It's all fun and games until they run into another branch of homo sapiens ala the descent....

Or the Reptilians. Or nazis from the centre of the Earth.

I wonder how much the founders are making here. They just started this a few years ago and now it has sold for 60B.

Dead capital. There's no need for public funding until they are reasy to cash out at the top, if ever.

How do investors cash out? Do they sell to new round investors?

Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?

If investor pool becomes too loose the company becomes de facto public, subject to all SEC-enforced regulations.

The judgment is subjective though, so pushing the boundaries could be a calculated risk.

Correct. There is also a secondary market.

> There's no need for public funding

You're assuming private liquidity to be infinite and private credit (that fuels VCs) to always have favorable rates.

When you have companies like SpaceX and Anthropic raising billions, it is hard to believe that private credit isn't virtually infinite.

I visited the Balkans recently. One thing that is very clear to me as a n American is that the rest of the world is catching up. English taught at a young age, internet access is easier than ever and in aome cases superior to US options. Like it or not, people from the developed countries are competing much more on the world stage than they realize. For companies, why pay 2x the price of a developer in the US when they can find good talent elsewhere? I'd love to leave the US and geo-arbitrage while I still can, I'm on a slowly sinking ship.

Human output is not money go in production come out. This is tired. Companies continue to headquarter in the most expensive cities in the world. Surely they would all REMOTE TO THE BALKANS by now if it were actually a viable option

Because it's casino like setup. Where management buys real estate in a city and headquarter their. Major chunk of employees wages end up right into the pockets of Executives through wages

On paper you get employees who are paid very high but large amount of that money goes right back into pocket of rich wealthy people who control the companies

The company town never died, it just evolved

Good talent is still hard to find so that's not going to happen for large companies, but lots of startups are going in that direction.

I have a similar belief, but of South and East Asia. YouTube made offshoring much more viable.

I don't doubt it. We had a massive edge on the internet for several decades. That's come to an end now. Somehow Western Europe squandered it though.

Revenue, not profit. A lot of that is likely inflation. I suspect we'll see this pattern repeat quite a bit with the oncoming oil shock

Their EPS is also up 37% GAAP / 10% Non-GAAP YoY and they beat their forecast. They aren’t hurting for money.

https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m05/ci...

The earnings report does mention profit as well. For example, it states: "GAAP EPS of $0.85, up 37% year over year ..."

he explicitly said 'double-digit bottom-line growth'

Bonus focus points if you paint the wall and watch it dry.

and all are wrong, but some are more useful than others

How did they deal with non-competes? Are they in CA or somewhere those aren't enforceable?

Sounds like they didn't build competing products, they built products that'd have been very valuable to the parent company.

I wonder what is driving this. I too sense that people are really guarded these days. For me, I work remotely and it's hard to build true rapport through Slack.

Why would I open up on a company chat? I don't want my life on record to be used against me by HR later on. I'll tell some friendly coworkers about vacation details, but certainly not on a paper trail.

Lack of barrier breaking. Fewer people call and talk outside of slack so it becomes the norm to not talk outside of slack. When you do it seems weird. Break the norm.