Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Square has a habit of wasting a bunch of energy on bad ideas: half the company worked on Square Wallet, which was a dead-end. Half the company worked on the Starbucks integration, which is now known to be a money pit.

I sort of think this means that they're undervalued. All they have to do is stop throwing time and money away and they'll be a lot more productive and profitable.




I sort of agree. Clearly they have some good technical folks. But based on the numbers and the Starbucks deal their management appear to have limited experience in strategy and how to build business cases. So even though the "team" on paper might be good they haven't been able to prove themselves yet.

This isn't helped by having a founder who seems to split his time equally with another large and basically unproven business (Twitter) when you are looking from a financial perspective.

My read on the situation is that the private equity funding options are all exhausted and the company's last option is to IPO otherwise they are a dead duck. That's not a very compelling sales pitch.

I'll bet the share price falls a lot further once they are listed. Perhaps at that time it will present a good buying opportunity if one wants to speculate on the team coming up with the next big thing, but that will be a race against the clock before their bank account runs dry.


Don't forget the Etsy clone, Square Market.




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: