Hi all,
I wanted to bring forth a recently-IPO’d cloud computing provider to the board. Bert just wrote an interesting article: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4272311-fastly-broken-ipo-o… that led me to dig into it myself. I haven’t seen it brought here before- if it has, my apologies and feel free to ignore.
Fastly is using Edge Computing to reduce customer latency on high-demand applications, streaming video, or any application or site. Edge computing at its simplest is the concept of bringing the computing geographically closer to the customer. If Computer A asks something from Computer B which is a continent away, it takes some time to come back with the answer. An ‘edge location’ is a cache of information much closer to Computer A, hence the reduction in latency. LIke TWLO and AYX, this is another developer-focused company.
Some current customers include: New York Times, BuzzFeed, GitHub, Spotify, and TicketMaster.
2017 to 2018 revenue increase was ~38.5%
Dollar based retention rate is ~130%
Total Customer Growth YoY was 10%
Customer Growth for those spending over $100K was 33%
Gross Margins are at 56%, which is below some of the SaaS companies we invest it, but remember this is not a purely SaaS company; there are infrastructure costs to caching capabilities around the world.
This is my first time bringing forth a stock here, I would love as much constructive criticism as the board can offer. Learning from you all has been a pleasure.
-Scott