Just read here [1] the Twilio net profits are these: 2013: -$26.9m 2014: -$26.8m...

nieksand · on June 23, 2016

The net profit numbers by themselves don't tell you much about the health and prospects of the company.

One big issue is that customer acquisition cost tends to be upfront whereas the life time value lags behind. E.g. you have to hire sales people now, it takes X months for them to become productive, and another Y months for those new customers to fully onboard.

So to put those numbers in to context, you would have to look at revenue growth, margins, customer churn, cac, ltv, etc.

wslh · on June 23, 2016

> The net profit numbers by themselves don't tell you much about the health and prospects of the company.

I am not saying they do but they help to discuss the IPO.

dang · on June 23, 2016

> being downvoted in HN for publishing this? Crazy

The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to do this. Please reread them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

kumarski · on June 23, 2016

I'm not from this part of the world, but what I've found is that if you can juice your growth numbers for the public markets or raise more investor money on the notion that you'll blitzkrieg the market, LTV matters less and less for public markets.

Even SalesForce and Amazon sort of go by this model. They make no profits. I'm not sure if I agree with this whole thing, esp. given the coliseum of a city they're building while being not-profitable, but I do understand some of the context of why the companies are valued so high.

kevinburke · on June 23, 2016

Shut the company down, someone's onto us