A few weeks ago, I posted about Castlight Health, the healthcare site set to go public at an expected valuation of about $2 billion.  Castlight did go public today at about that expected valuation.  Its anticipated value kept rising  during the week before the IPO from about $1 billion to $2 billion–making me look good.  However, Castlight finished its first day of trading at a valuation of about $4.4 billion.  All of this for a company with $13 million in revenue and net losses of $62 million for last year.  My bad for the underestimation. Please accept my apologies.

As with investors, The Wall Street Journal has finally caught on to the valuations and attractive economics of vertical cloud plays as well (see here and here).  In particular, The WSJ article highlights how much less vertical players need to spend on sales and marketing versus horizontal enterprise plays.  (They have not yet caught on to the network effects that some achieve.)

Wall Street Journal diagram of the advantages of niche cloud software players

Prepare yourself for more IPOs from enterprise cloud players and see if you can get some shares to flip from your broker–those days are back!

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