Posted by PriorityLeft 19 hours ago
All this “AI bla bla efficiency bla bla agents bla bla” is a convenient excuse.
EDIT: Now it's off the main page, because of course it is.
It’s good stuff but there’s room for a lot of things
Anyone else stumbled over that part? That is not at all how I perceive CF.
It doesn't matter how much revenue you have if you are spending more than that.
The stock is currently at -17% in after hours trading.
So you need to do something that's good for your margins to show investors.
Frankly I fully expect people to get even angrier once they become unable to meet the bills and companies still tout the whole AI line.
Cloudflare is an outlier because the company doesn't actually make money at present; their past three annual statements show net losses in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Not hemorrhaging cash per se (their cash reserves alone could cover ~9 more years of losses), but still enough to warrant some cutbacks - and AI is the current scapegoat, thus they finger AI and throw folks out the door.
Coinbase's story is different: they're making good money, but their industry is inherently volatile. Again, recent volatility in the crypto markets related to...things...is dragging down long-term prospects for currencies, while ongoing trades are broadly just insiders doing insider things or exiting their positions for liquidity. Still, their share price is down 27% over 5 years and 18% YTD, so they also need to pump their share price so the executives get paid; layoffs are consistently rewarded by the shareholders, thus they axe part of their workforce for the bump and fingerpoint to AI.
Never take what a company says at face value, and always check their balance sheets. What Cloudflare did sucks but could be warranted to some degree; what Coinbase did has no justification whatsoever beyond naked greed.
Their free cashflow is high; they're choosing not to report a profit. I don't think it's useful/accurate to say they don't make money.
Don't get me wrong, they may be doing a layoff to boost margins or enter GAAP profitability but the company revenue exceeds its operating cost by quite a bit.
See in their latest quarterly report: https://cloudflare.net/news/news-details/2026/Cloudflare-Ann...
> First quarter revenue totaled $639.8 million, representing an increase of 34% year-over-year
So they're growing 34% annually.
> Free cash flow was $84.1 million, or 13% of revenue, compared to $52.9 million, or 11% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2025. Cash, cash equivalents, and available-for-sale securities were $4,163.9 million as of March 31, 2026.
...and they have $84 million free cash flow in one quarter, and it's consistently pretty good cashflow.
And they have $4b of cash or cash equivalents stockpiled. It seems pretty healthy to me.
Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
Layoffs and cost of living problems but you must discount the evidence of your eyes and ears and remember it's over 50,000!
The PE ratio of Tesla should tell you everything you need to know about the stock market representing actual economic conditions.
> Also the US economy is collapsing, that probably has some relevance.
Right...wait, what?
> -- blingbot9 2026
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/coinbase-s...
Cloudflare was overvalued and missed extreme expectations (down another 12% now).
By this time I wonder which investor still believes the AI excuse.
If anything, AI makes each employee much more valuable because they can be much more productive and most big companies always have stuff that needs doing and opportunities for growth. So it's a sort of Jevons Paradox[1] situation but where human labour is the resource.