nCino S-1 (opens in new tab)

Not every tech company needs to be some obnoxious, loud weirdo pretending to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Some people just want to make money.

Tech journalism really covers consumer tech. Its purpose is to generate clicks, not actually educate people about the tech industry. Unfortunately, no one clicks on articles about B2B success stories.

Nobody from hacker news I would say. I have been working for two banks in US (not small) and both had nCino products.

So yes, opportunities abound and not all pf them are discussed in HN.

in fintech at a diff public company, but we as a company have worked with ncino and have many clients who use them, it's not a nobody

It's built on Salesforce. They serve mostly mid-size regional banks. It's honestly super cheap for what it is -- its no wonder they're gaining as much traction as they are.

As a former resident of Wilmington, this is incredibly pleasing to hear. The community has been striving hard for the past decades to move away from the concept of "just another beach town". I used to use the phrase "You get to live at the beach, now earn it" to motivate my students.

While not as prominent, Wilmington, NC is also home to Castle Branch [1], which initially started as small background checking company; GigSalad [2], which allows you to book various performers; and Lapetus Solutions [3], which uses facial recognition for health insurance purposes.

Also, hi Sam, don't internet stalk me.

[1] https://discover.castlebranch.com/

[2] https://www.gigsalad.com/

[3] https://www.lapetussolutions.com/

It cheers my heart to hear stories of tech thriving outside of SV.

I can imagine that intense financial client needs (not to mention working with the confines of SFDC) could easily give this type of company a much less positive culture. Are there specific things leadership have done culture-wise that have made it such a positive place?

Glad to hear that. Let us know what you liked the most. In my experience, every "great" company is somewhat unique and different in its own way.

Also, how would you explain your company's business in a couple of sentences, without any marketing/PR fluff?

Why is it the best company?

so, should I buy?

I doubt it. If you look at nCino S1, their professional services revenues are not growing as much as their subscription revenues.

PS revenues: 2018 20,094 2019 27,076 ~35% 2020 34,915 ~27%

While subscription revenues almost double every year since 2018. This is also highlighted in their risk factors.

What this indicates is that the deployment of such software still needs significant human touch.

Based on the services revenues and the sales expenses, I am hazarding a guess that nCino is a high touch businesses requiring significant sales professionals.

Which is why, it is key to understand customer retention in such businesses. From what I see, they have a 147% subscription revenue retention rate. That might be a proxy to customer retention but I'll try to get their actual customer retention numbers to be on the safer side.

Overall, yes this is no Facebook or Google. The risk section of S1 is very good and the founders are pretty candid about what the investors are up for.

Also something to keep in mind is this is selling to large financial institutions, not small businesses. They have 290 customers, who each pay pay ~$480K/year on average in subscription revenue. nCino doesn't need millions of customers, so its sales and support model is built to attract and retain a relatively small number of customers. It's common with large enterprises to see a decent amount of professional services revenue because keeping your existing customers happy is paramount, since churn matters a lot more at these contract values and customer acquisition is a longer process that goes through procurement, bureaucratic red tape, longer implementation, etc.

It happens. Enterprise SaaS takes a lot of capital, there were probably ups and downs, and between all of that you can take a ton of dilution. Just the cost of the enterprise game with its highly predictable revenue streams.

Not an instructive data point. Adam Neumann owned way more than that?

It's not flattering if retail investors prefer your stock over institutions.

Edit: The exception being Tesla. But Tesla's really different.

Nah. Salesforce is the Trojan horse into Enterprise. It’s a very symbiotic relationship.

It's not uncommon and seems to work well enough. Another example of a public company that is built and sold on top of Salesforce is Veeva (VEEV (NYSE)).

The reference to dependence on system integrators tells you all you need to know.. they will never have some 5-click signup process. Probably each new customer presently involves a fuckton of multi-vendor custom engineering over stupid timescales.

I've never heard of financial software that didn't suffer from this, so it will be interesting to see if they manage to eventually streamline it.

Banks were one of the first businesses to digitize. Big banks in the 1950s. Small banks in the 1980s. Many remain stuck on the technology of their specific era of digitization.

nCino is one of a relatively small number of players turning the complex process of operating a certain kind of bank- of which there are thousands in the US- into turning the crank on a SAAS-delivered machine.

With a new platform come capabilities for new products and services around money- not payments, as has been the hotness for quite some time, but deposits and lines of credit, for individuals and small to mid sized businesses.

And for nCino, having thousands of customers each of which has thousands to hundreds of thousands of customers, each of which has deposit and line of credit accounts, each of which has lots of transactions, and through which their survival as a business is managed- that's a really nice data set to do some really interesting analytics on.

So, yeah, important.

Tech IPOs usually find there way to the top of the page since that is viewed as a major milestone for any company, especially fast growth startups

I'm fairly convinced that names don't matter. In most cases, companies make the name with quality, consistent execution and success (or imploding failure, as with WeWork). Names don't make the company.

Relevant: https://tinyseed.com/latest/measuring-the-depth-of-the-softw...

(Disclosure: yes I wrote it)

At $100M revenue you can upgrade "probably" to "absolutely" and "many" to "most".

I don't know why and when you decided to go to the dark side of ruining HN with unsubstantive political comments and flamebait, after something like a decade of being the leading HN user arguing against it, but it's really dismaying and we need you to stop. Please stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Here are the most recent 100 IPOs [1]. A quick look through the non-China focused ones is failing to show me that immigrants found eventual-IPO companies at a higher rate than you would expect from the general demographics. There's a bit of a misconception here that Tech is reflective of the economy as a whole (it isn't).

[1] https://www.iposcoop.com/last-100-ipos/

Is there some idea you'd like to share?

How do you know the founder is an immigrant?

Edit: Founder is from South Africa, didn't see that in my initial search.

And?

Please don't do this here.