...because they are a billion dollar tech startup, whose end product/widget is security. Why shouldn't it be here? ...Because it's not about Uber-for-X? Or chat? or food Delivery? ... But everything they do is every HN buzzword: ML/AI/BigData/ES/JSON/CLOUD.
They are extreme users of tech and ingesting/processing more data in real-time than most of us can fathom.
The only thing most HN'ers know about Crowdstrike is that they were involved in the Russia hacking attribution in 2016-2017. But this is a major tech company S-1 --- Crowdstrike is one of the more important security product companies of the last few years --- and tech company S-1's generally get warm coverage on HN.
Just to add, the relative lack of comments here is related to the density of information presented here relative to the age of the submission (so people haven't gotten through it yet).
Because it's yet another very unprofitable company's IPO... with a potential "profit window" in 10 centuries, when flying cars are a reality, robots take over the earth etc.
And all of this doesn't matter because the US has injected so much money with QE and so on the economy that even an American kid's 10 year old lemonade shop is worth a few billions.
A whole vat of them in one year? Yeah, probably. Means they likely foresee difficulties securing public investment beyond the near term if they don't IPO ASAP.
Also means I'm not buying into any of them until the market slams, which I think is a common theme among many buyers considering the ever-intensifying downtrend in IPO day-1 closing price dips.
HN has quite a few infosec professionals who have obtained a fair bit of swag and gotten reasonably drunk on CrowdStrike investors' dime at various security conference booths/events/parties.
The SG&A line item in their financials is relevant to their interests. Specifically, their sales/swag/booze operation cost over twice as much as their R&D operations ( $172MM vs $84MM in 2018 ). Or, to put it another way, getting CISOs sauced outside the Moscone is twice as important to them as actually producing the software for their blinky boxes.
If they can pull another $300MM from retail in an IPO, our blood alcohol content will be secured at cons for another two years, assuming they continue to burn $140MM annually.
It is extraordinarily silly to suggest that "swag" and "booze" are serious contributors to Crowdstrike's SG&A expenses, considering that SG&A covers their entire sales and marketing teams. SG&A exceeding R&D is not exactly an anomaly among enterprise tech companies.
Oh, also? Crowdstrike sells endpoint software subscriptions, not "blinky boxes".
HN is a very entrepreneurial board and we applaud any Silicon Valley company going public.