Description

This pitch is pretty simple.   Unfortunately due to its size it is relagated to the land of PAs and smaller funds (good news is this is normally where the best fishing is).  

Headline: 1-Page is a kangaroonicorn!  It has been bid up completely on hopes and dreams in the land down under. After failing to raise money in Silicon Valley 1-Page decided to do the age old trick of a backdoor listing by acquiring a publicly listed Australian shell company (was formerly a nickle miner), since the reverse merger it is up some 6x (peaked at 14x).  As our good friends in China have shown only great businesses with staying power pursue backdoor listings.  Unfortuantely 1-Page doesn't fit the mold of a great company, they have no real product to speak of (more on this later).  Overtime this will move close to zero.  Need I say more?

Still here?  You seriously need more?  Fine...here is some more detail.

Overview: 1-Page is a failed Silicon Valley startup that is run by the daughter/father combo Joanna Riley Weidenmiller and Patrick G. Riley.  If you are unfamiliar with them clearly you did not read the expansion pack version of the Outsiders.  Patrick Riley is a self-help guru who wrote the book, "The One Page Proposal: How to Get your Business Pitch Onto One Pursuasive Page" - I haven't read the book but I appreciate the irony that it takes 112 pages to tell me how to write one page.  To his credit the people (or robots) on Amazon seem to rate it highly with 4.2 out of 5 stars.  Joanna on the other hand, graduated from the University of Virginia in 2004 (she majored in Foreign Affairs, rowed in college, and was a member of Delta Delta Delta), upon graduation she spent 10 months with the FBI to train and recruit police in the Middle East.  After one of the shortest stints in the FBI ever she moved on to become a VP at Venture Marketing Solutions and then one year after graduation became CEO fo Performance Advertising Associates.  The company's website states this was her large claim to fame prior to 1-Page (http://www.1-page.com/investorcenter/) - oddly according to her LinkedIn profile she did that for 1 year and 4 months and then from November 2006 to June 2012 was not really doing anything (as an Easter Egg bonus there are some epic misspellings and poor grammar on 1-Page's website - please take the time to poke around - it is well worth it).  Somehow Joanna and Patrick had their hearts set on starting a company they wanted to gamify the recruiting process combining Patrick's love of brevity (short job descriptions and one page CVs) and Joanna's love of...being employed (I guess it has to be this since it is unclear what else young Joanna was particular great or passionate about)?  They thought Monster Worldwide, Snagajob, and LinkedIn were ripe for disrupting. So in April 2012 they raised $1.5M in seed financing from Blumberg Capital and TMT investments and in November 2013 they got an additional $1.5M from their new found sugar daddies.  Unfortunately running a company and gamifying recruiting wasn't as easy as the drea-team thought.  Three years in they had lost nearly all the $3M they had raised and only had a cumulative $175k in revenue to show.  It proved difficult to raise money in one of the most bubbly VC environments since the DotCom boom (that alone says a ton!!!).  As mentioned our dream team decided to give Silicon Valley and Sand Hill Road the cold shoulder and turn to the age old path to riches that is merging with an Australian shell mining company.  In October 2014 1-Page merged with InterMet Resources (ASX:ITT) and changed the company name to 1-Page (ASX:1PG).  To close the transaction they had Intermet raise $400k followed by an additional $3.4B in a rights offering.  To complete the rights offering they went on the road and did some fantastic song & dance, being the costant promoters that they are team 1-Page touted the global recruitment market as a $190B behemoth that was ripe for an edgy company to disrupt.  They claimed 1-Page was the owner and sole provider of a revolutionary SaaS HR platform that had predictive capabilities (undoubtedly Joanna used her deep training at Quantico to help create some amazing predictive algorithms).  1-Page claimed their whiz-bang solution would reduce the time to hireto 4 weeks from 13 weeks while improving retention rates by up to 70%!  They didn't go so far as to say it could cure cancer, but you can see they probably aren't too far off from a cure.  Their song & dance proved quite effective and they were able to raise a total of $8.5M.  To paraphrase the great Kenny Powers, after the reverse merger and fundraise 1-Page had: the glory, the fame, the money, the jewels, the cash, the Denali...  Joanna, being the ambitious person she is, knew this was not enough.  Gamifcation was no longer a buzz word so she changed the focus.  She decided to go out and purchase BranchOut - another infamous Silicon Valley flameout.  For those of you who are Silicon Valley historians you are familiar with BranchOut.  For those who aren't, BranchOut was foundend in 2010 and raised $49M and tried to compete with the incumbents (Monster Worldwide & LinkedIn) by scraping LinkedIn and Facebook.  They did this successfully for a short while rising to 33M MAUs, but then in April 2012 Facebook and LinkedIn realized someone was stealing their stuff without paying and put and end to this practice.  BranchOut had to cease and desist and their MAUs collapsed to around 100,000.  Hearst came in and acquired the bulk of the employees and assets but 1-Page swooped in and acquired a database of 800M personal profiles.  For those of you keeping up the database 1-Page acquired is 800M profiles populated with data that is now around 4 years old.  Upon acquiring this treasure trove of useless and dated profile information 1-Page went on the offensive and said they found new ways of scraping to update and grow the database from 800M to 1.2B.  They claimed recruiters were willing to pay big bucks for access to their rich information.  They claimed that customers would pay $300,000+ per year to access their data.  1-Page hasn't really shown much success on the revenue front with only $1.39M in new bookings in the month of November.  They have gotten folks like Starbucks to sign up to test their platform - to hire baristas - problem is Starbucks is paying the rich price of $0 to test the platform.  To double their efforts they acquired Marianas Labs in December - this is a pre-revenue data science concept company (either this could further their recruiment efforts or potentially be a new pivot into the now hot area of "Machine Learning" or "Artificial Intelligence").  Luckily 1-Page continues to show brilliance when it comes to raising money - having raised another $9.6M in February to pursue whatever Joanna's heart desires.  

Conclusion: So basically what you have here is a failed Silicon Valley start up that has found a way to cheat the system by backdooring in Australia.  They then bought another failed company and calim to have breathed new life into it.  While no customers have shown up to date Mr. Market (or at least his Australian cousin) is willing to assign a ~$400M market cap on a pile of hopes and dreams.  This company is burning cash and will continue to have to raise more money.  Sooner of later it will come time to put up or shut up and the evidence is overwhelming that their is no substance here.  I think 1-Page is embracing their new found Australian love and heading the solid advice from Chuck Prince:

We can dance if we want to;

We can leave our friends behind;

Cause your friends don't dance;

And if they don't dance;

Well the're no friends of mine.

Put me in the non-friend camp on this one as I can't be bothered to keep dancing on this one.   

Catalyst

Lack of traction on core business and continued cash burn will remove the hype 1-Page has created.  As this happens the market cap will evaporate and the suckers will walk away and this scam will collapse on itself.