Item 1A. Risk Factors.
Investing in our Class A common stock involves a high degree of risk. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described below, together with all of the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” and our audited consolidated financial statements and related notes. Our business, financial condition, and results of operations could also be harmed by risks and uncertainties not currently known to us or that we currently do not believe are material. If any of the risks actually occur, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. In that event, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline, and you could lose part or all of your investment.
Risk Factor Summary
The material risks that may affect our business, financial condition or results of operations include, but are not limited to, those relating to the following:
Risks Related to the Proposed Merger
• The announcement and pendency of our agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Thoma Bravo may have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations and our failure to complete the Merger could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and stock price.
• While the Merger is pending, we are subject to business uncertainties and contractual restrictions that could harm our business relationships, financial condition, results of operations, and business.
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• Litigation has been filed in connection with the Merger and further litigation may arise, which could be costly, prevent consummation of the Merger, divert management’s attention and otherwise harm our business.
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
• We have a history of losses, and we expect to incur losses for the foreseeable future.
• We may not continue to grow on pace with historical rates.
• We face intense competition, especially from larger, well-established companies, and we may lack sufficient financial or other resources to maintain or improve our competitive position.
• If we fail to manage our growth effectively, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service and customer satisfaction or adequately address competitive challenges.
• We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to predict our future results of operations.
• If we fail to innovate in response to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, and changing customer needs, requirements or preferences, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
• If we are unable to efficiently acquire new customers, retain our existing customers or expand the level of adoption of our platform with our customers, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
• Our quarterly and annual results are likely to fluctuate and as a result may adversely affect the trading price of our common stock.
• If our solutions have or are perceived to have defects, errors, or vulnerabilities, or if we otherwise fail or are perceived to fail to provide secure and frictionless user experiences, our brand and reputation could be harmed, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
• If we or our third-party service providers experience a security breach or incident that allows, or is perceived to allow, unauthorized access to our platform or our customers’ data, our reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Risks Related to Our Dependence on Third Parties
• If we are unable to build and maintain successful relationships with our partners, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.
• Defects in or the loss of access to software or services from third parties could increase our costs and adversely affect the quality of our platform.
• Certain estimates and information that we refer to publicly are based on information from third-party sources and we do not independently verify the accuracy or completeness of the data contained in such sources or the methodologies for collecting such data, and any real or perceived inaccuracies in such estimates and information may harm our reputation and adversely affect our business.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property
• We use open source software in our platform and offerings, which could negatively affect our ability to offer our platform and expose us to litigation or other actions.
• If we fail to adequately obtain, maintain, defend, protect, or enforce our intellectual property or proprietary rights, our competitive position could be impaired and we may lose valuable assets, generate less revenue, and incur costly litigation.
• If we cannot license rights to use technologies on reasonable terms, we may not be able to commercialize new products in the future.
• If we are subject to a claim that we infringe, misappropriate, or otherwise violate a third party’s intellectual property rights, our business, financial condition or results of operations could be adversely affected.
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Risks Related to Our Legal and Regulatory Environment
• Our business is subject to a wide range of laws and regulations, many of which are evolving, and failure to comply with such laws and regulations could harm our business, financial condition and results of operations.
• We are subject to stringent laws, rules, and regulations regarding privacy, data protection and information security. Any actual or perceived failure by us to comply with such laws, rules, and regulations, the privacy or security provisions of our privacy policy, our contracts or other legal or regulatory requirements could result in proceedings, actions, or penalties against us and materially adversely affect our business.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Class A Common Stock
• The dual-class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our capital stock (or options or other securities convertible into or exercisable for our capital stock) prior to the completion of our initial public offering, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control.
Risks Related to the Proposed Merger
The announcement and pendency of our agreement to be acquired by affiliates of Thoma Bravo may have an adverse effect on our business and results of operations and our failure to complete the Merger could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, results of operations and stock price.
On October 10, 2022, ForgeRock entered into the Merger Agreement with Parent and Merger Sub. Completion of the Merger remains subject to the satisfaction of certain terms and conditions set forth in the Merger Agreement, including (i) the absence of any order issued by any governmental entity of competent jurisdiction or any law applicable to the merger that, in each case, prevents, materially restrains, or materially impairs the consummation of the Merger; and (ii) the expiration or termination of the waiting period applicable to the Merger pursuant to the HSR Act, and the absence of any agreement with any governmental authority not to consummate the Merger. On December 22, 2022, ForgeRock and Parent each received a Second Request from the DOJ in connection with the DOJ’s review of the Merger. The issuance of the Second Request extends the waiting period under the HSR Act until 30 days after both ForgeRock and Parent have substantially complied with the Second Request. On January 12, 2023, we received approval of the Merger Agreement by the affirmative vote of ForgeRock’s stockholders holding a majority of the outstanding voting power of ForgeRock’s common stock. ForgeRock and entities affiliated with Thoma Bravo have entered into the Timing Agreement with the DOJ in connection with the Merger and the Second Request. Under the Timing Agreement, ForgeRock and Thoma Bravo have agreed that they will certify compliance with the Second Request no earlier than May 1, 2023, and will not consummate the Merger less than 75 days after compliance with the Second Request. The Timing Agreement does not prevent ForgeRock and Thoma Bravo from consummating the Merger sooner if the DOJ closes its investigation of the Merger before that date. The expiration or termination of the waiting period applicable to the Merger pursuant to the HSR Act (and the absence of any agreement with any governmental authority not to consummate the Merger) is the only remaining approval or regulatory condition required to consummate the closing of the Merger under the Merger Agreement. There is no assurance that the remaining conditions to closing the Merger, including the expiration or termination of the waiting period applicable to the Merger pursuant to the HSR Act, will be satisfied before the Termination Date or at all, or that the Merger will be completed on the proposed terms, within the expected timeframe, or at all.
The Merger may be delayed, and may ultimately not be completed, due to a number of factors, including:
• the failure to obtain the expiration or termination of the waiting period applicable to the Merger pursuant to the HSR Act, or any other regulatory approval, clearance or condition that may become applicable to the Merger, before the Termination Date or at all;
• potential future stockholder litigation and other legal and regulatory proceedings, including litigation by the DOJ seeking to block the completion of the Merger, which could prevent, materially restrain, or materially impair the consummation of the Merger;
• the failure of any remaining closing condition to be satisfied before the Termination Date, after which time either ForgeRock or Parent may be entitled to terminate the Merger Agreement; and
• the failure to satisfy any other conditions to the completion of the Merger, including the possibility that a Company material adverse effect would permit Parent not to close the Merger.
If the Merger does not close, we may suffer other consequences that could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and stock price, and our stockholders would be exposed to additional risks, including:
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• to the extent that the current market price of our stock reflects an assumption that the Merger will be completed, the market price of our Class A common stock could decrease if the Merger is not completed;
• investor confidence in us could decline, stockholder litigation could be brought against us, relationships with existing and prospective customers, service providers, investors, lenders and other business partners may be adversely impacted, we may be unable to retain key personnel, and our operating results may be adversely impacted due to costs incurred in connection with the Merger;
• any disruptions to our business resulting from the announcement and pendency of the Merger, including adverse changes in our relationships with customers, suppliers, partners and employees, may continue or intensify in the event the Merger is not consummated or is significantly delayed;
• the risks related to the diversion of attention of ForgeRock management or employees during the pendency of the Merger; and
• the requirement that we pay Parent a termination fee under certain circumstances that give rise to the termination of the Merger Agreement.
There can be no assurance that our business, relationships with other parties, liquidity or financial condition will not be adversely affected, as compared to the condition prior to the announcement of the Merger, if the Merger is not consummated. Even if successfully completed, there are certain risks to our stockholders from the Merger, including:
• we may experience a departure of employees, prior to the closing of the Merger;
• the amount of cash to be paid under the Merger Agreement is fixed and will not be adjusted for changes in our business, assets, liabilities, prospects, outlook, financial condition or operating;
• results or in the event of any change in the market price of, analyst estimates of, or projections relating to, our Class A common stock;
• receipt of the all-cash per share merger consideration under the Merger Agreement is taxable to stockholders that are treated as U.S. holders for U.S. federal income tax purposes; and
• if the Merger is completed, our stockholders will forego the opportunity to realize the potential long-term value of the successful execution of our current strategy as an independent company.
While the Merger is pending, we are subject to business uncertainties and contractual restrictions that could harm our business relationships, financial condition, results of operations, and business.
During the period prior to the closing of the Merger and pursuant to the terms of the Merger Agreement, our business is exposed to certain inherent risks and contractual restrictions that could harm our business relationships, financial condition, results of operations, and business, including:
• potential uncertainty in the marketplace, which could lead current and prospective customers to purchase products and services from other providers or delay purchasing from us;
• difficulties maintaining existing and/or establishing business relationships, including business relationships with significant customers, suppliers and partners;
• the possibility of disruption to our business and operations resulting from the announcement and pendency of the Merger, including diversion of management attention and resources;
• the inability to attract and retain key personnel and recruit prospective employees, and the possibility that our current employees could be distracted, and their productivity decline as a result, due to uncertainty regarding the Merger;
• the inability to pursue alternative business opportunities or make changes to our business pending the completion of the Merger, and other restrictions on our ability to conduct our business;
• our inability to freely issue securities, incur certain indebtedness, declare or authorize any dividend or distribution, or make certain material capital expenditures without Parent's approval;
• our inability to solicit other acquisition proposals during the pendency of the Merger;
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• the amount of the costs, fees, expenses and charges related to the Merger Agreement and the Merger, including but not limited to the cost of professional services, insurance and any legal proceeding that may be instituted against us, which may materially and adversely affect our financial condition; and
• other developments beyond our control, including, but not limited to, changes in domestic or global economic conditions that may affect the timing or success of the Merger.
If any of these effects were to occur, it could adversely impact our business, cash flow, results of operations or financial condition, as well as the market price of our common stock and our perceived value, regardless of whether the Merger is completed.
Litigation has been filed in connection with the Merger and further litigation may arise, which could be costly, prevent consummation of the Merger, divert management’s attention and otherwise harm our business.
Regardless of the outcome of any litigation or future litigation related to the Merger, such litigation may be time-consuming and expensive and may distract our management from running the day-to-day operations of our business. The litigation costs and diversion of management’s attention and resources to address the claims and counterclaims in any litigation related to the Merger may adversely affect our business, results of operations, prospects, and financial condition. If the Merger is not consummated for any reason, litigation could be filed in connection with the failure to consummate the Merger. Any litigation related to the Merger may result in negative publicity or an unfavorable impression of us, which could adversely affect the price of our Class A common stock, impair our ability to recruit or retain employees, damage our relationships with our customers, suppliers, and other business partners, or otherwise harm our operations and financial performance. For more information, see the section titled “Legal Proceedings” below.
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
We have a history of losses, and we expect to incur losses in the future.
We have incurred net losses in each year since our inception. As of December 31, 2022 and 2021, we had an accumulated deficit of $330.1 million and $263.8 million, respectively. We expect to continue to incur net losses in the future. Because the market for our platform is rapidly evolving and has not yet reached widespread adoption, it is difficult for us to predict our future results of operations. We expect our operating expenses to continue to increase over the next several years as we hire additional personnel, particularly in sales and marketing, expand and improve the effectiveness of our distribution channels, expand our operations and infrastructure, both domestically and internationally, pursue business combinations and continue to develop our platform. As we operate as a public company and transition back to a private company, we may incur additional legal, accounting, and other expenses that we did not incur historically. If our revenue does not increase to offset these increases in our operating expenses, we will not be profitable in future periods. Any failure by us to achieve or sustain profitability on a consistent basis could cause the value of our common stock to decline.
We may not continue to grow on pace with historical rates.
We have experienced rapid growth historically, and we may not be able to sustain such growth rates. Thus, you should not rely on our key business metrics or results of operations for any previous quarterly or annual period (or the growth rate relating to such metrics or results) as any indication of future periods. In particular, our revenue growth rate and ARR has fluctuated in prior periods. We expect our revenue growth rate to continue to fluctuate over the short term. In future periods, our revenue growth and ARR could slow or our revenue could decline for a number of reasons, including slowing demand for or adoption of our platform and offerings, increasing competition, any failure to gain or retain customers or partners, a decrease in the growth of our overall market, changes to technology, or our failure, for any reason, to continue to capitalize on growth opportunities. In addition, our revenue growth rate and ARR may experience increased volatility due to global societal and macroeconomic conditions (e.g., economic uncertainties or downturns, health epidemics and other outbreaks, such as COVID-19, inflationary pressures, supply chain disruptions, the military conflict in Ukraine and related sanctions against Russia and Belarus, higher interest rates and strength of the U.S. dollar relative to other currencies). As a result, our past financial performance should not be considered indicative of our future performance. If our revenue growth rate and ARR declines, investors’ perceptions of our business and the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected. Additionally, our ARR does not adjust for the timing impact of revenue recognition for specific performance obligations identified within a contract. Therefore, our ARR growth in any given period may not result in a similar growth rate for revenue. Our revenue is also affected by the overall growth in our business and changes in our revenue mix of self-managed subscriptions and SaaS subscriptions. As a result, our year-over-year growth rates for total revenue may not be comparable due to changes in our revenue mix.
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We face intense competition, especially from larger, well-established companies, and we may lack sufficient financial or other resources to maintain or improve our competitive position.
The identity and access management market is intensely competitive, and we expect competition to increase in the future from established competitors and new market entrants. We face competition from (1) legacy providers such as CA Technologies, IBM and Oracle, (2) cloud-only providers such as Okta, (3) companies that provide a subset of functionality across identity, access and governance such as Okta, Ping Identity (acquisition completed by affiliates of Thoma Bravo in October 2022), and SailPoint (acquisition completed by affiliates of Thoma Bravo in August 2022), and (4) homegrown solutions that are designed to solve a limited identity use case. We also compete with other companies that offer a broad array of IT solutions that compete in our market.
With the continued increase in merger and acquisition transactions in the technology industry, particularly transactions involving cloud-based technologies, there is a significant likelihood that we will compete with other large technology companies in the future. For example, other technology companies could acquire or develop an identity and access management or digital identity platform that competes directly with our platform. These companies have significant name recognition, considerable resources and existing IT infrastructures and powerful economies of scale and scope, which allow them to rapidly develop and deploy new solutions. Many of our existing competitors have, and some of our potential competitors could have, substantial competitive advantages such as greater name recognition and brand awareness, longer operating histories, larger customer bases, larger sales and marketing budgets and resources, broader distribution and established relationships with partners and customers, greater professional services and customer support resources, greater resources to make acquisitions and enter into strategic partnerships, lower labor and research and development costs, larger and more mature intellectual property portfolios and substantially greater financial, technical and other resources. Certain of our competitors may also have greater ease of implementation of their products with customers in our market, as well as flexibility, scale, and breadth of integration points.
In addition, some of our larger competitors have substantially broader product offerings and leverage their relationships based on other products they offer or incorporate functionality into existing products to gain business in a manner that discourages users from purchasing our offerings, including through selling at zero or negative margins, product bundling or closed technology platforms. Potential customers may also prefer to purchase from their existing suppliers rather than a new supplier regardless of product performance or features. Our larger competitors often have broader product lines and market focus and are less susceptible to downturns in a particular market. Our competitors may also seek to repurpose their existing offerings to provide identity solutions with subscription models. Conditions in our market could change rapidly and significantly as a result of technological advancements, partnering by our competitors or continuing market consolidation. Further, industry trends, such as the migration to cloud and the transition to Zero Trust, could give competitors an advantage in the market if they are better positioned to address such industry trends. Additionally, start-up companies that innovate and large competitors that are making significant investments in research and development may invent similar or superior products and technologies that compete with our solutions or solution packages.
Consolidation in the markets in which we compete may affect our competitive position. This is particularly true in circumstances where customers are seeking to obtain a broader set of solutions and services than we are currently able to provide. In addition, some of our competitors may enter into new alliances with each other or may establish or strengthen cooperative relationships with system integrators, third-party consulting firms, or other parties. Any such consolidation, acquisition, alliance, or cooperative relationship could lead to pricing pressure and loss of our market share and could result in a competitor with greater financial, technical, marketing, service, and other resources, all of which could harm our ability to compete. Furthermore, organizations may be more willing to incrementally add solutions to their existing infrastructure from competitors than to replace their existing infrastructure with our offerings. Any failure to meet and address the foregoing could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
If we fail to manage our growth effectively, we may be unable to execute our business plan, maintain high levels of service and customer satisfaction, or adequately address competitive challenges.
We have experienced, and may continue to experience, rapid growth and organizational change, which has placed, and may continue to place, significant demands on our management and our operational and financial resources. Our ability to manage our growth effectively and to integrate new employees and technologies into our existing business will require us to continue to expand our operational and financial infrastructure and to continue to effectively integrate, develop, and motivate a large number of employees (new or existing), while maintaining the beneficial aspects of our culture.
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Continued growth could challenge our ability to develop and improve our operational, financial, and management controls, enhance our reporting systems and procedures, recruit, train, and retain highly skilled personnel, and maintain customer satisfaction. In addition, we have encountered and will continue to encounter risks and challenges frequently experienced by growing companies in evolving industries, including market acceptance of our platform and offerings, intense competition, and our ability to manage our costs and operating expenses. We must continue to improve and expand our IT and financial infrastructure, operating, and administrative systems and relationships with various partners and other third parties. Additionally, we have international operations in but not limited to Canada, France, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, and we may continue to expand our international operations in these jurisdictions or other countries in the future. Our expansion has placed, and our expected future growth will continue to place, a significant strain on our managerial, research and development, sales and marketing, administrative, financial, and other resources. If we are unable to manage our continued growth successfully, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could suffer. In addition, as we expand our business, it is important that we continue to maintain a high level of customer service and satisfaction. As our customer base continues to grow, we will need to expand our account management, customer service, and other personnel, and our network of partners, to provide personalized account management and customer service. If we are not able to continue to provide high levels of customer service, our reputation, as well as our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We have a limited operating history, which makes it difficult to predict our future results of operations.
We were formed in 2009 and we have since frequently expanded our platform features and offerings and evolved our pricing methodologies. Our limited operating history and evolving business make it difficult to evaluate our future prospects and the risks and challenges we may encounter. These risks and challenges include our ability to:
• accurately forecast our revenue and plan our expenses;
• increase the number of new customers and retain and expand relationships with existing customers;
• successfully introduce new offerings and services;
• successfully compete with current and future competitors;
• successfully expand our business in existing markets and enter new markets and geographies;
• anticipate and respond to macroeconomic and technological changes and changes in the markets in which we operate;
• maintain and enhance the value of our reputation and brand;
• maintain and expand our relationships with partners;
• successfully execute on our sales and marketing strategies;
• adapt to rapidly evolving trends in the ways consumers interact with technology;
• hire, integrate, and retain talented technology, sales, customer service, and other personnel; and
• effectively manage rapid growth in our personnel and operations.
If we fail to address the risks and difficulties that we face, including those associated with the challenges listed above as well as those described elsewhere in this “Risk Factors” section, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. Further, because we have limited historical financial data and operate in a rapidly evolving market, any predictions about our future revenue and expenses may not be as accurate as they would be if we had a longer operating history or operated in a more predictable market. We have encountered in the past, and will encounter in the future, risks and uncertainties frequently experienced by growing companies with limited operating histories in rapidly changing industries. If our assumptions regarding these risks and uncertainties, which we use to plan and operate our business, are incorrect or change, or if we do not address these risks successfully, our results of operations could differ materially from our expectations and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. Additionally, we recently launched our SaaS offering, and it is in the early stages of customer adoption. Our SaaS offering may prove to be difficult to scale, or encounter other difficulties and such difficulties could cause our results of operations to differ materially from our expectations and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
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If we fail to innovate in response to rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, and changing customer needs, requirements, or preferences, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
The identity and access management market is characterized by rapid technological change, evolving industry standards, and changing regulations, as well as changing customer needs, requirements and preferences. The success of our business will depend, in part, on our ability to anticipate, adapt, and respond effectively to these changes on a timely and cost-effective basis. In addition, as our customers’ technologies and business plans grow more complex, we expect them to face new and increasing challenges. Our customers require that our platform effectively identify and respond to these challenges without disrupting the performance of our customers’ IT systems or interrupting their business operations. As a result, we must continually modify and improve our offerings in response to changes in our customers’ IT infrastructures and operational needs or end-user preferences. The success of any enhancement to our existing offerings or the deployment of new offerings depends on several factors, including the timely completion and market acceptance of our enhancements or new offerings. Any enhancement to our existing offerings or new offerings that we develop and introduce involves significant commitment of time and resources and is subject to a number of risks and challenges including:
• ensuring the timely release of new offerings, features and platform enhancements;
• adapting to emerging and evolving industry standards, technological developments by our competitors and customers, and changing regulatory requirements;
• interoperating effectively with existing or newly-introduced technologies, systems, or applications of our existing and prospective customers;
• resolving defects, errors, or failures in our platform or offering(s);
• extending the operation of our offerings and services to new and evolving platforms, operating systems, and hardware products, such as mobile and IoT devices; and
• managing new offerings, features, and service strategies for the markets in which we operate.
If we are not successful in managing these risks and challenges, or if our new offerings, platform upgrades and services are not competitive or do not achieve market acceptance, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
If we are unable to efficiently acquire new customers, retain our existing customers, or expand the level of adoption of our platform with our customers, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
To continue to grow our business, it is important that we continue to acquire new customers. Our success in adding new customers depends on numerous factors, including our ability to (1) offer a compelling identity and access management platform and effective offerings, (2) execute our sales and marketing strategy, (3) attract, effectively train and retain new sales, marketing, professional services and support personnel, (4) develop or expand relationships with partners, (5) expand into new geographies and vertical markets, (6) deploy our platform or offerings for new customers, (7) provide quality customer support once deployed, (8) effectively manage and forecast our customer count, and (9) expand our use cases for our existing customers.
It is important to our continued growth that we retain our existing customers. Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscription agreements, and our customers may decide not to renew these agreements with a similar contract period, at the same prices and terms or with the same or a greater number of identities, or at all. Our customer retention or our customers’ use of our platform and services may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including our customers’ satisfaction with our platform and offerings, our customer support and professional services, our prices and pricing plans, the competitiveness of other identity and access management offerings and services, reductions in our customers’ spending levels, user adoption of our platform and offerings, deployment success, utilization rates by our customers, new releases, and changes to our platform or offerings. Additionally, new consolidations, acquisitions, alliances or cooperative relationships involving one or more of our customers may lead such customers not to renew their existing subscriptions with us.
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Our ability to increase revenue also depends in part on our ability to increase the number of identities managed by our platform and sell more use cases or offerings to our existing and new customers. Our ability to increase sales to existing customers depends on several factors, including their experience with implementing our offerings and using our platform and the existing offerings they have implemented, their ability to integrate our offerings with existing technologies and our pricing model. As we expand our market reach, we may experience difficulties in gaining traction and raising awareness among potential customers regarding the critical role that our offerings play in securing their businesses and we may face more competitive pressure in such markets. Additionally, our existing customers may delay or fail to pay us under our commercial agreements. Our Net Retention Rate may fluctuate from period to period and is dependent upon new ARR and renewals from existing customers, of which new ARR is impacted by the mix of new ARR from existing and new customers in any given period. We cannot accurately predict our renewals and Net Retention Rate given the diversity of our customer base, the size of our industry, and geography. Our renewals and Net Retention Rate may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, many of which are outside our control, including the business strength or weakness of our customers, customer usage, the ability of our customers to quickly integrate our products into their businesses, the ability of our customers to continually find new uses for our products within their businesses, and customer satisfaction with our products, platform capabilities, and customer support.
If we are unable to successfully acquire new customers, retain our existing customers or expand sales to existing customers, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Our results of operations are likely to fluctuate and as a result may adversely affect the trading price of our Class A common stock.
Our quarterly and annual results of operations, including our key business metrics, are likely to vary significantly in the future, and period-to-period comparisons of our results of operations may not be meaningful. Accordingly, the results for any one quarter are not necessarily an accurate indication of future performance. Our financial results may fluctuate due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. Factors that may cause fluctuations in our financial results include:
• the Merger, the pendency of the Merger, or the failure to complete the Merger;
• the mix of revenue attributable to our various offerings, in particular, our SaaS and subscription offerings;
• the length of our sales cycles;
• the weighted average duration of our contracts in any given period;
• the mix of revenue attributable to larger transactions as opposed to smaller transactions, and the associated volatility and timing of our transactions;
• the level of demand for our platform;
• our ability to attract new customers, obtain renewals from existing customers, and upsell or otherwise increase our customers’ use of our platform;
• the timing and success of new product introductions by us or our competitors or any other change in the competitive landscape of our market;
• pricing pressure as a result of competition or otherwise;
• seasonal buying patterns for IT spending;
• changes in Remaining Performance Obligations, due to seasonality, the timing of and compounding effects of renewals, invoice duration, size and timing, new business linearity between quarters and within a quarter or average contract term, all of which may impact implied growth rates;
• errors in our forecasting of the demand for our offerings, which could lead to lower than projected revenue, increased costs or both;
• increases in and timing of sales and marketing and other operating expenses that we may incur to grow and expand our operations and to remain competitive;
• security breaches or incidents impacting, technical difficulties with or interruptions to, the delivery and use of our platform and offerings;
• our ability to comply with laws, rules, regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations, and other legal requirements relating to privacy, data protection and information security, including the GDPR, and the California Consumer Privacy Act, or the CCPA;
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• costs related to the acquisition of businesses, talent, technologies, or intellectual property, including potentially significant amortization costs and possible write-downs;
• our ability to effectively obtain, maintain, protect, defend, and enforce our intellectual property rights;
• credit, liquidity, financial or other difficulties confronting our channel partners;
• adverse litigation judgments, settlements of litigation and other disputes or other litigation-related or dispute-related costs;
• the impact of new accounting pronouncements and associated system implementations;
• changes in the legislative or regulatory environment;
• fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates;
• expenses related to real estate, including our office leases, and other fixed expenses; and
• general economic conditions in domestic or international markets, including the economic impact of inflation, supply chain disruptions, competition, health epidemics and other outbreaks, such as COVID-19, and other geopolitical uncertainty and instability, such as the military conflict in Ukraine and related sanctions against Russia and Belarus, resulting sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries, and retaliatory actions taken by Russia in response to such sanctions.
Any one or more of the factors above may result in significant fluctuations in our results of operations. In addition, we generally experience seasonality based on when we enter into agreements with customers, which has historically been the most frequent in our fourth quarter, and our quarterly results of operations generally fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter depending on customer purchasing habits. This seasonality is reflected to a much lesser extent, and sometimes is not immediately apparent, in our revenue, due to the fact that we recognize subscription revenue over the term of the subscription. We expect that seasonality will continue to affect our results of operations in the future and may reduce our ability to predict cash flow and optimize the timing of our operating expenses.
The variability and unpredictability of our quarterly results of operations or key business metrics could result in our failure to meet our expectations or those of securities analysts or investors. If we fail to meet or exceed such expectations for these or any other reasons, the market price of our common stock could decline, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action suits.
If our solutions have or are perceived to have defects, errors, or vulnerabilities, or if we otherwise fail or are perceived to fail to provide secure and frictionless user experiences, our brand and reputation could be harmed, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Real or perceived defects, errors, or vulnerabilities in our software, the failure of our solution to secure digital identities, including any stored or transmitted data and integrated applications, services, and APIs, the failure to protect against advanced or newly developed exploits or discovered vulnerabilities, misconfiguration of our solutions, or the failure of customers to take action on attacks could harm our reputation and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Because our platform is complex, it may contain defects or errors that are not detected until after deployment. We cannot assure you that our products will protect against all security vulnerabilities, exploits, or cyberattacks, especially in light of the rapidly changing cybersecurity landscape that our offerings seek to address. Due to a variety of both internal and external factors, including, without limitation, defects or misconfigurations of our solutions, our offerings could become vulnerable to security incidents that cause them to fail to secure identities, to protect against vulnerabilities and exploits, to secure data that is stored or transmitted, and to secure integrated applications, services, and APIs. In addition, due to a variety of both internal and external factors, including real or perceived defects, errors, vulnerabilities, or misconfiguration in our software, our solutions may fail to deliver a frictionless experience or may significantly or negatively degrade the end user experience which could lead to customer and end user dissatisfaction that could harm our reputation and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Moreover, as our platform is adopted by an increasing number of enterprises and governmental entities, it is possible that the individuals and organizations behind advanced cyberattacks will begin to focus on finding ways to defeat our platform. If this happens, our customers could be specifically targeted by attackers, which could result in vulnerabilities in our platform or undermine the market acceptance of our platform or solutions or our reputation as a provider of identity and access management solutions.
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Companies are increasingly subject to a wide variety of attacks on their systems and networks on an ongoing basis. In addition to threats from traditional computer “hackers,” malicious code (such as malware, viruses, worms and ransomware), employee or contractor theft, fraud, misconduct or misuse, password spraying, phishing, social engineering attacks and denial-of-service attacks, we and our third-party service providers now also face threats from sophisticated nation-state and nation-state supported actors who engage in attacks (including advanced persistent threat intrusions) that add to the risks to our systems (including those hosted on GCP or other cloud services), internal networks, our customers’ systems, and the information that they store and process. Despite our efforts to create security barriers to such threats, it is virtually impossible for us to entirely mitigate these risks, in particular, as the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks increases. For example, the risks of cyberattacks may be increased in connection with Russia’s activities in Ukraine. If any of our customers experiences a cyberattack while using our platform or offerings, or believes that this has occurred, such customer could be disappointed with our platform, regardless of whether our offerings or services were implicated in failing to prevent such attack. Real or perceived security breaches of, or security incidents impacting, our customers’ networks could cause disruption or damage to their networks or other negative consequences and could result in negative publicity to us, damage to our reputation, and other customer relations issues, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
If we or our third-party service providers experience a data security breach or network incident that allows, or is perceived to allow, unauthorized access to our platform or our customers’ data, our reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
As a provider of identity and security solutions, we pose a potential attack vector for cyberattacks. The security measures we have integrated into our internal systems and platform, which are designed to detect unauthorized access or activity and prevent or minimize security breaches and incidents, may not function as expected or may not be sufficient to protect our internal networks and platform against certain attacks and other security breaches and incidents. In addition, techniques used to sabotage or to obtain unauthorized access to networks in which data is stored or through which data is transmitted change frequently, become more complex over time and generally are not recognized until launched against a target. As a result, we and our third-party service providers may be unable to anticipate these techniques or implement adequate preventative measures quickly enough to prevent either an electronic intrusion into our systems or services or a compromise of customer data, and we and they may face difficulties or delays in identifying or otherwise responding to any potential security breach or incident. Additionally, our remediation efforts and other response to any potential security breach or incident may not be successful or timely. The military conflict in Ukraine may create additional risks of cyberattacks, and of security breaches and incidents.
Third parties may attempt to fraudulently induce employees, contractors, customers, or our customers’ users into disclosing sensitive information, such as user names, passwords, or other information or otherwise compromise the security of our internal networks, electronic systems, or physical facilities in order to gain access to our data or our customers’ data, which could result in significant legal and financial exposure, a loss of confidence in the security of our platform, interruptions, or malfunctions in our operations, account lock outs, and, ultimately, harm to our business, financial condition, and results of operations. With many of our employees and contractors working remotely, the risks of these types of compromise, and certain other security risks, may be heightened.
Our customers’ use of ForgeRock to access business systems and store data concerning, among other things, their employees, contractors, partners and customers is essential to their use of our platform, which collects, uses, stores, transmits, and otherwise processes customers’ proprietary information and personal data. If a security breach or incident impacting customer data or systems on our platform were to occur, as a result of third-party action, technology limitations, employee or contractor error, malfeasance or otherwise, and the confidentiality, integrity or availability of our customers’ data or systems was disrupted, or if this was perceived to have occurred, we could face claims, demands, and litigation by, and incur significant liability to our customers and to individuals or businesses whose information was being stored by our customers, could face regulatory or governmental investigations, inquiries, or other proceedings, and our platform may be perceived as less desirable, any of which could negatively affect our business and damage our reputation. Further, and notwithstanding any contractual rights or remedies we may have, because we do not control our third-party service providers, including their security measures and the processing of data by our third-party service providers, we cannot ensure the integrity or security of measures they take to protect customer information and prevent data loss.
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In addition, security breaches or incidents impacting our platform, including from ransomware, could result in a risk of loss or unauthorized disclosure or other processing of critical information, including personal data, or the denial of access to or other inability to access this information, which, in turn, could lead to enforcement actions, litigation, regulatory or governmental audits, investigations, inquiries, or other proceedings and possible significant liability, and increased requests by individuals regarding their personal data. Actual or perceived security breaches and incidents could also damage our relationships with and ability to attract customers and partners, and trigger service availability, indemnification, and other contractual obligations. Security breaches and incidents may also cause us to incur significant investigation, mitigation, remediation, notification and other expenses, including necessitating that we put in place additional measures designed to prevent further security breaches or incidents. We may be required to expend significant capital and financial resources to protect against such threats or to alleviate problems caused by security breaches and incidents. Furthermore, as a provider of identity and security solutions, any such breach or incident, including a breach of our customers’ systems, could compromise systems secured by our products, creating system disruptions or slowdowns and exploiting security vulnerabilities of our or our customers’ systems, and the information stored on our or our customers’ systems could be improperly accessed, publicly disclosed, altered, lost, stolen, made unavailable, or otherwise processed, which could result in a loss of intellectual property and subject us to claims, demands, and litigation from private parties, as well as regulatory or governmental investigations and other proceedings, fines, penalties, and other liabilities, harm to our reputation and market position, and financial harm. While we maintain cybersecurity insurance, our insurance may be insufficient to cover all liabilities incurred in these incidents, and any incidents may result in loss of, or increased costs of, our cybersecurity insurance. We also cannot ensure that our existing insurance coverage will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims related to a security incident or breach, or that the insurer will not deny coverage as to any future claim. The successful assertion of one or more large claims against us that exceed available insurance coverage, or the occurrence of changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or the imposition of large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could adversely affect our reputation and our business, financial condition, and results of operations. We also cannot ensure that any limitations of liability provisions in our customer agreements, contracts with third-party service providers and other contracts for a security lapse or breach or other security-related matter would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim.
Any breach or incident, or any perceived breach or incident, of our systems, our customers’ systems, or other systems or networks secured by our products, whether or not any such breach or incident is due to a vulnerability in our platform, may also undermine confidence in our platform or our industry and result in damage to our reputation and brand, negative publicity, loss of partners, customers and sales, increased costs to remedy any problem, costly litigation, regulatory or governmental investigations, inquiries, or other proceedings, and other liability. In addition, a breach or violation of the security measures of one of our partners could result in the exfiltration of confidential corporate information or other data that may provide additional avenues of attack, and if a high profile security breach or incident occurs with respect to a comparable identity and access management provider, our customers and potential customers may lose trust in identity and access management providers generally, which could adversely impact our ability to retain existing customers or attract new ones, potentially causing a negative impact on our business. Any of these negative outcomes could negatively impact market acceptance of our platform and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Health epidemics and other outbreaks, such as COVID-19, have harmed and could continue to harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our business could be adversely impacted by the effects of possible health epidemics and other outbreaks. Such effects may include, for example:
• for certain enterprises, delaying or pausing digital transformation and expansion projects and negatively impacting IT spending, which has caused some potential customers to delay or forgo purchases of subscriptions for our platform and services and some existing customers to fail to renew subscriptions, reduce their usage or fail to expand their usage of our platform;
• restricting our sales operations and marketing efforts, reducing the effectiveness of such efforts in some cases and delaying or lengthening our sales cycles; and
• delaying the delivery of professional services and training to our customers.
Health epidemics and other outbreaks, such as COVID-19, may cause us to experience the foregoing challenges in our business in the future and could have other effects on our business, including disrupting our ability to develop new offerings and enhance existing offerings, market, and sell our products and conduct business activities generally.
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We have in the past taken precautionary measures intended to reduce the risk of COVID-19 spreading to our employees, our customers and the communities in which we operate, and we may take similar measures for further health epidemics and other outbreaks as required by government entities or that we determine are in the best interests of our employees, customers, partners, and third-party service providers. In particular, governmental authorities have previously instituted shelter-in-place policies or other restrictions in many jurisdictions in which we operate, including in the San Francisco Bay Area where our headquarters is located, which policies required most of our employees to work remotely. These precautionary measures and policies could negatively impact product innovation and development and employee and organizational productivity, training, and collaboration, or otherwise disrupt our business operations. The further continuation of working remotely may expose us to increased risks of security breaches or incidents. We may need to enhance the security of our platform and offerings, our data, and our internal IT infrastructure, which may require additional resources and may not be successful.
The extent to which health epidemics and other outbreaks, such as COVID-19 may impact our business and results of operations will depend on future developments that are highly uncertain and cannot be predicted. To the extent a health epidemic adversely affects our business, financial condition, and results of operations, it is likely to also have the effect of heightening many of the other risks described in this “Risk Factors” section.
If our platform and offerings fail to help our customers achieve and maintain compliance with certain government regulations and industry standards, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
The success of our platform depends, in large part, on its ability to help our customers achieve and maintain compliance with certain industry standards and government regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, the CCPA, the GDPR, and the GLBA, and these types of regulations continue to proliferate globally. These industry standards may change with little or no notice, including changes that could make them more or less onerous for businesses. In addition, governments may also adopt new laws or regulations, or make changes to existing laws or regulations, that could affect whether our customers believe our platform assists them in maintaining compliance with such laws or regulations. If our platform and offerings fail to expedite our customers’ compliance initiatives, our customers may lose confidence in our platform and could switch to products offered by our competitors. In addition, if government regulations and industry standards related to digital identity and security are changed in a manner that makes such regulations and industry standards less onerous, our customers may view compliance as less critical to their businesses, and our customers may be less willing to purchase our platform and offerings. If we are unable to manage the foregoing risks, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We recognize substantially all of our revenue from subscriptions over the term of the relevant subscription period, and as a result, downturns or upturns in sales may not be immediately reflected in our results of operations.
We recognize revenue from the non-license element of subscriptions and support and maintenance ratably over the term of the subscription or support and maintenance agreements with our customers, which is generally one to three years. As a result, a substantial portion of the revenue that we report in each period will be derived from the recognition of deferred revenue relating to agreements entered into in prior periods. Consequently, the full impact of a decline in new sales or renewals in any one period may not be immediately reflected in our results of operations for such period. Accordingly, the effect of significant downturns in sales and market acceptance of and demand for our platform and changes in our rate of renewals may not be fully reflected in our results of operations until future periods.
We also intend to increase our investment in research and development, sales and marketing, and general and administrative functions, and other areas to grow our business. These costs are generally expensed as incurred (with the exception of sales commissions), as compared to a significant portion of our revenue, which is recognized ratably in future periods. We may recognize the costs associated with such increased investments earlier than some of the anticipated benefits and the return on these investments may be lower, or may develop more slowly, than we expect, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition and results of operations.
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Our sales cycle is frequently long and unpredictable, and our sales efforts require considerable time and expense.
Since we primarily focus on selling our offerings to enterprises, the timing of our sales can be difficult to predict. We and our partners are often required to spend significant time and resources to better educate and familiarize potential customers with the value proposition of our platform and offerings. Customers often view the purchase of our platform and offerings as a strategic decision and significant investment and, as a result, frequently require considerable time to evaluate, test, and qualify our platform and offerings prior to purchase. In particular, for customers in highly-regulated industries, the selection of a security solution provider is a critical business decision due to the sensitive nature of these customers’ data, which results in particularly extensive evaluations prior to the selection of information security vendors. During the sales cycle, we expend significant time and money on sales and marketing and contract negotiation activities, which may not result in a sale. Additional factors that may influence the length and variability of our sales cycle include:
• the discretionary nature of purchasing and budget cycles and decisions;
• lengthy purchasing approval processes;
• the industries in which our customers operate;
• the evaluation of competing solutions and offerings during the purchasing process;
• time, complexity and expense involved in replacing existing solutions;
• announcements or planned introductions of new offerings, features or functionality by our competitors or of new offerings, features or functionality by us; and
• evolving functionality demands.
If our efforts in pursuing sales and customers are unsuccessful, or if our sales cycles lengthen, our revenue could be lower than expected, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our international operations and continued international expansion subject us to additional costs and risks, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We have historically generated a substantial portion of our revenue outside the United States. Our growth strategy depends, in part, on our continued international expansion. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to address international markets, but there is no guarantee that such efforts will be successful. Additionally, our international sales and operations are subject to a number of risks, including the following:
• unexpected costs and errors in the localization of our platform, including translation into foreign languages and adaptation for local practices and regulatory requirements;
• lack of familiarity and burdens of complying with foreign laws, legal standards, privacy standards, regulatory requirements, tariffs, and other barriers;
• laws and business practices favoring local competitors or commercial parties;
• costs and liabilities related to compliance with foreign data privacy, protection and security laws, rules, regulations, standards and enforcement, including the GDPR;
• fluctuations in exchange rates that may increase the volatility of our foreign-based revenue and expense;
• risk that our foreign employees or partners will fail to comply with U.S. and foreign laws;
• practical difficulties of obtaining, maintaining, defending, protecting, and enforcing intellectual property rights in countries with fluctuating laws and standards and reduced or varied protection for intellectual property rights in some countries;
• restrictive governmental actions focusing on cross-border trade, including taxes, trade laws, tariffs, import and export restrictions, controls, or quotas, barriers, sanctions, custom duties, or other trade restrictions;
• unexpected changes in legal and regulatory requirements;
• difficulties in managing partners;
• differing technology standards;
• longer accounts receivable payment cycles and difficulties in collecting accounts receivable;
• difficulties in managing and staffing international operations, including compliance with differing employer-employee relationships and local employment laws;
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• political, economic and social instability, war (including the military conflict in Ukraine, resulting sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries and retaliatory actions taken by Russia in response to such sanctions), armed conflict, or terrorist activities;
• health pandemics or epidemics, such as COVID-19, influenza, and other highly communicable diseases or viruses; and
• potentially adverse tax consequences, including the complexities of foreign value added tax (or other tax) systems, and restrictions on the repatriation of earnings.
Operating in international markets also requires significant management attention and financial resources. We cannot be certain that the investment and additional resources required in establishing operations in other countries will produce desired levels of revenue or profitability. Any of the foregoing factors could harm our ability to generate revenue outside of the United States and, consequently, adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Some of our business partners also have international operations and are subject to the risks described above. Even if we are able to successfully manage the risks of international operations, our business may be adversely affected if our business partners are not able to successfully manage these risks.
We may face exposure to foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations.
A substantial portion of our international customer contracts are denominated in local currencies. In addition, the majority of our international costs are denominated in local currencies. As a result, fluctuations in the value of the U.S. Dollar and foreign currencies may affect our results of operations when translated into U.S. Dollars. We do not currently engage in currency hedging activities to limit the risk of exchange rate fluctuations. However, in the future, we may use derivative instruments, such as foreign currency forward and option contracts, to hedge certain exposures to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates. The use of such hedging activities may not offset any or more than a portion of the adverse financial effects of unfavorable movements in foreign exchange rates over the limited time the hedges are in place. Moreover, the use of hedging instruments may introduce additional risks if we are unable to structure effective hedges with such instruments.
If we fail to offer high-quality customer support, our business and reputation will suffer.
Once our platform is deployed, our customers rely on our support services to resolve any issues that may arise. High-quality customer education and customer support is important for the successful marketing and sale of our platform and offerings and for the renewal of existing customers. We must successfully assist our customers in deploying our platform and offerings, resolving performance issues, and addressing interoperability challenges with a customer’s existing network and security infrastructure. Many enterprises, particularly large enterprises, have complex networks, and require high levels of focused support, including premium support offerings, to fully realize the benefits of our platform. Any failure by us to maintain the expected level of support could reduce customer satisfaction and hurt our customer retention, particularly with respect to our large enterprise customers. To the extent that we are unsuccessful in hiring, training and retaining adequate support resources, our ability to provide adequate and timely support to our customers will be negatively impacted, and our customers’ satisfaction with our platform could be adversely affected.
Given our growth, we may in the future engage third parties to provide support services to our customers. Any failure to properly train or oversee such contractors could result in a poor customer experience, which could have an adverse impact on our reputation and ability to renew subscriptions or engage new customers. In addition, some of our contracts with our larger customers require consent in the event we subcontract the services we provide thereunder. The process of obtaining consent to subcontract support services with these customers could be lengthy and there can be no assurance such consent would be provided.
Furthermore, as we sell our platform and offerings internationally, our support organization faces additional challenges, including those associated with delivering support, training and documentation in languages other than English. Any failure to maintain high-quality customer support, or a market perception that we do not maintain high-quality support, could adversely affect our reputation, business, financial condition, and results of operations, and adversely impact our ability to sell our platform or offerings to existing and prospective customers. The importance of high-quality customer support will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers.
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If we do not set optimal prices for our platform and offerings, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
In the past, we have at times adjusted our prices either for individual customers in connection with long- term agreements or for a particular offering. We expect that we may need to change our pricing in future periods. Further, as competitors introduce new products that compete with ours or reduce their prices, we may be unable to attract new customers or retain existing customers based on our historical pricing. As we expand internationally, we also must determine the appropriate price to enable us to compete effectively in each respective geographic region. In addition, if our mix of offerings changes, then we may need to, or choose to, revise our pricing model. If we do not optimally price our platform and offerings and manage risks related to changing our prices or pricing model, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
If we are unable to manage the costs associated with our professional services, our results of operations could be adversely affected.
We offer professional services associated with implementing our platform and training customers on the use of our platform, and our revenue from professional services carries a negative gross margin compared to our subscription revenue. We price our professional services to be attractive to customers because we believe that our professional services help achieve customer success on our platform, which assists us in retaining customers and expanding our relationships with them. If we are unable to manage and improve the margin associated with our professional services, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
If our platform or offerings do not effectively interoperate with our customers’ existing or future IT infrastructures, our business would be harmed.
Our success depends in part on the interoperability of our platform or offerings with our customers’ IT infrastructures, including third-party operating systems, applications, data and devices that we have not developed and do not control. Third-party products and services are constantly evolving, and we may not be able to modify our offerings to ensure their compatibility with those of other third parties following development changes. Any changes in such infrastructure, operating systems, applications, data or devices that degrade the functionality of our platform or offerings or give preferential treatment to competitive solutions could adversely affect the adoption and usage of our platform. We may not be successful in quickly or cost effectively adapting our platform or offerings to operate effectively with these operating systems, applications, data, or devices. If it is difficult for our customers to access and use our platform or offerings, or if our platform or offerings cannot connect a broadening range of applications, data and devices, then our customer growth and retention may be harmed, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. We rely on open standards for many integrations between our platform and third-party applications that our customers utilize, and in other instances on such third parties making available the necessary tools for us to create interoperability with their applications. If application providers were to move away from open standards, or if a critical, widely-utilized application provider were to adopt proprietary integration standards and not make them available for the purposes of facilitating interoperability with our platform, the utility of our platform and offerings for our customers would be decreased, our offerings may become less marketable, less competitive, or obsolete, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
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Real or perceived errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs in our platform, including deployment complexity, could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs have occurred and may continue to occur in our platform, especially when updates are deployed or new platform offerings and functionalities are rolled out. Our platform is often used in connection with large- scale computing environments with different operating systems, system management software, equipment and networking configurations, which may cause errors or failures of products, or other aspects of the computing environment into which our platform is deployed. In addition, deployment of our platform into complicated, large-scale computing environments may expose errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs in our platform. Any such errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs may be difficult to detect and may not be found until after they are deployed to our customers. Further, our platform and offerings operate in conjunction with, and we are dependent upon, numerous third-party products and components. There have been and may continue to be significant attacks on certain third-party providers, and we cannot guarantee that our or our third-party providers’ systems and networks have not been breached or that they do not contain exploitable defects or bugs that could result in a breach of or disruption to our systems and networks or the systems and networks of third parties that support us and our services. If there is a security vulnerability, error, or other bug in one of these third-party products or components and if there is a security exploit targeting them, we could face increased costs, liability claims, reduced revenue, or harm to our reputation or competitive position. More generally, real or perceived errors, failures, vulnerabilities or bugs in our platform, or delays in or difficulties implementing our platform releases, could result in negative publicity, or corruption of, or unauthorized access to, customer data, loss of or delay in market acceptance of our platform, a decrease in customer satisfaction, confidence or adoption rates, delayed product introductions, compromised ability to protect the data (including personal data) of our customers and our data and intellectual property, an inability to provide some or all of our services, loss of competitive position, or claims by customers for losses sustained by them, all of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Such errors, bugs, vulnerabilities or defects could also be exploited by malicious actors and result in exposure of data of users on our platform, or otherwise result in a security breach or other security incident. We may need to expend significant financial and development resources to analyze, correct, eliminate, or work around errors or defects or to address and eliminate vulnerabilities.
If there are interruptions or performance problems associated with our technology or infrastructure, our customers may experience service outages or delays in the deployment of our platform.
Our continued growth depends on the ability of our existing and potential customers to access our platform 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without interruption or degradation of performance. We have in the past and may in the future experience disruptions, outages and other performance problems with our infrastructure due to a variety of factors, including infrastructure changes, introductions of new functionality, human or software errors, capacity constraints, distributed denial-of-service attacks or other security-related incidents. In some instances, we may not be able to identify the cause or causes of these performance problems immediately or in short order. We may not be able to maintain the level of service uptime and performance required by our customers, especially during peak usage times and as our offerings become more complex and our user traffic increases. If our platform is unavailable or if our customers are unable to access our offerings or deploy them within a reasonable amount of time, or at all, our business would be harmed. Frequent or persistent interruptions in our products and services could cause customers to believe that our products and services are unreliable, leading them to switch to our competitors or to otherwise avoid our products and services.
The adverse effects of any service interruptions on our reputation and financial condition may be disproportionately heightened due to the nature of our business and the fact that our customers expect continuous and uninterrupted access to our offerings and have a low tolerance for interruptions of any duration. Since our customers rely on our offerings to provide and secure access to their IT infrastructures and to support customer-facing applications, any outage on our platform would impair the ability of our customers to operate their businesses, which would negatively impact our brand, reputation and customer satisfaction. Additionally, our insurance policies may be insufficient to cover a claim made against us by any customers affected by any disruptions, outages, or other performance or infrastructure problems.
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Moreover, we depend on services from various third parties to maintain our cloud infrastructure and deploy our offerings, such as GCP, which hosts our platform. If a third-party service provider fails to provide sufficient capacity to support our platform or otherwise experiences service outages, such failure could interrupt our customers’ access to our services, which could adversely affect their perception of our platform’s reliability. Any disruptions in these services, including as a result of actions outside of our control, would significantly impact the continued performance of our offerings. In the event that our service agreements are terminated with our cloud infrastructure providers, or there is a lapse of service, interruption of internet service provider connectivity or damage to such providers’ facilities, we could experience interruptions in access to our platform as well as delays and additional expense in arranging new facilities and services. In the future, these services may not be available to us on commercially reasonable terms, or at all. Any loss of the right to use any of these services could result in decreased functionality of our offerings until equivalent technology is either developed by us or, if available from another provider, is identified, obtained and integrated into our infrastructure. We may also be unable to effectively address capacity constraints, upgrade our systems as needed and continually develop our technology and network architecture to accommodate actual and anticipated changes in technology.
Our platform is accessed by a large number of customers, often at the same time. As we continue to expand the number of our customers and offerings available to our customers, our technology may not be able to scale to accommodate the increased capacity requirements, which may result in interruptions or delays in service. In addition, the failure of third-party cloud infrastructure providers, third-party internet service providers or other third-party service providers whose services are integrated with our platform to meet our capacity requirements could result in interruptions or delays in access to our platform or impede our ability to scale our operations. Any of the above circumstances or events may harm our reputation, cause customers to terminate their agreements with us, impair our ability to obtain subscription renewals from existing customers, impair our ability to grow our customer base, result in the expenditure of significant financial, technical and engineering resources, subject us to financial penalties and liabilities under our service level agreements, and otherwise could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
System interruption and the lack of integration, redundancy and scalability in these systems and infrastructures may harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our success depends, in part, on our ability to maintain the integrity of our systems and infrastructure, including websites, information and related systems. System interruption and a lack of integration and redundancy in our information systems and infrastructure may adversely affect our ability to operate websites, process and fulfill transactions, respond to customer inquiries and generally maintain cost-efficient operations. We may experience occasional system interruptions that make some or all systems or data unavailable or prevent us from efficiently providing access to our platform. We also rely on third-party computer systems, broadband and other communications systems and service providers in connection with providing access to our platform generally. Any interruptions, outages or delays in our systems and infrastructure, our business or third parties, or deterioration in the performance of these systems and infrastructure, could impair our ability to provide access to our platform. Fire, flood, power loss, telecommunications failure, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, other natural disasters, acts of war (including the military conflict in Ukraine) or terrorism and similar events or disruptions may damage or interrupt computer, broadband or other communications systems and infrastructure at any time. Any of these events could cause system interruption, delays and loss of critical data, including personal data, and could prevent us from providing access to our platform. While we have backup systems for certain aspects of these operations, disaster recovery planning by its nature cannot be sufficient for all eventualities. In addition, we may not have adequate insurance coverage to compensate for losses from a major interruption. If any of these events were to occur, it could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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If we fail to efficiently maintain, protect and enhance our brand, our ability to attract new customers could be impaired and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We believe that developing and maintaining awareness of our brand in a cost-effective manner is critical to achieving widespread adoption of our platform and offerings and is critical to our ability to attract new customers. Furthermore, we believe that the importance of brand recognition will increase as competition in our market increases. Successful promotion of our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, our ability to provide reliable and useful offerings at competitive prices, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust and our ability to successfully differentiate our services and platform capabilities from competitive products and services, any of which we may not be able to do effectively. In the past, our efforts to build our brand have involved significant expenses. Brand promotion activities may not yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incur in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, or incur substantial expenses in an unsuccessful attempt to promote and maintain our brand, we may fail to attract new customers or retain our existing customers to the extent necessary to realize a sufficient return on our brand-building efforts, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Failure to effectively develop and expand our marketing and sales capabilities could harm our ability to grow our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform.
Our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our platform depends, in part, on our ability to expand our marketing and sales operations. We plan to continue expanding our direct sales force and engaging additional channel, system integrator and technology partners, both domestically and internationally. This expansion will require us to invest significant financial and other resources. Our business will be harmed if our efforts do not generate a corresponding increase in revenue. We may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from expanding our direct sales force if we are unable to hire and develop talented direct sales personnel, if our new direct sales personnel are unable to achieve desired productivity levels in a reasonable period of time or if we are unable to retain our existing direct sales personnel. We also may not achieve anticipated revenue growth from our partners if we are unable to attract and retain additional motivated partners, if any existing or future partners fail to successfully market, resell, implement or support our platform or offerings for their customers, or if they represent multiple providers and devote greater resources to market, resell, implement and support the products and solutions of other providers. For example, some of our partners also sell or provide integration and administration services for our competitors’ products, and if such partners devote greater resources to marketing, reselling and supporting competing products, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
If we cannot maintain our corporate culture as we grow, our business could be adversely affected.
We believe that our corporate culture has been a critical component to our success and that our culture creates an environment that drives and perpetuates our overall business strategy. We have invested substantial time and resources in building our team and we expect to continue to hire as we expand, including with respect to our international operations. As we grow our business, we may find it difficult to maintain our corporate culture. Any failure to preserve our culture could negatively affect our future success, including our ability to recruit and retain personnel and effectively execute on our business strategy.
We depend on our management team and other highly skilled personnel, and we may fail to attract, retain, motivate, or integrate highly skilled personnel, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We depend on the continued contributions of our management team, key employees, and other highly skilled personnel. Our management team and key employees are at-will employees, which means they may terminate their relationship with us at any time. The loss of the services of any of our key personnel or delays in hiring required personnel, particularly within our research and development and engineering teams, could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.Our future success also depends, in part, on our ability to continue to attract and retain highly skilled personnel. Competition for these personnel in the San Francisco Bay Area, where our headquarters is located, and in other locations where we maintain offices, is high, and the industry in which we operate has in the past been characterized by significant competition for skilled personnel as well as high employee attrition. We may not be successful in attracting, retaining, training or motivating qualified personnel to fulfill our current or future needs. Competitors for technical talent increasingly seek to hire our employees, and the increased availability of work-from-home arrangements, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has both intensified and expanded competition while also reducing regional salary differences. In addition, changes in immigration policies may further limit the pool of available talent and impair our ability to recruit and hire technical and professional talent. We have intensified our efforts to recruit and retain talent. These efforts have increased our expenses, and they may not be successful in attracting, retaining, and motivating the workforce necessary to deliver on our strategy. Additionally, the former employers of our new employees may attempt to assert that our new employees or we have breached their legal obligations, which may be time-consuming, distracting to management and may divert our resources. To help attract, retain, and motivate
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qualified employees, we use stock-based awards, such as RSUs, and performance-based cash incentive awards. Sustained declines in our stock price, or lower stock price performance relative to competitors, can reduce the retention value of our stock-based awards. Our employee hiring and retention also depend on our ability to build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workplace culture and be viewed as an employer of choice. To the extent our compensation programs and workplace culture are not viewed as competitive, our ability to attract, retain, and motivate employees can be weakened, which could harm our results of operations. If we fail to attract and integrate new personnel or retain and motivate our current personnel, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We may be unable to make acquisitions and investments, successfully integrate acquired companies into our business, or our acquisitions and investments may not meet our expectations, any of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We have in the past acquired, and we may in the future acquire or invest in, businesses, offerings, technologies, or talent that we believe could complement or expand our platform, enhance our technical capabilities or otherwise offer growth opportunities. We may not be able to fully realize the anticipated benefits of such acquisitions or investments. The pursuit of potential acquisitions may divert the attention of management and cause us to incur significant expenses related to identifying, investigating and pursuing suitable acquisitions, whether or not they are consummated.
There are inherent risks in integrating and managing acquisitions. If we acquire additional businesses, we may not be able to assimilate or integrate the acquired personnel, operations, solutions and technologies successfully, or effectively manage the combined business following the acquisition. We also may not achieve the anticipated benefits or synergies from the acquired business due to a number of factors, including, without limitation:
• delays or reductions in customer purchases for both us and the acquired business;
• disruption of partner and customer relationships;
• potential loss of key employees of the acquired company;
• claims by and disputes with the acquired company’s employees, customers, stockholders or third parties;
• unknown liabilities or risks associated with the acquired business, product or technology, such as contractual obligations, potential security vulnerabilities of the acquired company and its products and services, potential intellectual property infringement, misappropriation or other violation, costs arising from the acquired company’s failure to comply with legal or regulatory requirements and litigation matters;
• acquired technologies or products may not comply with legal or regulatory requirements and may require us to make additional investments to make them compliant;
• acquired technologies or products may not be able to provide the same support service levels that we generally offer with our other offerings;
• they could be viewed unfavorably by our partners, our customers, our stockholders or securities analysts;
• unforeseen difficulties relating to integration or other expenses; and
• future impairment of goodwill or other acquired intangible assets.
Acquisitions also increase the risk of unforeseen legal liability, including for potential violations of applicable law or industry rules and regulations, arising from prior or ongoing acts or omissions by the acquired businesses that are not discovered by due diligence during the acquisition process. We may have to pay cash, incur debt or issue equity or equity-linked securities to pay for any future acquisitions, each of which could adversely affect our financial condition or the market price of our common stock. The sale of equity or issuance of equity-linked debt to finance any future acquisitions could result in dilution to our stockholders. The incurrence of indebtedness would result in increased fixed obligations and could also include covenants or other restrictions that would impede our ability to manage our operations. Any of the foregoing could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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We track certain operational metrics with internal systems and tools and do not independently verify such metrics. Certain of our operational metrics are subject to inherent challenges in measurement, and any real or perceived inaccuracies in such metrics may adversely affect our business and reputation.
We track certain operational metrics, including ARR, Net Retention Rate, and number of large customers, with internal systems and tools that are not independently verified by any third party and which may differ from estimates or similar metrics published by third parties due to differences in sources, methodologies or the assumptions on which we rely. Our internal systems and tools have a number of limitations, and our methodologies for tracking these metrics may change over time, which could result in unexpected changes to our metrics, including the metrics we publicly disclose. If the internal systems and tools we use to track these metrics undercount or overcount performance or contain algorithmic or other technical errors, the data we report may not be accurate. While these numbers are based on what we believe to be reasonable estimates of our metrics for the applicable period of measurement, there are inherent challenges in measuring these metrics. Limitations or errors with respect to how we measure data or with respect to the data that we measure may affect our understanding of certain details of our business, which could affect our long-term strategies. If our operating metrics are not accurate representations of our business, if investors do not perceive our operating metrics to be accurate or if we discover material inaccuracies with respect to these figures, we expect that our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We have substantial indebtedness under our term loan facility and our obligations thereunder may limit our operational flexibility or otherwise adversely affect our financial condition.
In September 2021, we entered into our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement that provides for senior secured credit consisting of term loans. As of December 31, 2022, the aggregate principal amount of our outstanding indebtedness under our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement was $40.0 million and no further amounts are available to be drawn at this time. There can be no assurance that we will be able to repay this indebtedness when due, or that we will be able to refinance this indebtedness on acceptable terms or at all. Our indebtedness could adversely impact us. For example, these obligations could, among other things:
• make it difficult for us to pay other obligations;
• increase our cost of borrowing;
• make it difficult to obtain favorable terms for any necessary future financing for working capital, capital expenditures, investments, acquisitions, debt service requirements, or other purposes;
• restrict us from making acquisitions or cause us to make divestitures or similar transactions;
• adversely affect our liquidity and result in an adverse effect on our financial condition upon repayment of the indebtedness;
• require us to dedicate a substantial portion of our cash flow from operations to service and repay the indebtedness, reducing the amount of cash flow available for other purposes;
• increase our vulnerability to adverse and economic conditions;
• place us at a competitive disadvantage compared to our less leveraged competitors; and
• limit our flexibility in planning for and reacting to changes in our business.
Restrictions imposed by our outstanding indebtedness and any future indebtedness may limit our ability to operate our business and to finance our future operations or capital needs or to engage in acquisitions or other business activities necessary to achieve growth.
The terms of our outstanding indebtedness restrict us from engaging in specified types of transactions. Subject to certain exceptions, these covenants restrict our ability to, among other things:
• incur additional indebtedness;
• create or incur liens;
• engage in consolidations, amalgamations, mergers, liquidations, dissolutions or dispositions;
• sell, transfer or otherwise dispose of assets;
• pay dividends and distributions on, or repurchase or redeem, capital stock; and
• make acquisitions, investments, loans, advances or capital contributions.
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We cannot guarantee that we will be able to maintain compliance with these covenants or, if we fail to do so, that we will be able to obtain waivers from the lenders and/or amend the covenants. Even if we comply with all of the applicable covenants, the restrictions on the conduct of our business could adversely affect our business by, among other things, limiting our ability to take advantage of financing opportunities, mergers, acquisitions, investments, and other corporate opportunities that may be beneficial to our business. Even if our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement is terminated, any additional debt that we incur in the future could subject us to similar or additional covenants.
A breach of any of the covenants in the Amended and Restated Loan Agreement could result in an event of default, which, if not cured or waived, could trigger acceleration of our indebtedness and an increase in the interest rates applicable to such indebtedness, and may result in the acceleration of or default under any other debt we may incur in the future to which a cross-acceleration or cross-default provision applies. The acceleration of the indebtedness under our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement or under any other indebtedness could have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations, and financial condition. In the event of any default under our existing or future debt instruments, the applicable lenders could elect to terminate borrowing commitments and declare all borrowings and loans outstanding, together with accrued and unpaid interest and any fees and other obligations, to be due and payable. In addition, we have granted a security interest in a significant portion of our assets to secure our obligations under our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement. During the existence of an event of default under our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement, the applicable lenders could exercise their rights and remedies thereunder, including by way of initiating foreclosure proceedings against any assets constituting collateral for our obligations.
We may be unable to generate sufficient cash flow to satisfy our debt service obligations, which could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our ability to make scheduled payments on or to refinance our debt obligations depends on our financial condition and results of operations, which are subject to prevailing economic and competitive conditions and to certain financial, business, legislative, regulatory, and other factors beyond our control. We may not be able to maintain a level of cash flows from operating activities sufficient to permit us to pay the principal, premium, if any, or interest on our indebtedness. If our cash flows and capital resources are insufficient to fund our debt service obligations, we may be forced to reduce or delay strategic acquisitions and partnerships, capital expenditures, and payments on account of other obligations, seek additional capital, restructure or refinance our indebtedness, or sell assets. These alternative measures may not be successful and may not permit us to meet our scheduled debt service obligations. Our ability to restructure or refinance our debt will depend on the condition of the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. Any refinancing of our debt could be at higher interest rates and could require us to comply with more onerous covenants, which could further restrict our business operations. In addition, we cannot assure you that we will be able to refinance any of our indebtedness on commercially reasonable terms, or at all.
If we are unable to repay or otherwise refinance our indebtedness when due, or if any other event of default is not cured or waived, the applicable lenders could accelerate our outstanding obligations or proceed against the collateral granted to them to secure that indebtedness, which could force us into bankruptcy or liquidation. In the event the applicable lenders accelerate the repayment of our borrowings, we and our subsidiaries may not have sufficient assets to repay that indebtedness. Any acceleration of amounts due under the agreements governing our amended and restated term loan facility or the exercise by the applicable lenders of their rights under the security documents could have a material and adverse effect on our business.
Despite our level of indebtedness, we and our subsidiaries may still be able to incur substantially more debt, including off-balance sheet financing, contractual obligations and general and commercial liabilities. This could further exacerbate the risks to our financial condition described above.
We and our subsidiaries may incur significant additional indebtedness in the future, including additional tranches of term loans and/or term loan increases and/or revolving credit facilities, contractual obligations, and general and commercial liabilities. Although the terms of our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement contain restrictions on the incurrence of additional indebtedness, such restrictions are subject to a number of significant exceptions and qualifications and any additional indebtedness incurred in compliance with such restrictions could be substantial. These restrictions also will not prevent us from incurring obligations that do not constitute indebtedness. If we and our subsidiaries incur significant additional indebtedness or other obligations, the related risks that we face could increase.
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We may require additional capital, which may not be available on terms acceptable to us, or at all.
Historically, we have funded our operations and capital expenditures primarily through equity issuances, debt instruments and cash generated from our operations. To support our growing business, we must have sufficient capital to continue to make significant investments in our platform. If we raise additional funds through the issuance of equity, equity-linked or debt securities, those securities may have rights, preferences or privileges senior to those of our common stock, and our existing stockholders may experience dilution. Any debt financing secured by us in the future could involve restrictive covenants relating to our capital-raising activities and other financial and operational matters, which may make it more difficult for us to obtain additional capital and to pursue business opportunities.
We evaluate financing opportunities from time to time, and our ability to obtain financing will depend on, among other things, our development efforts, business plans and operating performance, and the condition of the capital markets at the time we seek financing. We cannot be certain that additional financing will be available to us on favorable terms, or at all. If we are unable to obtain adequate financing or financing on terms satisfactory to us, when we require it, our ability to continue to support our business growth and to respond to business challenges could be significantly limited, and our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. In September 2021, we entered into our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement, which provides for term loans, and we must adhere to the covenants contained therein.
Our results of operations may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles applicable to us.
US GAAP is subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the “FASB”, the SEC and other various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret appropriate accounting principles. Changes in accounting principles applicable to us, or varying interpretations of current accounting principles, could have a significant effect on our reported results of operations. Further, any difficulties in the implementation of changes in accounting principles, including the ability to modify our accounting systems, could cause us to fail to meet our financial reporting obligations, which could result in regulatory discipline and harm investors’ confidence in us.
Our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies may be based on assumptions that change or prove to be incorrect, which could cause our results of operations to fall below expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in our financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as described in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” The results of these estimates form the basis for making judgments about the recognition and measurement of certain assets and liabilities and revenue and expenses that is not readily apparent from other sources. Our accounting policies that involve judgment include those related to revenue recognition, the period of benefit for deferred sales commissions, assumptions used for estimating the fair value of common stock and to calculate stock-based compensation, certain accrued liabilities, and valuation allowances associated with income taxes. If our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, our results of operations could be adversely affected, which could cause our results of operations to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.
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We may fail to maintain an effective system of disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting, which could impair our ability to produce timely and accurate financial statements or comply with applicable regulations.
We are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and the listing standards of NYSE. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we maintain effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. Our management is responsible for establishing and maintaining adequate internal control over financial reporting to provide reasonable assurance regarding the reliability of our financial reporting and the preparation of financial statements for external purposes in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles. We may in the future discover weaknesses in our internal financial and accounting controls and procedures that need improvement. Our internal control over financial reporting will not prevent or detect all error and all fraud. A control system, no matter how well designed and operated, can provide only reasonable, not absolute, assurance that the control system’s objectives will be met. All control systems have inherent limitations, and, accordingly, no evaluation of controls can provide absolute assurance that misstatements due to error or fraud will not occur or that all control issues and instances of fraud will be detected. We have expended, and anticipate that we will continue to expend, significant resources in order to maintain and improve the effectiveness of our disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. If we are unable to maintain proper and effective internal controls, we may not be able to produce accurate financial statements on a timely basis, which could adversely affect our ability to operate our business and could result in regulatory action. Ineffective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting could also cause investors to lose confidence in our reported financial and other information, which would likely adversely affect the market price of our common stock. In addition, if we are unable to continue to meet these requirements, we may not be able to remain listed on NYSE.
Our independent registered public accounting firm may issue a report that is adverse in the event it is not satisfied with the level at which our internal control over financial reporting is documented, designed or operating. Any failure to maintain effective disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations and could cause a decline in the market price of our Class A common stock.
Our business could be adversely affected by economic downturns.
Prolonged economic uncertainties or downturns could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Negative conditions in the general economy in either the United States or abroad, including conditions resulting from financial and credit market fluctuations, changes in economic policy, trade uncertainty, including changes in tariffs, sanctions, international treaties and other trade restrictions, the occurrence of a natural disaster or global public health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, or armed conflicts, such as the military conflict in Ukraine, resulting sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries, and retaliatory actions taken by Russia in response to such sanctions, could cause a decrease in corporate spending on digital identity offerings in general and negatively affect the growth of our business.
These conditions could make it extremely difficult for our customers and us to forecast and plan future business activities accurately and could cause our customers to reevaluate their decision to purchase access to our platform, which could delay and lengthen our sales cycles or result in cancellations of planned purchases. These conditions could also cause our customers to reduce their spend, or duration of, their contracts with us, or request concessions including extended payment terms or better pricing. Further, during challenging economic times, our customers may face issues in gaining timely access to sufficient credit, which could result in an impairment of their ability to make timely payments to us, if at all. If that were to occur, we may be required to increase our allowance for doubtful accounts, which would adversely affect our results of operations.
A substantial downturn in any of the industries in which our customers operate may cause firms to react to worsening conditions by reducing their capital expenditures in general or by specifically reducing their spending on digital identity offerings. Customers in these industries may delay or cancel projects or seek to lower their costs by renegotiating vendor contracts. To the extent purchases of access to our platform are perceived by customers and potential customers to be discretionary, our revenue may be disproportionately affected by delays or reductions in general digital identity spending.
We cannot predict the timing, strength or duration of any economic slowdown, instability or recovery, generally or within any particular industry or geography. Any economic downturns of the general economy or industries in which we operate would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. For example, the full impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is unknown at this time but could result in adverse changes in our results of operations for an unknown period of time.
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Our business could be adversely affected by pandemics, natural disasters, political crises or other unexpected events.
A significant natural disaster, such as an earthquake, fire, hurricane, tornado, flood or significant power outage, could disrupt our operations, mobile networks, the Internet or the operations of our third-party technology providers. In particular, our corporate headquarters is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region known for seismic activity. In addition, any unforeseen public health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, political crises, such as terrorist attacks, war and other political instability, such as the military conflict in Ukraine, resulting sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries and retaliatory actions taken by Russia in response to such sanctions, or other catastrophic events, whether in the United States or abroad, can continue to adversely affect our operations or the economy as a whole. The impact of any natural disaster, act of terrorism or other disruption to us or our third- party providers’ abilities could result in decreased demand for our platform or a delay in the provision of our platform, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. All of the aforementioned risks would be further increased if our disaster recovery plans prove to be inadequate.
Risks Related to Our Dependence on Third Parties
If we are unable to build and maintain successful relationships with our partners, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected.
We employ a go-to-market business model whereby a meaningful portion of our revenue is generated by sales through our strategic global channel partners, including global strategic consulting firms and global systems integrators, that further expand the reach of our direct sales force into additional geographies, sectors and industries. We provide certain of our partners with specific training and programs to assist them in selling access to our platform, and our deal cycles are sometimes protracted due to our partners’ involvement. If our partners are unsuccessful in marketing and selling access to our platform, it would limit our expansion into certain geographies, sectors and industries. If we are unable to develop and maintain effective sales incentive programs for our partners, we may not be able to incentivize these partners to sell access to our platform to customers.
Identifying partners, and negotiating and documenting relationships with them, requires significant time and resources. Our competitors may be effective in causing third parties to favor their products or services over subscriptions to our platform. In addition, acquisitions of such partners by our competitors could result in a decrease in the number of our current and potential customers, as these partners may no longer facilitate the adoption of our applications by potential customers. Further, some of our partners are or may become competitive with certain of our offerings and may elect to no longer integrate with our platform. If we are unsuccessful in establishing or maintaining our relationships with third parties, our ability to compete in the marketplace or to grow our revenue could be impaired, and our results of operations may suffer. Even if we are successful, we cannot ensure that these relationships will result in increased customer adoption and usage of our platform or increased revenue. If our existing relationships with our partners are disrupted or terminated for any of these factors, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Defects in or the loss of access to software or services from third parties could increase our costs and adversely affect the quality of our platform.
We rely on technologies from third parties to operate critical functions of our business, including cloud infrastructure services such as GCP, customer relationship management services, support software and development hardware. Our business would be disrupted if any of the third-party software or services we use, or functional equivalents, were unavailable due to extended outages or interruptions or because they are no longer available on commercially reasonable terms or prices. In each case, we would be required to either seek licenses to software or services from other parties and redesign our platform and offerings to function with such software or services or develop substitutes ourselves, which would result in increased costs and could result in delays in our offering launches and the release of new platform offerings until equivalent technology can be identified, licensed or developed, and integrated into our platform. Furthermore, we might be forced to limit the features available on our platform. Any delays and feature limitations could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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Certain estimates and information that we refer to publicly are based on information from third-party sources and we do not independently verify the accuracy or completeness of the data contained in such sources or the methodologies for collecting such data, and any real or perceived inaccuracies in such estimates and information may harm our reputation and adversely affect our business.
Certain estimates and information that we refer to publicly, including general expectations concerning our industry and the market in which we operate and addressable market size, are based to some extent on information provided by third-party providers. This information involves a number of assumptions and limitations, and although we believe the information from such third-party sources is reliable, we have not independently verified the accuracy or completeness of the data contained in such third-party sources or the methodologies for collecting such data. If there are any limitations or errors with respect to such data or methodologies, or if investors do not perceive such data or methodologies to be accurate, or if we discover material inaccuracies with respect to such data or methodologies, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected.
Risks Related to Our Intellectual Property
We use open source software in our platform and offerings, which could negatively affect our ability to offer our platform and expose us to litigation or other actions.
We use open source software in our platform and offerings and expect to use more open source software in the future. In certain circumstances, we also make available, upon customer request, the source code of the open source portions of our software. From time to time, there have been claims challenging the ownership of open source software against companies that incorporate open source software into their products. However, the terms of many open source licenses have not been interpreted by U.S. or foreign courts, and there is a risk that these licenses could be construed in a way that could impose unanticipated conditions or restrictions on our ability to commercialize our platform and offerings. As a result, we could be subject to lawsuits by parties claiming ownership of what we believe to be open source software, or claiming that software we developed using such open source software is a derivative work of open source software and demanding the release of portions of our source code, or otherwise seeking to enforce the terms of the applicable open source license. Litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our financial condition and results of operations or require us to devote additional research and development resources to change our platform and offerings.
In addition, if we were to combine our proprietary software offerings with open source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain of the open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software to the public. While we monitor our use of open source software and try to ensure that none is used in a manner that would require us to disclose our proprietary source code or that would otherwise breach the terms of an open source agreement, such use could inadvertently occur, or could be claimed to have occurred, in part because open source license terms are often ambiguous. This would allow our competitors to create similar products with less development effort and time. If we inappropriately use open source software, or if the license terms for open source software that we use change, we may be required to re-engineer our platform or offerings, incur additional costs, discontinue the sale of some or all of our platform or take other remedial actions.
In addition to risks related to license requirements, usage of open source software can lead to greater risks than use of third-party commercial software, as open source licensors generally do not provide warranties or assurance of title or controls on origin of the software. There is typically no support available for open source software, and we cannot ensure that the authors of such open source software will implement or push updates to address security risks or will not abandon further development and maintenance. In addition, many of the risks associated with usage of open source software, such as the lack of warranties or assurances of title, cannot be eliminated, and could, if not properly addressed, negatively affect our business. We have established processes to help alleviate these risks, including a review process for screening requests from our development organizations for the use of open source software, but we cannot be sure that all of our use of open source software is in a manner that is consistent with our current policies and procedures, or will not subject us to liability. Any of these risks could be difficult to eliminate or manage and, if not addressed, could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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If we fail to adequately obtain, maintain, defend, protect or enforce our intellectual property or proprietary rights, our competitive position could be impaired and we may lose valuable assets, generate less revenue and incur costly litigation.
Our success is dependent, in part, upon protecting our intellectual property, proprietary information and technology. We rely, or may in the future rely, on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, trade secret laws in the United States and certain other jurisdictions and contractual restrictions to establish and protect our proprietary rights, all of which provide only limited protection. However, the steps we take to protect our intellectual property may be inadequate and we will not be able to protect our intellectual property if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property. Various factors outside our control pose a threat to our intellectual property rights, as well as to our products, services and technologies. For example, we may fail to obtain effective intellectual property protection, or the efforts we have taken to protect our intellectual property rights may not be sufficient or effective, and any of our intellectual property rights may be challenged, which could result in them being narrowed in scope or declared invalid or unenforceable.
We make business decisions about when to seek patent protection for a particular technology and when to rely upon trade secret protection, and the approach we select may ultimately prove to be inadequate. There can be no assurance our intellectual property rights will be sufficient to protect against others offering products or services that are substantially similar to ours and compete with our business or that unauthorized parties may attempt to copy aspects of our technology and use information that we consider proprietary. For example, it is possible that third parties, including our competitors, may obtain patents relating to technologies that overlap or compete with our technology. If third parties obtain patent protection with respect to such technologies, they may assert that our technology infringes their patents and seek to charge us a licensing fee or otherwise preclude the use of our technology.
We rely in part on trade secrets, proprietary know-how and other confidential information to maintain our competitive position. We attempt to protect our intellectual property, technology and confidential information by requiring our employees, contractors, consultants, corporate collaborators, advisors and other third parties who develop intellectual property on our behalf to enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements and third parties we share information with to enter into nondisclosure and confidentiality agreements. However, we cannot guarantee that we have entered into such agreements with each party who has developed intellectual property on our behalf and each party that has or may have had access to our confidential information, know-how and trade secrets, and no assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to and distribution of our intellectual property, trade secrets, platform or offerings and proprietary and confidential information. Further, these agreements do not prevent our competitors from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our platform or offerings. These agreements may be insufficient or breached, or may not effectively prevent unauthorized access to or unauthorized use, disclosure, misappropriation or reverse engineering of, our confidential information, intellectual property, or technology. Moreover, these agreements may not provide an adequate remedy for breaches or in the event of unauthorized use or disclosure of our confidential information or technology, or infringement of our intellectual property. Enforcing a claim that a party illegally disclosed or misappropriated a trade secret or know-how is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, and the outcome is unpredictable. In addition, trade secrets and know-how can be difficult to protect and some courts inside and outside the U.S. are less willing or unwilling to protect trade secrets and know-how. If any of our trade secrets were to be lawfully obtained or independently developed by a competitor or other third party, we would have no right to prevent them from using that technology or information to compete with us, and our competitive position would be adversely harmed. The loss of trade secret protection could make it easier for third parties to compete with our products and services by copying functionality. Additionally, individuals not subject to invention assignment agreements may make adverse ownership claims to our current and future intellectual property, and, to the extent that our employees, independent contractors or other third parties with whom we do business use intellectual property owned by others in their work for us, disputes may arise as to the rights in related or resulting know-how and inventions.
Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our platform or offerings and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products that compete with ours. Some license provisions protecting against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosure of our platform or offerings may be unenforceable under the laws of certain jurisdictions and foreign countries. Further, the laws of some countries do not protect intellectual property and proprietary rights to the same extent as the laws of the United States, and mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights in some foreign countries may be inadequate. Any of our intellectual property rights may be challenged or circumvented by others or invalidated or held unenforceable through administrative process or litigation in the United States or in foreign jurisdictions. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain and any changes in, or unexpected interpretations of, intellectual property laws may compromise our ability to enforce our trade secrets and intellectual property rights. To the extent we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our platform or offerings and proprietary information may increase. Accordingly, despite our efforts, we may be unable to prevent third parties from infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating our technology and intellectual property.
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To protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant time, money, and resources to maintain, monitor, and protect these rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Such litigation could be costly, time consuming and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Additionally, because of the substantial amount of discovery required in connection with intellectual property litigation, there is a risk that some of our confidential information could be compromised by disclosure during this type of litigation. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could delay further sales or the implementation of our platform or offerings, impair the functionality of our platform or offerings, delay introductions of new offerings, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our platform and offerings, or injure our reputation.
If we cannot license rights to use technologies on reasonable terms, we may not be able to commercialize new products in the future.
In the future, we may identify additional third-party intellectual property that we may need to license to conduct our business, including to develop or commercialize new products or services. However, such licenses may not be available on acceptable terms or at all. The licensing or acquisition of third-party intellectual property rights is a competitive area, and several more established companies may pursue strategies to license or acquire third-party intellectual property rights that we may consider attractive or necessary. These established companies may have a competitive advantage over us due to their size, capital resources and greater development or commercialization capabilities. In addition, companies that perceive us to be a competitor may be unwilling to assign or license rights to us. Even if such licenses are available, we may be required to pay the licensor substantial royalties based on sales of our products and services. Such royalties are a component of the cost of our products or services and may affect the margins on our products and services. In addition, such licenses may be non-exclusive, which could give our competitors access to the same intellectual property licensed to us. If we are unable to enter into the necessary licenses on acceptable terms or at all, if any necessary licenses are subsequently terminated, if our licensors fail to abide by the terms of the licenses, if our licensors fail to prevent infringement by third parties, or if the licensed intellectual property rights are found to be invalid or unenforceable, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. Defense of any lawsuit or failure to obtain any of these licenses on favorable terms could prevent us from commercializing products, which could have an adverse effect on our competitive position, business, financial condition, and results of operations.
If we are subject to a claim that we infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate a third party’s intellectual property rights, our business, financial condition, or results of operations could be adversely affected.
Claims by third parties that we or customers using our platform infringe, misappropriate or otherwise violate their proprietary technology or other intellectual property rights could harm our business. A number of companies in our industry hold a large number of patents and also protect their copyrights, trade secrets and other intellectual property rights, and there is considerable patent and other intellectual property development activity in our industry. We expect that software companies will increasingly be subject to claims of infringement, misappropriation and other violations of intellectual property rights as the number of products and competitors grows and the functionality of products in different industry segments overlaps. As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving a larger number of intellectual property claims against us grows. In addition, various “non-practicing entities,” and other intellectual property rights holders may attempt to assert intellectual property claims against us or seek to monetize the intellectual property rights they own to extract value through licensing or other settlements.
In addition, the patent portfolios of many of our competitors are larger than ours, and this disparity may increase the risk that our competitors may sue us for patent infringement and may limit our ability to counterclaim for patent infringement or settle through patent cross-licenses. Our use of third-party software and other intellectual property rights also may be subject to claims of infringement or misappropriation. For example, a claim may be made relating to technology that we acquire or license from third parties. In addition, to the extent we hire personnel from competitors, we may be subject to allegations that such personnel have divulged proprietary or other confidential information to us. Further, we may be unaware of the intellectual property rights of others that may cover some or all of our technology, and our insurance may not cover intellectual property rights infringement claims that may be made.
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Our agreements with our customers or third-party service providers also contain indemnification provisions related to claims that our platform infringes upon, misappropriates or otherwise violates the intellectual property rights of third parties. We have in the past, and may in the future, receive such claims. In the event that the resolution of such claims requires us to indemnify our customers or third-party service providers for significant amounts, our business, financial condition and results of operations could be adversely affected. Any claim of infringement, misappropriation or other violation, regardless of its merit or our defenses, could:
• require costly litigation to resolve or the payment of substantial damages, ongoing royalty payments, or other significant amounts to settle such disputes;
• require significant management time and attention;
• cause us to enter into unfavorable royalty or license agreements, which may not be available on commercially reasonable terms, if at all;
• require us to discontinue the sale of some or all of our platform, remove, or reduce features or functionality of our platform or comply with other unfavorable terms;
• require us to indemnify our customers or third-party service providers; or
• require us to expend additional development resources to redesign our platform.
Any of the foregoing could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
If we fail to comply with our obligations under license or technology agreements with third parties, we may be required to pay damages and we could lose license rights that are critical to our business.
We license from third parties certain intellectual property, technologies, data, content and software that are important to our business, and in the future we may enter into additional agreements. If we fail to comply with any of the obligations under our license agreements, we may be required to pay damages and the licensor may have the right to terminate the license. Termination by the licensor may cause us to lose valuable rights, and could prevent us from selling our products and services, or inhibit our ability to commercialize future products and services. Our business may suffer if any current or future licenses terminate, if the licensors fail to abide by the terms of the license, if the licensors fail to enforce licensed patents against infringing third parties, if the licensed intellectual property rights are found to be invalid or unenforceable, or if we are unable to enter into necessary licenses on acceptable terms. Moreover, our licensors may not own or control intellectual property that has been licensed to us and, as a result, we may be subject to claims, regardless of their merit, that we are infringing, misappropriating or otherwise violating a third party’s rights. In addition, the agreements under which we license intellectual property or technology from third parties are generally complex, and certain provisions in such agreements may be susceptible to multiple interpretations. The resolution of any contract interpretation disagreement that may arise could narrow what we believe to be the scope of our rights to the relevant intellectual property or technology, or increase what we believe to be our financial or other obligations under the relevant agreement. Any of the foregoing could an adverse effect on our competitive position, business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We may be obligated to disclose our proprietary source code to certain of our customers, which may limit our ability to protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights and could reduce the renewals of our solutions.
Some of our customer agreements contain provisions permitting the customer to become a party to, or a beneficiary of, a source code escrow agreement under which we place the proprietary source code for certain of our products in escrow with a third party, and in certain circumstances, upon customer request, we also make available the source code of our proprietary software. We are currently party to a source code escrow agreement, pursuant to which an escrow agent may release our source code to customers identified as beneficiaries under such agreement (i) upon our written request or (ii) if we become the subject of a voluntary or involuntary petition in bankruptcy (other than a case filed under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code), and such petition is not dismissed within 120 days of filing, or if we admit in writing of our inability to pay our debts as they become due. We have never released our source code from escrow. Agreements with certain customers may also require us to release our source code under certain other circumstances, such as material breach of the applicable agreement. Disclosing the content of our source code may limit the intellectual property protection we can obtain or maintain for our source code or our products containing that source code and may facilitate intellectual property infringement, misappropriation or other violation claims against us. Following any such release, we cannot be certain that customers will comply with the restrictions on their use of the source code and we may be unable to monitor and prevent unauthorized disclosure of such source code by customers. Any increase in the number of people familiar with our source code as a result of any such release also may increase the risk of a successful hacking attempt. Any of these circumstances could result in an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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Risks Related to Legal and Regulatory Environment
Our business is subject to a wide range of laws and regulations, many of which are evolving, and failure to comply with such laws and regulations could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our business is subject to regulation by various federal, state, local and foreign governmental agencies, including agencies responsible for monitoring and enforcing data privacy, security and protection laws and regulations, intellectual property, employment and labor laws, workplace safety, consumer protection laws, anti- bribery laws, import and export controls, immigration laws, federal securities laws and tax laws and regulations. In certain foreign jurisdictions, these regulatory requirements may be more stringent than in the United States. These laws and regulations impose added costs on our business. Noncompliance with applicable regulations or requirements could subject us to:
• investigations, enforcement actions, orders and sanctions;
• mandatory changes to our products and services;
• disgorgement of profits, fines and damages;
• civil and criminal penalties or injunctions;
• claims for damages by our customers or partners;
• termination of contracts;
• loss of intellectual property rights; and
• temporary or permanent debarment from sales to heavily regulated organizations and governments.
If any governmental sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and an increase in professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could materially harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
In addition, we must comply with laws and regulations relating to the formation, administration and performance of contracts with customers in heavily regulated industries and the public sector, including U.S. federal, state and local governmental organizations, which affect how we and our partners do business with such customers. Selling our product to customers in heavily regulated industries or to the U.S. government, whether directly or through partners, also subjects us to certain regulatory and contractual requirements. Failure to comply with these requirements by either us or our partners could subject us to investigations, fines and other penalties, which would adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Violations of certain regulatory and contractual requirements could also result in us being suspended or debarred from future government contracting or other contracting opportunities. Any of these outcomes could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We are subject to stringent laws, rules and regulations regarding privacy, data protection and information security. Any actual or perceived failure by us to comply with such laws, rules and regulations, the privacy or security provisions of our privacy policy, our contracts or other legal or regulatory requirements could result in proceedings, actions or penalties against us and materially adversely affect our business.
Our customers’ collection, storage, use and other processing of data concerning, among others, their employees, contractors, partners and customers is essential to their use of our platform. We have implemented various features intended to enable our customers to better comply with applicable privacy, data protection and information security requirements in their collection, use and other processing of data within our online service, but these features do not ensure their compliance and may not be effective against all potential concerns relating to privacy, data protection or information security.
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Many jurisdictions have enacted or are considering enacting or revising privacy, data protection or information security legislation, including laws, rules and regulations applying to the collection, use, storage, transfer, disclosure or other processing of personal data, including for purposes of marketing and other communications. The costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by, such laws, rules and regulations that are applicable to the operations of our business, or those of our customers, may limit the use and adoption of our service and reduce overall demand for it. These privacy, data protection and information security related laws, rules and regulations are evolving and may result in increasing regulatory and public scrutiny and escalating levels of enforcement and sanctions. In addition, we are subject to certain contractual obligations regarding the collection, use, storage, transfer, disclosure or other processing of personal data. Although we are working to comply with applicable federal, state, and foreign laws, rules and regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations and other legal obligations that apply to us, those laws, rules, regulations, standards and obligations are evolving and may be modified, interpreted and applied in an inconsistent manner from one jurisdiction to another, and may conflict with one another, other requirements or legal obligations, our practices or the features of our platform. We also expect that there will continue to be new proposed laws, regulations and industry standards concerning privacy, data protection and information security in the United States, the European Union and other jurisdictions, and we cannot yet determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business.
California has enacted the CCPA, which took effect on January 1, 2020 and established a new privacy framework for covered businesses such as ours, which may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies and incur compliance-related costs and expenses. The CCPA broadly defines personal information and gives California residents expanded privacy rights and protections, such as affording them the right to access and request deletion of their information and to opt out of certain sharing and sales of personal information. The law also prohibits covered businesses from discriminating against California residents (for example, charging more for services) for exercising any of their CCPA rights. The CCPA provides for severe civil penalties and statutory damages for violations and a private right of action for certain data breaches that result in the loss of personal information. This private right of action is expected to increase the likelihood of, and risks associated with, data breach litigation. In November 2020, California voters passed the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020, or CPRA. Effective in most material respects as of January 1, 2023, the CPRA imposes additional obligations on companies covered by the legislation and significantly modifies the CCPA, including by expanding the CCPA with additional data privacy compliance requirements that may impact our business. The CPRA also establishes a regulatory agency dedicated to enforcing the CCPA and the CPRA. The effects of the CPRA, the CCPA, other similar state or federal laws, and other future changes in laws or regulations relating to privacy, data protection and information security, particularly any new or modified laws or regulations that require enhanced protection of certain types of data or new obligations with regard to data retention, transfer or disclosure, are significant, may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies, and could greatly increase the cost of providing our offerings, require significant changes to our operations or even prevent us from providing certain offerings in jurisdictions in which we currently operate and in which we may operate in the future or incur potential liability in an effort to comply with such legislation.
Other state legislatures are currently contemplating, and may pass, their own comprehensive data privacy and security laws, with potentially greater penalties and more rigorous compliance requirements relevant to our business, and many state legislatures have already adopted legislation that regulates how businesses operate online, including measures relating to privacy, data security, data breaches and the protection of sensitive and personal information. For example, in March 2021, Virginia enacted the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, or CDPA, which took effect on January 1, 2023; in June 2021, Colorado enacted the Colorado Privacy Act, or CPA, which becomes effective on July 1, 2023; in March 2022, Utah enacted the Utah Consumer Privacy Act, or UCPA, which becomes effective on December 31, 2023; and in May 2022, Connecticut enacted the Connecticut Act Concerning Personal Data Privacy and Online Monitoring, or CPOMA, which takes effect on December 31, 2023. The CDPA, CPA, UCPA, and CPOMA are comprehensive privacy statutes that share similarities with the CCPA, the CPRA, and legislation proposed in other states. The U.S. federal government also is contemplating federal privacy legislation. Laws in all 50 states require businesses to provide notice under certain circumstances to customers whose personal information has been disclosed as a result of a data breach. New laws, amendments to or re-interpretations of existing laws and regulations, industry standards, contractual obligations and other obligations may require us to incur additional costs and restrict our business operations. Such laws and regulations may require companies to implement privacy and security policies, permit users to access, correct and delete personal data stored or maintained by such companies, inform individuals of security breaches that affect their personal data, and, in some cases, obtain individuals’ consent to use personal data for certain purposes. If we, or the third parties on which we rely, fail to comply with federal, state or international laws or regulations relating to privacy, data protection or information security, our ability to successfully operate our business and pursue our business goals could be harmed. In addition to government activity, privacy advocacy groups and technology and other industries are considering various new, additional or different self-regulatory standards that may place additional burdens on us. Future laws, regulations, standards and other obligations, and changes in the interpretation of existing laws, regulations, standards and other obligations may require us to modify our data processing practices and policies, and could impair our or our customers’ ability
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to collect, use or disclose information relating to consumers, which could decrease demand for our applications, increase our costs and impair our ability to maintain and grow our customer base and increase our revenue.
Internationally, many jurisdictions have established their own legal frameworks governing privacy, data protection, and information security with which we may need to comply. For example, the European Union has adopted the GDPR, which went into effect in May 2018 and contains numerous requirements and changes from previously existing EU law, including more robust obligations on data processors and heavier documentation requirements for data protection compliance programs. The GDPR requires data controllers to implement more stringent operational requirements for processors and controllers of personal data, including, for example, transparent and expanded disclosure to data subjects about how their personal data is to be used, imposes limitations on retention of information, introduces mandatory data breach notification requirements, and sets higher standards for data controllers to demonstrate that they have obtained valid consent for certain data processing activities. The GDPR also imposes strict rules on the transfer of personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area, or the EEA, including the United States. In 2016, the EU and United States agreed to a transfer framework for data transferred from the EEA to the United States, called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, but the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield was invalidated in July 2020 by the Court of Justice of the EU, or CJEU. On September 8, 2020, the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner invalidated the Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield on similar grounds. The standard contractual clauses issued by the European Commission for the transfer of personal data, or the SCCs, a potential alternative to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, also have been drawn into question for use under certain circumstances, and regulators have issued additional guidance regarding considerations and requirements that we and other companies must consider and undertake when using the SCCs. In its decision invalidating the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield, the CJEU imposed additional obligations on companies when relying on the SCCs to transfer personal data. The CJEU decision may result in European data protection regulators applying differing standards for, and requiring ad hoc verification of, transfers of personal data from the EEA and Switzerland to the U.S. On June 4, 2021, the European Commission published new SCCs that are required to be implemented, and it remains to be seen whether additional means for lawful data transfers will become available. The revised SCCs, recommendations and opinions of regulators, and other developments relating to cross-border data transfer, may require us to implement additional contractual and technical safeguards for any personal data transferred out of the EEA and Switzerland, which may increase compliance and related costs, lead to increased regulatory scrutiny or liability, necessitate additional contractual negotiations, and adversely impact our business, financial condition, and results of operations. Fines for noncompliance with the GDPR are significant and can be up to the greater of €20.0 million or 4% of annual global turnover. The GDPR also provides that EU member states may introduce further conditions, including limitations, and make their own laws and regulations further limiting the processing of ‘special categories of personal data,’ including personal data related to health, biometric data used for unique identification purposes and genetic information, which could limit our ability to collect, use and share EU data, and could cause our compliance costs to increase, ultimately having an adverse impact on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Further, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, often referred to as Brexit, and ongoing developments in the United Kingdom have created uncertainty with regard to data protection regulation in the United Kingdom. Following the expiry of transitional arrangements agreed to between the United Kingdom and European Union, data processing in the United Kingdom is governed by a United Kingdom version of the GDPR (combining the GDPR and the United Kingdom’s Data Protection Act 2018), which authorizes significant fines, up to the greater of £17.5 million or 4% of global turnover, and exposes us to two parallel regimes and other potentially divergent enforcement actions for certain violations. On June 28, 2021, the European Commission announced a decision that the United Kingdom is an “adequate country” to which personal data could be exported from the EEA, but this decision must be renewed and may face challenges in the future, creating uncertainty regarding transfers of personal data to the United Kingdom from the EEA. Furthermore, there exists the potential over time for divergence in application, interpretation and enforcement of the data protection law as between the United Kingdom and EEA. On February 2, 2022, the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office issued new standard contractual clauses, or the UK SCCs, to support personal data transfers out of the United Kingdom. The UK SCCs became effective March 21, 2022, and like the EU SCCs, also are required to be implemented over time. We may, in addition to other impacts, experience additional costs associated with increased compliance burdens and be required to engage in new contract negotiations with third parties that aid in processing personal data on our behalf or localize certain personal data of United Kingdom data subjects. Other countries have also passed or are considering passing laws requiring local data residency or restricting the international transfer of data. Additionally, many jurisdictions outside the United States, EEA, and United Kingdom in which we have operations or for which such jurisdictions’ laws or regulations may apply to us or our operations, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, maintain laws and regulations relating to privacy, data protection, and information security that provide for extensive obligations in connection with the use, collection, protection, and processing of personal data. Many of these legal regimes provide for substantial fines, penalties, or other consequences for noncompliance. We may be required to implement new measures or policies, or change our existing policies and measures or the features of our platform, in an effort to comply with U.S. and international laws, rules, and regulations relating to privacy, data protection and information security, which may require us to expend substantial financial and other resources and which may otherwise be difficult to undertake.
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Any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with federal, state or foreign laws, rules or regulations, industry standards, contractual or other legal obligations relating to privacy, data protection or information security, or any actual, perceived or suspected security incident, whether or not resulting in unauthorized access to, or acquisition, release or transfer of personal data or other data, may result in enforcement actions and prosecutions, private litigation, significant fines, penalties and censure, claims for damages by customers and other affected individuals, regulatory inquiries and investigations or adverse publicity and could cause our customers to lose trust in us, any of which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business. Since many of our offerings involve the processing of personal data from our customers and their employees, contractors, customers, partners and others, any inability to adequately address privacy, data protection or information security concerns, even if unfounded, or comply with applicable laws, rules, regulations, policies, industry standards, contractual or other legal obligations could result in additional cost and liability to us, damage our reputation, inhibit sales and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Around the world, there are numerous lawsuits in process against various technology companies that process personal data. If those lawsuits are successful, it could increase the likelihood that our company may be exposed to liability for our own policies and practices concerning the processing of personal data and could hurt our business. Furthermore, the costs of compliance with, and other burdens imposed by laws, regulations and policies concerning privacy, data protection and information security that are applicable to the businesses of our customers may limit the use and adoption of our platform and reduce overall demand for it. Concerns relating to privacy, data protection or information security whether or not valid, may inhibit market adoption of our platform. Additionally, concerns about privacy, data protection or information security may result in the adoption of new legislation that restricts the implementation of technologies like ours or requires us to make modifications to our platform, which could significantly limit the adoption and deployment of our technologies or result in significant expense to modify our platform.
We publicly post our privacy policies and practices concerning our collection, use, disclosure and other processing of the personal data provided to us by our website visitors and by our customers. Although we endeavor to comply with our public statements and documentation, we may at times fail to do so or be alleged to have failed to do so. Our publication of our privacy policies and other statements we publish that provide promises and assurances about privacy, data protection and information security can subject us to potential regulatory action if they are found to be deceptive, unfair or misrepresentative of our actual practices.
Evolving and changing definitions of what constitutes “personal information” and “personal data” within the EEA, the United States and elsewhere, especially relating to classification of IP addresses, machine or device identification numbers, location data and other information, may limit or inhibit our ability to operate or expand our business, including limiting technology alliance partners that may involve the sharing of data. In addition, rapidly-evolving privacy laws and frameworks distinguish between a data processor and data controller (or under the CCPA, whether a business is a ‘service provider’), and different risks and requirements may apply to us, depending on the nature of our data processing activities. If our business model expands and changes over time, different sets of risks and requirements may apply to us, requiring us to re-orient the business accordingly.
If our platform is perceived to cause, or is otherwise unfavorably associated with, violations of privacy, data protection or information security requirements, it may subject us or our customers to public criticism and potential legal liability. Existing and potential laws, rules and regulations concerning privacy, data protection and information security and increasing sensitivity of consumers to unauthorized processing of personal data may create negative public reactions to technologies, products and services such as ours. Public concerns regarding personal data processing, privacy, data protection and information security may cause some of our customers’ end users to be less likely to visit their websites or otherwise interact with them. If enough end users choose not to visit our customers’ websites or otherwise interact with them, our customers could stop using our platform. This, in turn, may reduce the value of our service, and slow or eliminate the growth of our business, or cause our business to contract.
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We may be the subject of legal proceedings which could have an adverse effect on our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
In the ordinary course of business, we may be involved in various litigation matters, including but not limited to commercial disputes, employee claims and class actions, and from time to time may be involved in governmental or regulatory investigations or similar matters arising out of our current or future business. Any claims asserted against us, regardless of merit or eventual outcome, could harm our reputation and have an adverse impact on our relationship with our customers, partners and other third parties and could lead to additional related claims. Certain claims may seek injunctive relief, which could disrupt the ordinary conduct of our business and operations or increase our cost of doing business. Our insurance or indemnities may not cover all claims that may be asserted against us, and any claims asserted against us, regardless of merit or eventual outcome, may harm our reputation and cause us to expend resources in our defense. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that we will be successful in defending ourselves in future litigation or similar matters under various laws. If judgments or settlements in any future litigation or investigation significantly exceed our insurance coverage, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected. For more information, see the section titled “Legal Proceedings” below.
If we fail to meet the service level commitments under our customer contracts, we could be obligated to provide credits for future service, or face contract termination with refunds of prepaid amounts related to unused subscriptions, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Our customer agreements contain service level commitments, under which we guarantee specified availability of our platform, and time-bound resolutions to support inquiries. Any failure of or disruption to our infrastructure could make our platform unavailable to our customers. If we are unable to meet the stated service level commitments to our customers or suffer extended periods of unavailability of our platform, we may be contractually obligated to provide affected customers with service credits for future subscriptions, or customers could elect to terminate and receive refunds for prepaid amounts related to unused subscriptions. Any of the foregoing could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
Indemnity provisions in various agreements potentially expose us to substantial liability for intellectual property infringement and other losses.
Our agreements with customers, partners and other third parties may include indemnification or other provisions under which we agree to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of intellectual property infringement, misappropriation or other violation, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from the use of our platform or other acts or omissions. The term of these contractual provisions sometimes survives termination or expiration of the applicable agreement. As we continue to grow, the possibility of infringement claims and other intellectual property rights claims against us may increase. For any intellectual property rights indemnification claim against us or our customers, we will incur significant legal expenses and may have to pay damages, settlement fees, license fees or stop using technology found to be in violation of the third party’s rights. Large indemnity payments could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. We may also have to seek a license for the infringing or allegedly infringing technology. Such license may not be available on reasonable terms, if at all, and may significantly increase our operating expenses or may require us to restrict our business activities and limit our ability to deliver certain offerings. As a result, we may also be required to develop alternative non-infringing technology, which could require significant effort and expense or cause us to alter our platform, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
From time to time, customers require us to indemnify or otherwise be liable to them for breach of confidentiality, violation of applicable law or failure to implement adequate security measures with respect to their data stored, transmitted or accessed using our platform. Although we normally contractually limit our liability with respect to such obligations, the existence of such a dispute may have adverse effects on our customer relationship and reputation and we may still incur substantial liability related to them.
Any assertions by a third party, whether or not successful, with respect to such indemnification obligations could subject us to costly and time-consuming litigation, expensive remediation and licenses, divert management attention and financial resources, harm our relationship with that customer and other current and prospective customers, reduce demand for our platform, and adversely affect our brand, business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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We may be subject to liability claims if we breach our contracts and our insurance may be inadequate to cover our losses.
We are subject to numerous obligations in our contracts with our customers and partners. Despite the procedures, systems and internal controls we have implemented to comply with our contracts, we may breach these commitments, whether through a weakness in these procedures, systems and internal controls, negligence or the willful act of an employee or contractor. Our insurance policies, including our errors and omissions insurance, may be inadequate to compensate us for the potentially significant losses that may result from claims arising from breaches of our contracts, disruptions in our service, including those caused by cybersecurity incidents, failures or disruptions to our infrastructure, catastrophic events and disasters or otherwise. In addition, such insurance may not be available to us in the future on economically reasonable terms, or at all. Further, our insurance may not cover all claims made against us and defending a suit, regardless of its merit, could be costly and divert management’s attention.
A portion of our revenue is generated from sales to government entities, which subject us to a number of challenges and risks.
A portion of our revenue is generated from sales to governmental entities, and we have made, and may continue to make, investments to support future sales opportunities in the government sector. We estimate that we generated approximately 18% and 19% of our revenue from government entities for the years ended December 31, 2022 and 2021, respectively. Government demand for our platform and offerings could be impacted by budgetary cycles, and there may be governmental certification requirements for our platform. Further, we may be subject to audits and investigations regarding our governmental contracts, and any violations could result in penalties and sanctions, including termination of the contract, refunding or forfeiting payments, fines and suspension or disbarment from future government business. Selling to these entities can be highly competitive, expensive and time consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that we will successfully complete a sale. Government entities often require contract terms that differ from our standard arrangements and impose compliance requirements that are complicated, require preferential pricing, termination rights tied to funding availability, or are otherwise time consuming and expensive to satisfy. Government entities may also have statutory, contractual, or other legal rights to terminate contracts with our partners for convenience, for lack of funding, or due to a default, and any such termination may adversely impact our results of operations. If we undertake to meet special standards or requirements and do not meet them, we could be subject to increased liability from our customers or regulators. Even if we do meet such special standards, the additional costs associated with providing our platform and offerings to government entities could harm our margins. Moreover, changes in the underlying regulatory conditions that affect these types of customers could harm our ability to efficiently provide our platform to them and to grow or maintain our customer base. If we are unable to manage the risks related to contracting with government entities, our business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected .
Political developments in the United Kingdom, including the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We contract with our international customers via our subsidiary in the United Kingdom, ForgeRock Limited, and we derive a meaningful portion of our revenue from the United Kingdom, which is typically in British Pounds or Euros. Recent developments in the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union may have an adverse impact on our business and financial position, and results of operations and the currencies in which we transact business.
Following a referendum in June 2016, the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union on February 1, 2020 (referred to as Brexit), and entered into a transition period to, among other things, negotiate an agreement with the European Union governing the future relationship between the European Union and the United Kingdom. Brexit created significant political and economic uncertainty in 2020 about the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union, which in turn caused and continues to cause significant volatility in global financial markets and the value of the British Pound or other currencies, including the Euro.
While the E.U.-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement was agreed on December 24, 2020 and ratified by the UK Parliament on December 30, 2020 shortly before the transition period ended on December 31, 2020, the ongoing impact of both Brexit and the E.U.-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, is unclear how these will impact economic conditions in the United Kingdom as well as global financial markets.
While the European Union Withdrawal Act retains relevant E.U. law as domestic UK law and the E.U.-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement extended the transition period specifically for data transfers (the adequacy bridge), Brexit has nonetheless created uncertainty with regard to the regulation of data protection, immigration and taxation, among other issues, in the United Kingdom. For example, it is unclear how Brexit will affect how data transfers to and from the United Kingdom will be regulated in the future.
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The uncertainty that Brexit has caused may result in new regulatory challenges or increased costs to our United Kingdom and global operations, all of which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We are subject to anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering and similar laws, and non-compliance with such laws can subject us to criminal penalties or significant fines and harm our business and reputation.
We are subject to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended, or the FCPA, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, U.S. Travel Act, the U.K. Bribery Act 2010 and possibly other anti-corruption, anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been enforced aggressively in recent years and are interpreted broadly and prohibit companies and their employees, agents, representatives, business partners, and third-party intermediaries from promising, authorizing, making or offering, directly or indirectly, improper payments or other benefits to recipients in the public or private sector. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.
In addition, we use third parties to sell our platform or offerings and conduct business on our behalf abroad. We, our employees, agents, representatives, business partners and third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities and we may be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of these employees, agents, representatives, business partners and third-party intermediaries, representatives, contractors, partners, and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities. These laws also require that we keep accurate books and records and maintain internal controls and compliance procedures designed to prevent any such actions. We have policies to address compliance with such laws, but cannot ensure that all our employees, agents, representatives, business partners and third-party intermediaries, will not take actions in violation of our policies and applicable law, for which we may be ultimately held responsible.
Any allegations or violation of the FCPA, other applicable anti-bribery, anti-corruption laws, or anti-money laundering laws could subject us to investigations, whistleblower complaints, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, and other enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, significant fines, damages, injunctions, adverse media coverage, loss of export privileges, severe criminal or civil sanctions, suspension or debarment from government contracts and other consequences, any of which could have a material adverse effect on our reputation, business, financial condition, prospects and results of operations. Responding to any investigation or action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense costs and other professional fees.
We are subject to governmental export and import controls and economic sanctions programs that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate these controls.
In many cases, our business activities are subject to U.S. and international export control laws and regulations including the Export Administration Regulations, or EAR, and trade and economic sanctions maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. As such, an export license may be required to export or reexport our software and services to certain countries and end-users, including to certain U.S. embargoed or sanctioned countries, governments, and persons and for certain end-uses. If we were to fail to comply with such export control laws and regulations, trade and economic sanctions, or other similar laws, we could be subject to both civil and criminal penalties, including substantial fines, possible incarceration for employees and managers for willful violations, and the possible loss of our export or import privileges. Obtaining the necessary export license for a particular sale or offering may not be possible and may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities.
In addition, various countries regulate the import of certain software and technology using encryption, including through import permit and license requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our platform and offerings or could limit our end-customers’ ability to implement our platform in those countries. Changes in our platform or changes in export and import regulations in such countries may create delays in the introduction of our platform and offerings into international markets, prevent our customers with international operations from deploying our platform globally, or in some cases, prevent or delay the export or import of our platform and offerings to certain countries, governments, or persons altogether. The following developments could result in decreased use of our platform and offerings by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell our platform and offerings to, existing or potential end-customers with international operations: any change in export or import laws or regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation; shift in the enforcement or scope of existing export, import or sanctions laws or regulations; or change in the countries, governments, persons, or technologies targeted by such export, import or sanctions laws or regulations. Any decreased use of our platform or offerings or limitation on our ability to export to or sell our platform or offerings in international markets could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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Our international operations may give rise to potentially adverse tax consequences.
Our income tax obligations are based in part on our corporate operating structure and intercompany arrangements, including the manner in which we develop, value, manage and use our intellectual property and the valuation of our intercompany transactions. Our existing corporate structure and intercompany arrangements have been implemented in a manner we believe is in compliance with current prevailing tax laws. The tax laws applicable to our business, including the laws of the United States and other jurisdictions, are subject to interpretation and certain jurisdictions are aggressively interpreting their laws in new ways in an effort to raise additional tax revenue. New income, sales, use or other tax laws, statutes, rules, regulations or ordinances could be enacted at any time. Those enactments could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, taxing authorities in these jurisdictions could impose additional tax, interest and penalties on us, claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries. These events could require us or our customers to pay additional tax amounts on a prospective or retroactive basis, as well as require us or our customers to pay fines or penalties and interest for past amounts deemed to be due. If we raise our prices to offset the costs of these changes, existing and potential future customers may elect not to purchase our products in the future.
In addition, our intercompany relationships are subject to complex transfer pricing regulations administered by taxing authorities in various jurisdictions. The relevant taxing authorities may disagree with our current and historic determinations as to the value of assets sold or acquired or income and expenses attributable to specific jurisdictions. If such a disagreement were to occur, and our position were not sustained, we could be required to pay additional taxes, interest, and penalties, which could result in one-time tax charges, higher effective tax rates, reduced cash flows, and lower overall profitability of our operations. In addition, changes to our corporate structure and intercompany agreements could impact our worldwide effective tax rate and adversely affect our financial condition and results of operations.
Changes in global and U.S. tax legislation may give rise to potentially harmful tax consequences.
There is also a high level of uncertainty in today’s tax environment stemming from both global initiatives put forth by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, and unilateral measures being implemented by various countries due to a lack of consensus on these global initiatives. As an example, the OECD is advancing two proposals—Pillar One and Pillar Two—that revise the allocation of revenues to market jurisdiction based on customer jurisdiction rather than physical presence of the provider and ensure a minimal level of taxation, respectively. Further, certain countries have implemented or are considering implementing measures such as a digital services tax, or a minimum tax on gross income. The U.S. administration continues to discuss changes to the U.S. Internal Revenue Code that, if enacted, could materially impact our U.S. tax liability in future years. Additionally, further regulatory or legislative developments may also arise from the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. These measures and corresponding tariffs in response to such measures create additional tax liabilities and uncertainty. As a result, we may have to pay higher taxes in countries where such rules are applicable.
Our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards and certain other tax attributes may be limited.
Under Section 382 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended, or the Code, if a corporation undergoes an “ownership change,” generally defined as a greater than 50% change (by value) in its equity ownership over a three year period, the corporation’s ability to use its pre-change net operating loss carryforwards and other pre-change tax attributes, such as research tax credits and interest deduction carryover, to offset its post-change income may be limited. Any ownership change in the future could result in increased future tax liability. In addition, we may experience ownership changes in the future as a result of subsequent shifts in our stock ownership. As a result, if we earn net taxable income, our ability to use our pre-change net operating loss carryforwards to offset U.S. federal taxable income may be subject to limitations, which could potentially result in increased future tax liability to us. The impact of any limitations that may be imposed due to such ownership changes has not been determined as of December 31, 2022.
In addition, under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or Tax Act, as modified by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act, federal net operating losses incurred during our taxable years beginning after December 31, 2017 can be carried forward indefinitely, however, the deductibility of our federal net operating losses generated in such years will be limited to 80% of taxable income in the year utilized. Furthermore, our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards is conditioned upon generating future U.S. federal taxable income. Since we do not know whether or when we will generate the U.S. federal taxable income necessary to use our remaining net operating loss carryforwards, certain of our net operating loss carryforwards generated could expire before use.
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Any successful action by state, foreign or other authorities to collect additional or past indirect taxes, including sales tax and others could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
States, some local taxing jurisdictions, and foreign jurisdictions have differing rules and regulations governing indirect taxes such as sales and use taxes, value added taxes, or VAT, and goods and services taxes, and these rules and regulations are subject to varying interpretations that may change over time. In particular, the applicability of indirect taxes to our platform in various jurisdictions is unclear. We file indirect tax returns and collect indirect taxes in certain states within the United States and certain foreign jurisdictions as required by law, and we do not file and collect indirect or other similar taxes in certain other states, certain other foreign jurisdictions and on certain of the offerings that we provide on the basis that such taxes are not applicable. It is possible that we could face indirect tax audits and that one or more states, local jurisdictions or foreign authorities could seek to impose additional indirect or other tax collection and record-keeping obligations on us or may determine that such taxes should have, but have not been, paid by us. We could also be subject to audits in states, local and foreign jurisdictions for which we have not accrued tax liabilities. A successful assertion that we should be collecting additional indirect or other taxes on our service in jurisdictions where we have not historically done so and do not accrue for indirect taxes could result in substantial tax liabilities for past sales, discourage customers from purchasing our platform and offerings or otherwise adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
We may face exposure to foreign currency exchange rate fluctuations.
Today, approximately half of our customer contracts are denominated in U.S. dollars. Over time, however, an increasing portion of our international customer contracts may be denominated in local currencies. In addition, the majority of our international costs are denominated in local currencies. As a result, fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar and foreign currencies may affect our results of operations when translated into U.S. dollars. We do not currently engage in currency hedging activities to limit the risk of exchange rate fluctuations. However, in the future, we may use derivative instruments, such as foreign currency forward and option contracts, to hedge certain exposures to fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates. The use of such hedging activities may not offset any or more than a portion of the adverse financial effects of unfavorable movements in foreign exchange rates over the limited time the hedges are in place. Moreover, the use of hedging instruments may introduce additional risks if we are unable to structure effective hedges with such instruments.
Operating as a public company has and will require us to incur substantial costs and will require substantial management attention.
As a public company, we incur substantial legal, accounting and other expenses that we did not incur as a private company. For example, we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Exchange Act, the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the rules and regulations of the SEC and the listing standards of the NYSE. The Exchange Act requires, among other things, we file annual, quarterly and current reports with respect to our business, financial condition, and results of operations. In addition, as a public company, we may be subject to stockholder activism, which can lead to additional substantial costs, distract management and impact the manner in which we operate our business in ways we cannot currently anticipate. As a result of disclosure of information in filings required of a public company, our business, financial condition, and results of operations have become and will continue to become more visible, which may result in threatened or actual litigation, including by competitors.
Certain members of our management team have limited experience managing a publicly traded company, and certain members joined us more recently. As such, our management team may not successfully or efficiently manage our growth as a public company subject to significant regulatory oversight and reporting obligations under the federal securities laws and the continuous scrutiny of securities analysts and investors. These new obligations and constituents will require significant attention from our senior management and could divert their attention away from the day-to-day management of our business, which could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
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Risks Related to Ownership of Our Class A Common Stock
The dual-class structure of our common stock has the effect of concentrating voting control with those stockholders who held our capital stock (or options or other securities convertible into or exercisable for our capital stock) prior to the completion of our initial public offering, which will limit your ability to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in control.
Our Class B common stock has 10 votes per share, and our Class A common stock has one vote per share. As of December 31, 2022, our directors, executive officers, and holders of more than 5% of our common stock, and their respective affiliates, held in the aggregate over 60% of the combined voting power of our Class A common stock and Class B common stock. Because of the 10-to-one voting ratio between our Class B common stock and Class A common stock, the holders of our Class B common stock collectively will continue to control a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock and will therefore, if acting together, be able to control all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval until the earlier of (i) the 7th anniversary of the filing and effectiveness of our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, (ii) when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than 5% of the combined voting power of our outstanding Class A common stock and Class B common stock, and (iii) the affirmative vote of the holders of 66-2/3% of the voting power of our outstanding Class B common stock. This concentrated control will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters, including the election of directors, amendments of our organizational documents, and any merger, consolidation, sale of all or substantially all of our assets or other major corporate transactions requiring stockholder approval. In addition, this may prevent or discourage unsolicited acquisition proposals or offers for our capital stock that you may feel are in your best interest as one of our stockholders.
Future transfers by holders of shares of our Class B common stock generally result in those shares converting to Class A common stock, subject to limited exceptions, including but not limited to, transfers effected for estate planning purposes, to the extent the transferor retains voting power over the shares, and transfers among affiliates, to the extent the transferee continues to remain an affiliate. Shares of Class B common stock held by natural persons automatically convert into shares of Class A common stock upon the death or disability of the holder. The conversion of Class B common stock to Class A common stock will have the effect, over time, of increasing the relative voting power of those individual holders of Class B common stock who retain their shares in the long-term.
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The market price of our Class A common stock may be volatile, and you could lose all or part of your investment.
The market price of our Class A common stock may be volatile and could be subject to fluctuations in response to various factors, some of which are beyond our control. These fluctuations could cause you to lose all or part of your investment in our Class A common stock. Factors that could cause fluctuations in the market price of our Class A common stock include the following:
• the Merger, the pendency of the Merger, or the failure to complete the Merger;
• price and volume fluctuations in the overall stock market from time to time;
• volatility in the market prices and trading volumes of technology stocks;
• changes in operating performance and stock market valuations of other technology companies generally, or those in our industry in particular;
• sales of shares of our common stock by us or our stockholders, as well as the anticipation of, expiration of, or releases, from market standoff agreements or lock-up agreements;
• failure of securities analysts to maintain coverage of us, changes in financial estimates by securities analysts who follow our company or our failure to meet these estimates or the expectations of investors;
• the financial projections we may provide to the public, any changes in those projections or our failure to meet those projections;
• announcements by us or our competitors of new offerings or platform features;
• the public’s reaction to our press releases, other public announcements and filings with the SEC;
• rumors and market speculation involving us or other companies in our industry;
• short selling of our Class A common stock or related derivative securities;
• actual or anticipated changes in our results of operations or fluctuations in our results of operations; actual or perceived security breaches or incidents;
• actual or anticipated developments in our business, our competitors’ businesses or the competitive landscape generally;
• announced or completed acquisitions of businesses, offerings or technologies by us or our competitors;
• developments or disputes concerning our intellectual property or other proprietary rights;
• litigation involving us, our industry, or both, or investigations by regulators into our operations or those of our competitors;
• new laws, regulations, rules or industry standards or new interpretations of existing laws, regulations, rules or industry standards applicable to our business;
• increased inflation throughout the economy, which is often accompanied by higher interest rates;
• changes in accounting standards, policies, guidelines, interpretations or principles;
• any significant change in our management; and
• general economic conditions and slow or negative growth of our markets.
In addition, if the market for technology stocks or the stock market in general experiences a loss of investor confidence, the market price of our Class A common stock could decline for reasons unrelated to our business, financial condition or results of operations. The market price of our Class A common stock might also decline in reaction to events that affect other companies in our industry even if these events do not directly affect us. In the past, following periods of volatility in the overall market and the market price of a particular company’s securities, securities class action litigation has often been instituted against these companies. This litigation, if instituted against us, would result in substantial costs and a diversion of our management’s attention and resources.
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Recently, the stock markets in general, and the markets for technology stocks in particular, have experienced extreme volatility, including as a result of inflationary pressures, economic uncertainties, the COVID-19 pandemic, interest rate increases and broader global macroeconomic uncertainties. Furthermore, the market price of our Class A common stock may be adversely affected by third parties trying to drive down the price of our Class A common stock. Short sellers and others, some of whom post anonymously on social media, can negatively affect the market price of our Class A common stock and may be positioned to profit if the market price of our Class A common stock declines. These broad market and industry factors may seriously harm the market price of our Class A common stock, regardless of our operating performance.
The issuance of additional stock in connection with financings, acquisitions, investments, our equity compensation plans or otherwise will dilute all other stockholders.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation authorizes us to issue up to 1,000,000,000 shares of Class A common stock, up to 500,000,000 shares of Class B common stock and up to 100,000,000 shares of preferred stock with such rights and preferences as may be determined by our board of directors. Subject to compliance with applicable rules and regulations, we may issue shares of Class A common stock or securities convertible into shares of our Class A common stock from time to time in connection with a financing, acquisition, investment, our equity compensation plans or otherwise. Any such issuance could result in substantial dilution to our existing stockholders and cause the market price of our Class A common stock to decline.
Delaware law and provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws could make a merger, tender offer or proxy contest difficult, thereby depressing the market price of our Class A common stock.
Our status as a Delaware corporation and the anti-takeover provisions of the Delaware General Corporation Law may discourage, delay or prevent a change in control by prohibiting us from engaging in a business combination with an interested stockholder for a period of three years after the date of the transaction in which the person became an interested stockholder, even if a change in control would be beneficial to our existing stockholders. In addition, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws contain provisions that may make the acquisition of our company more difficult, including the following:
• our board of directors is classified into three classes of directors with staggered three-year terms, and directors are only able to be removed from office for cause;
• certain amendments to our amended and restated certificate of incorporation require the approval of at least 66 2/3% of the voting power of the outstanding shares of our stock entitled to vote generally in the election of directors, voting together as a single class;
• our dual class common stock structure provides holders of Class B common stock with the ability to significantly influence the outcome of matters requiring stockholder approval, even if they own significantly less than a majority of the shares of our outstanding capital stock;
• our stockholders are only be able to take action at a meeting of stockholders and are not able to take action by written consent for any matter;
• our amended and restated certificate of incorporation does not provide for cumulative voting;
• vacancies on our board of directors are able to be filled only by our board of directors and not by stockholders;
• a special meeting of our stockholders may only be called by the chairperson of our board of directors, our Chief Executive Officer (or our President in the absence of a Chief Executive Officer) or a majority of the “whole board” of our board of directors, where the “whole board” is the total number of authorized directorships whether or not there exist any vacancies or other unfilled seats in previously authorized directorships;
• certain litigation against us can only be brought in Delaware;
• our amended and restated certificate of incorporation authorizes undesignated preferred stock, the terms of which may be established and shares of which may be issued without further action by our stockholders; and
• advance notice procedures apply for stockholders to nominate candidates for election as directors or to bring matters before an annual meeting of stockholders.
These provisions, alone or together, could discourage, delay or prevent a transaction involving a change in control of our company. These provisions could also discourage proxy contests and make it more difficult for stockholders to elect directors of their choosing and to cause us to take other corporate actions they desire, any of which, under certain circumstances, could limit the opportunity for our stockholders to receive a premium for their shares of our Class A common stock and could also affect the price that some investors are willing to pay for our Class A common stock.
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We cannot predict the impact our dual class structure may have on the market price of our Class A common stock.
We cannot predict whether our dual class structure will result in a lower or more volatile market price of our Class A common stock or in adverse publicity or other adverse consequences. For example, certain index providers have restrictions on including companies with multiple-class share structures in certain of their indexes. In July 2017, FTSE Russell and Standard & Poor’s announced that they would cease to allow most newly public companies utilizing dual or multi-class capital structures to be included in their indices. Affected indices include the Russell 2000 and the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600, which together make up the S&P Composite 1500. Under these policies, our dual class capital structure would make us ineligible for inclusion in certain indices, and as a result, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and other investment vehicles that attempt to passively track those indices will not be investing in our stock. Because of our dual class structure, we will likely be excluded from certain of these indexes and we cannot assure you that other stock indexes will not take similar actions. Given the sustained flow of investment funds into passive strategies that seek to track certain indexes, exclusion from stock indexes would likely preclude investment by many of these funds and could make our Class A common stock less attractive to other investors. As a result, the market price of our Class A common stock could be adversely affected.
Our amended and restated bylaws designate a state or federal court located within the State of Delaware as the exclusive forum for substantially all disputes between us and our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to choose the judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers or employees.
Our amended and restated bylaws, which provide that, unless we consent in writing to the selection of an alternative forum, to the fullest extent permitted by law, the sole and exclusive forum for (i) any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf, (ii) any action asserting a claim of breach of a fiduciary duty owed by any of our directors, officers or other employees to us or our stockholders, (iii) any action arising pursuant to any provision of the Delaware General Corporation Law, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or our amended and restated bylaws or (iv) any other action asserting a claim that is governed by the internal affairs doctrine shall be the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware (or, if the Court of Chancery does not have jurisdiction, the federal district court for the District of Delaware), in all cases subject to the court having jurisdiction over indispensable parties named as defendants.
Section 22 of the Securities Act creates concurrent jurisdiction for federal and state courts over all such Securities Act actions. Accordingly, both state and federal courts have jurisdiction to entertain such claims. To prevent having to litigate claims in multiple jurisdictions and the threat of inconsistent or contrary rulings by different courts, among other considerations, our amended and restated bylaws further provide that the federal district courts of the United States will be the exclusive forum for resolving any complaints asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act. We note, however, that investors cannot waive compliance with the federal securities laws and the rules and regulations thereunder, and that there is uncertainty as to whether a court would enforce this exclusive forum provision. If a court were to find either exclusive-forum provision in our amended and restated bylaws to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving the dispute in other jurisdictions, which could harm our business, financial condition, and results of operations.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research about us, our business or our market, or if they change their recommendations regarding our Class A common stock adversely, the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock could decline.
The trading market for our Class A common stock depends, in part, on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us, our business, our market or our competitors. The analysts’ estimates are based upon their own opinions and are often different from our estimates or expectations. If any of the analysts who cover us change their recommendation regarding our Class A common stock adversely, provide more favorable relative recommendations about our competitors or publish inaccurate or unfavorable research about our business, the market price of our Class A common stock would likely decline. If few securities analysts commence coverage of us, or if one or more of these analysts cease coverage of us or fail to publish reports on us regularly, we could lose visibility in the financial markets and demand for our securities could decrease, which could cause the market price and trading volume of our Class A common stock to decline.
We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future.
We have never declared nor paid cash dividends on our capital stock. We currently intend to retain any future earnings to finance the operation and expansion of our business, and we do not expect to declare or pay any dividends in the foreseeable future. Additionally, our ability to pay cash dividends on our common stock is limited by restrictions under the terms of our Amended and Restated Loan Agreement and the Merger Agreement. As a result, stockholders must rely on sales of their common stock after price appreciation, if any, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investment in our Class A common stock.
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