For sure, I am am one of the great “offenders” of the serious stuff. Part of it is because I find it fun sharing what I learned (M/A deals can be very complicated with lots of emotion involved, including for example mitigating fears (e.g. Nate and Chad riding off into the sunset). But I do recognize that some of the dialogue does wander off (e.g. Nate’s personal situation) that is less relevant the more important questions/discussions so perhaps that is best to let that stuff just be (for those interested).
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I’m curious what people are rooting for, here is my poll of what you hope the outcome is. I’m voting for the partnership.
- Nothing changes no one buys anything
- Zwift partners with TR, no buy out, i.e. Plan builder powered by TR, Train now powered by TR in Zwift
- Partial buyout, TR still operates independently, but zwift starts to incorporate features of it.
- Full buyout but TR still operates a fully owned subsidiary, again integration
- Full buyout and Zwift swallows all TR operations, TR slowly dies and becomes part of zwift
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I just want to be able to push my scheduled TR workouts to Zwift and do them there. I don’t really care what form that takes…buyout, license, etc.
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I suspect what I am rooting for and what will actually happen are two very different things.
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I know what I want like half of the NIMBY world ‘nothing to change’ but I’ll understand if things need to develop/progress 
My point was that mergers are often bad for taking away what made the original product good. I didn’t mention anything about whether it would be right for trainer road.
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Eric Min used XERT some time ago, which started some speculation (cf https://www.trainerroad.com/forum/t/zwift-and-xert-merging-buyout/ ) but it just died out in the end. What guarantees us that this time it is sure that Zwift will buyout TR? Just because @dcrainmaker said so? What other concrete information do we have?
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I don’t think anyone is saying it is a guarantee.just doing some water cooler speculating.
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This thread is more a campfire now… we’re all just sitting around staring at the flames. Every now and then someone new walks up and points out the fire to us. We all just look to them and nod.
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Yes, I knew what you meant. 
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Yep. No guarantees, but I’d wager that discussions have happened between the parties at minimum. If there was nothing going on, I’d expect some response from the TR crew. Even that is speculation, maybe Eric is just messing with Nate and just mixing things up to drive market interest.
Even if they actually are well down the purchase/partner path, these things can take a long time and can fall apart for a variety of reasons right up until the end. A lot of that depends on how clean TR’s books are and whether they have been doing things in a way to facilitate outside due diligence.
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Buy the rumor, sell the news.
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Perfect. 
Depending on the details of the TR ownership structure, and how restricted the various owners are regarding selling their stake, this current ‘activity’ could have been initiated by an owner shopping around their stake. If zwift got wind that XX% (surely a minority stake) was for sale, that surely would start a conversation. Pure speculation, but stuff like this does happen with private companies, and as I understand it is largely governed by how the company organizational documents specify how owners selling their shares is governed, so it is very company specific.
Edit: Note to self - read to the bottom of the thread before replying to avoid posting redundant comments…
How much more money are the Zwift VCs willing to spend? They have already poured hundreds of millions into Zwift and I can’t imagine Nate selling TR on the low end.
This would almost certainly be done without more VC money. Likely some cash + equity in Zwift. A lot of it depends on if TR’s owners want to cash out or not, and if Zwift wants TR owners to be involved longer term at Zwift. Since I think a very significant part of the value of TR is the people and organization, I would expect there to be a fair amount of equity involved, as that helps align incentives longer term - this makes Zwift be partly ‘their’ company for the new employees. Zwift doesn’t just want a code drop (well, I guess they could, but that would be dumb.)
To the degree that zwift investors like the deal, and it is valued correctly, buying something with equity doesn’t ‘cost’ anything. ie TR bought for $100 of new stock, investors value TR at $100, stock price stays the same (existing zwift owners don’t pay anything), and market cap goes up by $100.
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I wouldn’t be so sure. I’ve heard 150k subscribers thrown around. If that’s right, their annual recurring revenue would be ~$30m. There are all kinds of ways to measure company value, but it’s often done as a multiple of earnings. I have no idea what TR’s cost structure is, but it would be unusual for a subscription software company not to get at least 2-3x of revenue, even if they were losing $ or barely breaking even (assuming there was an obvious path to earnings and future growth). It would not surprise me to see $100m+ if they really have 150k paying subscribers and growing.
I think people under estimate how disruptive operationalizing “Zwift partners with TR, no buy out, i.e. Plan builder powered by TR, Train now powered by TR in Zwift” would be to TR for two reasons:
- From everything I’ve read, Zwift code is poorly constructed, so making Zwift work with TR is going to take a lot of resources. Plus TR isn’t architected today to do this, so that will have to be done
- If Zwift is kicking significant money over to TR every year, then guess who’s priorities are going to be prioritized? The random TR users? Or Zwift which represents X thousands of users? No brainer
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