.

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.