re: Let’s discuss WTRH in this thread

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Its factually inaccurate to say that Waitr was purchased for $305M, Bite Squad was purchased for $325M, Tilman personally bought another 1M shares a month and a half ago?

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I think the point is that its different then if say he used cash or a loan. Both of which are a hard money and certainly worth that.

I'm looking at it similar to the winnings at a casino. You walk in with $100 and immediately win $1000, well now if you lose $900 it sucks but you didn't lose $900 you didn't have prior to walking in.

Its a shite ton of money either way don't get me wrong. I'm just not convinced Fertitta feels like he lost his $100 he walked in with and is willing to go to the ATM to win it back. I think he may feel more like he was playing with the Casino's money all along.

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Its factually inaccurate to say that Waitr was purchased for $305M, Bite Squad was purchased for $325M, Tilman personally bought another 1M shares a month and a half ago?

Even if all the money was not Tilman's personally, it's still his company.

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Actually yes it is wrong, the EV was $408M at time of MERGER. This was not a purchase, he merged WTRH into Landcadia (again look up SPAC). You should read the below before you spew any more of your uninformed BS. People that go on message boards and talk about stocks like you are dangerous.

LINK

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He used neither, he used a public SPAC (also known as a blank check company) to bring Waitr public via a reverse merger. It's a fairly complicated/niche structure that has become very popular.

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But he has very little invested right?

How much would it take for Fertitta or someone else to rescue Waitr here? A couple hundred million probably right? I don't know anything about Fertitta, I know he is worth billions, but that doesn't mean he has a couple hundred million liquid or more importantly that he is able to loan or use. Most people don't realize that most billionaire's have most of their money tied up into their businesses.

ETA: and you can't hurt your bread winning business by removing capital for it to help out a side gig. Maybe he has the money, I have no idea. But he may not or he may have other plans with everything he has.

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But he has very little invested right?

How much would it take for Fertitta or someone else to rescue Waitr here? A couple hundred million probably right? I don't know anything about Fertitta, I know he is worth billions, but that doesn't mean he has a couple hundred million liquid or more importantly that he is able to loan or use. Most people don't realize that most billionaire's have most of their money tied up into their businesses.

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He put ~$7 million in the original transaction (Landcadia); however, I'm not sure how it was split between he and his partner on Landcadia Richard Handler, CEO of Jefferies.

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If anyone makes an investment off a message board without doing the smallest bit of research, they have much larger issues than me.

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You should heed your own advice and educate yourself, because nothing in this thread that you've said has been remotely true/factual.

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I have and actually know some of the lawyers that were involved with the transition for Waitr.

The value of Waitr was $308M, Bite Squad was $325M, Tilman bought 1M shares, and it's also his company. None of that is factually inaccurate.

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Wrong.

The value of Waitr was $408 million. What existing Waitr shareholder received (in theoretical value) was $300 million. Again please read this presentation that speaks of valuation.

LINK

Yes he bought 1 million shares but at an average price of $1.425 (less than pocket change to him). You claimed that he had hundreds of millions of dollars in this company. Which is unequivocally false.

Lastly, it is not "his" company; he owns 6.52% of the outstanding shares, is not even chairman but only an independent director. It's the shareholders company.

Woof

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Any clue why this continues to tank?

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It may be partly due to GrubHub missing their profit and revenue estimates when they announced their 3rd qtr results this morning along with lowering their 4th qtr guidance.

It's starting to look like these 3rd party food delivery services don't currently have a sustainable business model.

ETA: GRUB is down over 40% this morning.

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Maybe Waitr's customer base is something GrubHub will look at/buy?

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I’ve been meaning to post about this topic since I’ve decided to try out some delivery gigs on the side to make some extra money with a baby coming and without having much thinking and being able to interact with people in a different context than usual. Plus I enjoy evaluating the differences between the different services (their incentives, pay, efficiencies, etc.) both as a deliverer and just as a service model.

Incidentally, one of the services I signed up for (right after I criticized the ex-CEO’s economic short-sightedness earlier in this thread) was for BiteSquad, who Waitr purchased earlier this year. Even though they’ve apparently kept the two businesses separate, they seem to have a similar business model (W2 employees) so I’m sure there are a lot of similarities. In addition, Bitesquad is about half the business so it’s a significant portion of Waitr’s value.

I may go into more details if anyone is interested, but I really question their value for a bigger company to buyout for a few main reasons:

1. I can’t remember picking up from a restaurant where at least one of the local competitors (GrubHub, DoorDash, Postmates, UberEats, even the defunct Amazon Restaurants) isn’t advertised as well. So there are few if any restaurants that a buyout would grant exclusive access from any competition, if it wasn’t already a partner for whomever would buy it out anyways.

2. When I mention to my friends the companies I’ve done deliveries for, few have ever heard of Bitesquad, and I even have fellow delivery drivers (from competitors) mention that they’re unfamiliar with it (since I have a uniform). So it’s likely that there isn’t a large market of customers in the first place, let alone exclusive customers.

3. As the article notes. There is already so much competition and little customer loyalty (why would one be loyal) to a service that an exclusive customer base is already unlikely, let alone exclusive to the much larger competitors who could buy them out.

4. If there is valuable (and exclusive) customer, restaurant, geographic, etc., data I don’t believe it’s being utilized well or creatively, if at all (for many reasons). So my guess is that the potential value of their data is a lot less than it could or should be.

5. There was an article just today about Uber getting closer to human-less delivery, so I think this is a sign that to get ahead in this crowded market is to maximize the efficiencies and effectiveness of technology and the pure economics of the gig economy, and Bitesquad, at least, seems to be behind the competition, if not way behind.

Now this is just based on my experiences and specific to one-half of the Waitr company, but since a number of posts have mentioned a bigger company buying them out, I think there are a lot of reasons that this is not especially likely, and if it is, it would be much closer to its current market cap than its initial one for it to be worthwhile. And frankly, I almost wonder if it makes more sense for larger companies to let smaller companies like Waitr to get pushed out of the market altogether (e.g., go out of business) than to buy them out, especially if they have little (and probably deceasing) to provide a company besides their displacement from the marketplace.