Siddharth Khare

Freelancer’s ASX Debut – Share Price soars 5x on a listing PE of 463 – under or overpriced?

Freelancer.com

Freelancer.com

Freelancer made its debut on the ASX last week. Initially listing at $0.50 the company’s share price skyrocketed to $2.60 and finally closed at $1.60.

Matt Barrie Freelancer

Matt Barrie – Credit: www.freelancer.com

Matt Barrie, the company’s CEO and founder, had announced Freelancer’s intention to list at the Startup Spring Entrepreneurship event.

His decision to not sell the company to the Japanese recruiting firm Recruit Co. at $430 Million earlier this year may have paid off when the companies market cap rose to $697 Million on its first day of trading 5x the $218 Million that it expected to achieve with $0.50 IPO price.

The stock market analysts credit the enormous response to the company’s shares to their limited availability and a company that has significant traction in a global market that is growing rapidly.

The majority of the company’s shares are owned by Matt, who has a 46% stake in the company. Other directors including Chief Technology Officer Darren Williams and Non Executive Director Simon Clausen also own major stakes.

 

Darren Williams Freelancer

Darren Williams
Credit -www.freelancer.com

Freelancer has emerged as one of the top outsourcing platforms, outsourcing various data entry, writing and/or coding jobs around the world. Increasing in number by seconds, the website is used by more than 9 Million users. The company has serviced around 5.1 Million projects worth a total of $1.2 Billion.

We use Freelancer for various jobs and in our opinion it is a very slick operation.

The company earns most of its revenue by taking a cut out of the freelancers’ fee paid by their hirers. Barrie founded the company in 2009 after buying it from a Swedish Entrepreneur. Freelancer has received numerous acquisition offers since then.

It seems that the decision to not sell might have been a good one, as the company received a valuation of $730 Million from the Australian stock market. Barrie announced that the funds received by the company’s ASX stint will be used to fuel growth.

 

Simon Clausen Freelancer

Simon Clausen
Credit – www.freelancer.com

Freelancer is forecasting $18 Million in revenues and a profit of $470,000 after listing costs this year.

Congratulations to the team, quite an amazing feat for a business that didn’t exist four years ago.

However there are a few things to think about, the offer only raised $15 million so only a small % of the company is in public hands so volatility is likely to be high, but given the recent rejection of a $430 million offer for outright purchase it seems like the market might have been able to handle a higher valuation and its probably fair to say whoever advised Freelancer probably got the numbers wrong and left some money on the table.

Given we are not in a dot.com boom a 5x rise in the value of the company on listing appears to be a pretty significant under pricing of the offer.

 

Freelancer Users online (this morning) and live projects

Freelancer Users online (this morning) and live projects

Having said that at a listing price of $.50 a share the PE was an amazing 463 times.

Clearly this listing was not for the founders and investors to cashout, they obviously have big plans for the company going forward, the offer document lists the acquisition of a domain name for $1.2m as part of those plans.

You have to admire Matt Barrie’s vision and conviction in rejecting an offer that would have put $430 millions cash into the shareholders pockets (assuming there was no earnout in the Japanese offer), this listing will give them the ability to buy competitors easily and quickly and help them grow.

What do you think, was the offer over or under priced? Given the evidence I still can’t work it out.

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Tech23 2013 Winners

Tech23 Celebrating Innovation

Tech23 Celebrating Innovation
Source: http://www.tech23.com.au/

Tech23 the popular annual tech conference run by Slattery IT announced its 2013 major category winners last week. The 23 participating startups each made a 5 minute pitch in front of a crowd of investors and entrepreneurs.

The Jeva Prototype

The Jeva Prototype
Source: http://www.2mar.com

 

 

 

The Innovation Excellence Award for 2013 went to 2Mar Robotics; a company that specializes in manufacturing robotic arms for people with spinal cord injuries, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson’s, etc. The robotic arm can be controlled with speech or Iphone controls. Their robot, Jeva, is specially designed for people with quadriplegia.

Based in Melbourne Australia, the company was founded by Young Australian of the Year Merita Cheng and is supported by the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Grid-blaster robotic system under Sydney Harbor Bridge

Grid-blaster robotic system under Sydney Harbor Bridge
Source: http://www.sabreautonomous.com.au

Grid-blaster robotic system

Grid-blaster robotic system
Source: http://www.sabreautonomous.com.au

Sabre Autonomous Solutions, won the Greatest Potential Award for 2013 for their grit-blaster robotic system. The system started as a collaborative research effort by the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the University of Technology, Sydney and the Roads and Maritime Services NSW (RMS) in 2006. The robotic system is specially designed to protect the various workers involved in manual grit blasting from harmful dust particles and physical hazards, by doing all the dangerous and tedious work for them.

 

 

 

 

 

BuyReply (who appear to have rebranded to ShopReply) won the People’s Choice Award for 2013. With the motive to revolutionize the current e-commerce industry, founder Brad Lindenberg and his team aim to convert non transactional offline advertising to revenue generating customer transactions through their unique idea. Having viewed the demo it appears to be a very effective way to convert offline leads into e-commerce transactions across multiple offline and online channels.

Shop Reply - credit shopreply.com

Shop Reply – credit shopreply.com

They aim to enable shopping through a simple text message, an email, a tweet or even a QR scan. Their vision is to convert offline advertising, completely non-transactional in nature, to purchasing transactions.

Full list of Prizes

Tech23 2013 Innovation Excellence Award » 2Mar Robotics
Tech23 2013 Greatest Potential Award » Sabre Autonomous Solutions
Tech23 People’s Choice Award » BuyReply
Innovate NSW MVP Grant » Sabre Autonomous Solutions
Innovate NSW MVP Grant » Intersective
PayPal Creating opportunity together award » BuyReply
REA Group Purpose & Passion prize » Food Orbit
ATP Innovations Explorer Award » 2Mar Robotics
London & Partners Discover Tech City Award » Sabre Autonomous Solutions
AMP Amplify Festival Most promising technology for enterprise application award »SimplyShow.me
Braintree best payment using mobile award » Food Orbit
Sirca University Medal for Tech Entrepreneurship » Breezedocs
Amazon Web Services Award » Ennova
Citrix Best early stage company award » 121cast
Anchor’s Legendary server management award » ollo mobile
Advance mentoring session » Roomz
Cloudstaff Ignition award » Ennova
Controlabill best subscription business model prize » ollo mobile
Fishburners most investable award » HSK Instruments
Google Encouragement prize » BuyReply
Lunch with Nick Gruen » SkyTree
Mentoring with Matt » SkyTree
MYOB Online Innovation for Small Business Award » BuyReply
Noah Consulting Disruption award » SkyTree
Saasu Plan for the future award » Breezedocs
Meeting with Square Peg Capital » HSK Intruments
Stripe Loves Australia award » Food Orbit
Meeting with Susan Wu » 2Mar Robotics
The Delicatessen Agency Light-globe moment award » Food Orbit
The New Agency Best growth hacking and boot-strapping prize » 2Mar Robotics
ThoughtWorks Getting stuff done award » 2Mar Robotics
Weco 24/7 co-working 2 month kickstart » 121cast
ilab Germinate Program Award » Rightprism
Innovation Island People’s Choice Award » Cloud Herd

Enhanced by Zemanta

SydneyFirehose.com – Coke’s Big Data Startup Competition – The Quest for Big Data, Solutions and Entrepreneurship

Crunch data from 3 years of CCA shipments

Crunch data from 3 years of CCA shipments

This warehouse is emptied every two days. A few small changes to operations can make a huge difference.

Franki Chamaki

Franki Chamaki

Coke’s Sydney Startup Accelerator Team is launching a novel big data competition called SydneyFirehose.com. The team which was founded by Franki Chamaki and Jason Hosking has launched a number of really interesting initiatives over the last six months, centred around solving real meaty problems for Coke and creating new business opportunities and partnerships with startups.

The Sydney Firehose Big Data Startup Competition aims to give real data from a massive business to help entrepreneurs and software guys to get close to a real customer and hopefully start a new business or develop a big data application.

Analysing big data can lead to big insights and a greater understanding of business problems and ways to solve them.

The Sydney Firehose: Big Data Startup Competition invites entrepreneurs to create something useful, marketable and unique by analyzing a huge set of data (1 TB/150,000,000 records), which will be given to them by Coca Cola Amatil, Coke’s Australian partner and bottler.

Jason Hosking

Jason Hosking

The data is basically the company’s supply chain data, collected by the company for the last 3 years. The data includes information of about CCA’s suppliers, clients, products, deliveries and orders.

The aim of the competition is to build an application or business that will make improvements to the companies operations by analyzing this data.

Big Data startups find it tough to find big companies that are willing to hand over their full operational history.

By providing the means and access to a huge set of data, the event aims at promoting innovation and as a result will hopefully help launch a number of new businesses.

The event is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs, who want to get access to an enormous quantity of data and use this to gain business insights and develop applications.

The features of the event include :

1. Coca Cola Amatil supplying three years of their Australian supply chain data for the entrepreneurs to access and utilize.

2. A platform to collaborate and learn from fellow entrepreneurs and mentors.

3. A chance for the participant to pitch their idea to a large prospective client, Coca Cola.

4. A great chance to meet extraordinary people from the entrepreneurship world and learn from them. The event will be judged by some great business leaders and entrepreneurs such as : Bruce Herbert, Rick Baker, Gerhard Voster, Ann Parker and Franki Chamaki.

They have some great prizes for the winner, $3000 in cash, startup training and 3 months of co-working experience with the Pollenizer team and the opportunity to pitch Coke as a customer for 3 months.

Coke trucks deliver to upto 40 customers per day

Coke trucks deliver to up to 40 customers per day

When and Where ?

The event will be held on the 15th, 16th and 23rd of November 2013. The participants can register on their website http://www.sydneyfirehose.com. The seats of the event are limited and are priced at $20. There are 20 slots each for entrepreneurs, designers and engineers.

The event will be held at :

The Hive

180 Commonwealth St

Surry Hills, NSW 2010

The Organizers

The event is co-organised by Pollenizer. A startup that co-founds businesses and organizes startup events like Firehose. Pollenizer was founded by Mick Liubinskas and Phil Morle in 2008. Mick Liubinskas is an entrepreneur, investor and technologist.

Phil Morle & Mick Liubinskas (looking very dapper) Credit Pollenizer.com

Phil Morle & Mick Liubinskas (looking very dapper) Credit Pollenizer.com

Mick and Phil Morle, the CEO of Pollenizer, worked in the team of Kazaa, a P2P sharing application that saw its rise during the end of the first generation of P2P networks such as Napster. In its golden days, Kazaa was downloaded and used by millions across the ‘World Wide Web’ for P2P sharing (over 300 million at its peak making it the most downloaded software in history at the time). They were also part of the team that helped launch Spreets.com which was sold to Yahoo Australia for $40m 18 months after launching.

UPDATE: Mick has taken up a new challenge at Muru Digital, the Telstra backed incubator, he will remain on the board at Pollenizer.

Final Word

The most unique feature of the event is it’s openness. The idea of making normally very tightly held data available to potential startups is a great initiative for the company and the potential startups.

Hopefully this initiative will see new businesses launched with Coke as a customer and help CCA improve its operations.

Enhanced by Zemanta