47th Division

$PLTR Palantir CEO Alex Karp at AIPCon 10: “Our biggest sales secret is that we want you to go to the model companies. We hope you go through the process of being sold by them. Because when you do, you will think you feel smarter, but you will soon realize that they actually don’t care about you. They don’t want to understand your business. They want to show you how many tokens you can use. The real value comes from an ontology that builds with you, understands your business, and actually wants you to win. That’s how we sell at Palantir.”

To be fair, Verona's revenue had nearly caught its costs before the deal, while ARS is earlier ($17.5m of sales last quarter against $72m of spend). So the bet is the curve keeps bending. But saying “they spend too much” misreads what the spend is for. Cc: @SmallCapKing2

That's the logic for a single-product company built to be sold: you spend hard to seize the market while the window is open, and profitability becomes the acquirer's problem. ARS is running the same play with heavy launch spend, prescriptions tripling, its footprint widening.

An obvious knock on ARS Pharmaceuticals ($SPRY) is that it loses money and spends too freely. We think that reading is backwards and the company that proved why was bought for around $10bn last year.

One of these is a coincidence; all of them around one small-cap has to be a signal. These are people who know precisely what a large buyer pays for and how to build it $SPRY

Another one: Laura Shawver sold Synthorx to Sanofi for $2.5bn and Capstan to AbbVie for $2.1bn. Saqib Islam ran SpringWorks and sold it to Merck for nearly $4bn. The new president, hired last month, arrived straight from Dynavax; which Sanofi acquired in February.

We said $SPRY has a board built to sell the company. It’s not a random guess but rather a pattern anyone can read straight off the roster. Here's who actually sits on it, and what each of them has sold before:

$SPRY back of the envelope maths: assuming it doubles (conservative see latest prez) the tam, that’s 2bn potential revenue, slap a customary 3-4x multiple on that and you get to 6-8bn market cap, a 6-8x from here.

@Liftthatbid @Mike10947310 @paulcerro One look at the board and you know this company is being set up to be acquired down the line.

as a single product pharma in a growing mkt, likely to be acquired along the way… for reference epipen does c1bn in sales in the us alone, when the stats show that nowadays 1 out of 2 kids has allergies someone like @Mike10947310 or @paulcerro should take a look at this

$SPRY was one of the biopharma names we added to the portfolio in the recent rebalance. It’s kind of a layup. I have seen lots of people freak out about administering epipens. Just the other day my gf had to give a kid having anaphylaxis an epipen on the subway because their caretaker was too afraid to do it. This is actually not an unreasonable fear, either. Delivering an epipen is easy, but also easy to mess up if you’re freaking out. This product (intranasal epi delivered via nasal spray) will have solid penetration, especially in pediatrics. It’s comparable in price to an epipen, without insurance it’s actually cheaper than an epipen and comparable to adrenaclick ($199 for 2 doses of neffy, $500-700 for 2 epi autoinjectors). I think the company can pull off awareness (especially in pediatrics) without much in the way of marketing expenses (moms groups talk) and probably rack up some solid revenue before getting acquired. I’m a big fan of the company realizing it can make money while also having a net benefit here (ensuring copay is max $25/offering @ $199 w/o insurance), think that also speaks to their read on what demand will be like. I think it’s at least a double from here. Still, it’s a biopharma so it could also just go to zero because of “lmao sike”. Size appropriately.

@bullsbayretail Insane jump in target price. (Ironically, my target price for $SPRY is $30.) It shows again the quality of the sell-side, "bumping" a price target from $12 to $30 and yet still maintaining an Outperform. Hey, if you have a stock you think will triple... it's a freakin' BUY!

9/9 Put it together, and you have a first-in-class drug still tripling prescriptions, expanding globally, its only rival delayed by the FDA — all at roughly half its 2025 highs. Either the market re-rates it, or someone buys it outright. That's our read.

8/9 None of this is risk-free. ARS isn't profitable yet, with breakeven guided to mid-2027; a chunk of prescriptions gets rejected by insurers before they're filled; and a holder appears to sell every time the stock nears $17. This is a thesis, not a certainty.

Nice to see $SPRY getting some buzz after Cantor's PT upgrade. Haven't seen recent posts recapping the thesis, so thought we'd share ours here. 🧵 1/9