I guess it again comes down to "you're not the right customer". They didn't file an IPO because they couldn't make any sales.
Zuora builds payments systems and other services to help companies who want to offer subscription-based products and services - a trend that has been seen in pretty much every industry from software to groceries.
Why did they file an IPO? Revenue growth is unimpressive, they don’t make any money and their product is terrible according to those who have to implement it.
Was that a serious question? It doesn't matter if the product is terrible as long as they can make sales, revenue growth looks fine (unless you've built a $100M business in a year?), and they definitely do make money unless you're talking about profit, which in VC-funded companies is traded for faster growth and exit (like an IPO).
I'm asking you if you've built something bigger and faster to be criticizing the revenue growth, since you claimed it wasn't impressive. How fast were you expecting it to be? Most companies are lucky to get this kind of double digit increases every year, if ever. And profit is what an IPO will let them do. You realize at some point profit does need to happen for the company to stay around right?
I find it strange that you say they aren't growing fast enough but yet say they don't make any money when they are delaying profits precisely for growth. Have you ever actually started or run a business?
Kind of a straw man argument isn’t it? You don’t have to run a company to understand how to value businesses, or that when we are in a bubble Wall Street will try to push out any poop thru an IPO.
In this case, they are nowhere near profitability. They need the IPO to forestall bankruptcy, they are 12 months from running out of cash. Their profit margin is still a massively negative -35%. There are no signs this business can ever be significantly profitable.
And if that’s not good enough for you, companies I’ve founded have raised over $20M in VC funding, and one was 2 months from an IPO we pulled because though we were profitable our growth had fallen to “only” 20%. We sold that business for $100M to a public company.
Interestingly, their sales deck is one of the best (as considered by Andy Raskin who's very good at marketing): https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...