Game Of Moats

@HarryStebbings Can’t just post that and then not say what software!

I just walked with a $10BN public company CEO. He told me his CoS replaced a piece of software they had been paying $1.2M per year for. It took him 3 weeks to build. F*** me software is more toast than I thought.

@bobspaysubstack Ebitda for DAY is as useful as a winter jacket in July

Thoma Bravo's $12.3b deal for Dayforce $DAY, which closed in February, translated to an EV-to-2026 EBITDA multiple of about 16.5x. Paylocity $PCTY (8x) and Paycom $PAYC (5.5x) currently trade for half and a third of that, respectively. Highly interested to see what pricing on the next PE software deal looks like if/when it happens. $BILL has been sitting out there for a few months. Quite possible they are far apart on price w/possible suitors.

@PythiaR @shortbus_ace Agreed and it was blatantly obvious that Shop Pay and Apple Pay were far superior with advantages positioning. Not as clear cut with enterprise SaaS

Tbf tho Paypal is a dumb fucking button whereas CRM/NOW/WDAY actually do have valuable data they can leverage. Not saying to get long obvs, but probably better outcomes for SoR SaaS than Paypal, but if you're just a visualization tool like a Tableau or whatever you're going to be nukeddddddd

great tweet

@winsteadscap @grok whic publicly traded home builders have the most exposure to the Dallas metro?

@KamalaHarris Literally nobody cares

A few thoughts ahead of the President’s speech tonight.

@jasonlk @grok what was said regard salesforce’s agentforce in this article?

@grok @Fried_rice What can we takeaway from this leaked code as investors? Is there anything highly unexpected or intriguing in the source code? Does this make it easier now for a competitor to quickly catch up to Claude code?

This is the src/ directory listing from Anthropic's Claude Code CLI (their agentic terminal coding tool) source code. It leaked yesterday via a 57MB cli.js.map source map accidentally shipped in their npm package (anthropic-ai/claude-code v2.1.88). The ~2300 TypeScript files (512k+ lines) expose their full agent architecture: QueryEngine, tools/tasks, cost-tracker, voice, vim mode, context hooks, and multi-file orchestration. Key takeaway: Classic build slip—Bun generates maps by default, and *.map wasn't ignored in npm publish. Rare public view into how they build Claude agents. Zip link is now 404'd.

Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm registry! Code: …a8527898604c1bbb12468b1581d95e.r2.dev/src.zip

@_inpractise 45% op margins suggest the “discounts” are just fine

Former EDA executive: "We are notorious for 70% to 95% discounts. List price is absolutely no indication." $CDNS "I don't have the details because none of these things are driven by list price. The EDA industry has this very nasty habit of discounting much more so than what you would find in almost any other industry. We are notorious for 70% to 95% discounts. The list price is absolutely no indication at all"

@IceburghCapital lol

@IceburghCapital Sell side writes for pod shops and mutual funds, so the assumption is that you are writing to an educated audience

@JaredSleeper @dino11 I’m a $BRZE bull overall. One thing to watch out for is gross profit. Premium messaging has to have very low GM profile ($TWLO messaging at 33% GM for example). So rev growth becoming less important and gross profit $s added / incremental GM the keys to watch

@dino11 But they are accelerating…

Another quarter of accelerating organic growth for Braze... +24% Y/y. Net retention up, bookings +50% Y/y, AI products GA ahead of schedule. And trading at 2.5x forward sales after hours. The bar for a public SaaS company to be an "AI winner" is *very* high right now.

@JaredSleeper By and large agree for hedge fund monkeys trying to gauge quarterly demand. But expert calls, when done right, can unveil and teach really interesting things about competitive dynamics, products, industry knowledge, etc

In research orgs, by far the biggest time-waster I see is “gathering n” via manual hourlong expert calls that often just reduce down to a few datapoints. I’m sorry but even 15-20 calls is unlikely to be statistically significant on anything that counts as a debate.

@shortbus_ace @Ticketmaster The venue plays a big role setting that fee and gets a huge cut of it

21% fees? fuck you @Ticketmaster

@pmje73 @dennisihong Well said

An increasing screen for me for whether someone has the temperament to invest institutionally or is someone I want to talk stocks with these days is how quickly and how often they label the market. Label it as “crazy”, “nuts”, “stupid”, “broken”. This is like my earlier post on being self authoring or self transforming. If you are self transforming you see the market as an object for what it is without judgement. If it opens on time and closes on time it’s working as it’s supposed to. If you are constantly frustrated and not bemused by the market it’s because you have a mental map of how it’s supposed to work and if it’s doesn’t conform to the map it causes you angst, or worse.

@packyM Bingo! When the most prominent AI leaders publicly declare repeatedly that the very technology they are building will cause 50% unemployment, is it any wonder why only 17% of Americans think AI will have a positive impact!?

Base Power Company: we want to give you affordable, reliable power Astro Mechanica: we want to give you really fast flights at a good price Somos Internet: we want to give you really fast, reliable internet at a good price Cuby: we want to build you a house for much less AI Labs: we want to take your stupid job and we can't promise we're not going to kill you and everyone you love

Europe already does this and are their companies at an advantage because of less reporting requirements? Holding mgmt teams accountable more often, not less often, is preferable for investors and markets

@MarceloLima Medical super intelligence

What arrives first: medical superintelligence or... ...search in Microsoft Outlook that actually works? 🤔

@long_equity I’ve had this chart printed out sitting in my office for years

Michael J. Mauboussin's paper "Total Shareholder Return" is a must read for quality growth investors. In particular, I appreciate how he clearly sets out the multiple drivers of shareholder return. In short, share price appreciation is driven by EPS (or FCF) growth and multiple extraction (or contraction). Focus on companies growing sales, expanding their margins and trading at fair valuations. What are your favourites meeting these criteria?

@DrewCohenMoney For those of us around then, 2022 was Armageddon for SMID cap software

Interesting that the software index actually sold off more in 2022/2023 than this recent sell off... About a -32% draw down in 2023 vs a -27% drawdown at its lowest last week