Yeah, he has a bunch of points he can't let go of. First, $USD...

Yeah, he has a bunch of points he can't let go of.

First, $USD is not the only currency used on FLN; their exposure to different currencies is even laid out in their report.

Second, freelancers on FLN are not all uniform. There are some big ones and a long tail.

That being said total revenue makes FLN a minnow in comparison with any of the top 10 outsourcing firms. So all these people raving about how coronavirus or "pick your big economic phenomenon" is going to deliver the future straight into the hands of FLN (or UPWK/FVRR) are ignoring how the vast majority of outsourcing works - FLN is for casual, low-end relationships. Sort of the Tinder/Grindr of work in a world, where most people are still meeting at church and getting married.

Also, having FLN's revenue/profitability trending "slowly in the right direction" is a bit rich for a company that's still valued more like a startup. People have been telling me FLN is not very profitable for several years now because they are "putting it all back into growth". Well, where's the growth? Why is it going to materialize in "future years", exactly? As far as I can tell, the only thing that's happened recently is FLN has moved from #2 (after Elance and Odesk merged) to #3 (replaced with the upstart FVRR). They feel like a deer in the headlights.

The other factor that should alarm people is that FLN's balance sheet now contains a disturbingly large proportion of intangible non-current assets like "goodwill" and "domain names". Yes, they have cash, but they have a lot of real current liabilities too. I feel that they have fired their "cash pile" bullets already, and maybe Escrow and Freightlancer and that growth conference maybe aren't really quite worth as much as you might have hoped. I don't see how they can acquire their way to growth - in fact, the sluggish growth of the last few years has coincided with the slow transformation of FLN's asset position from "we have lots of spare cash" to "yay, we have goodwill and domain names".

Shouldn't they have seen more than low-single digit growth across a period where they were running down their assets to buy revenue-positive companies?