Game Of Moats

@BoringBiz_ They aren’t real

How are these stats real. Absolutely insane

Another software company didn’t die

Blew through my allotted Claude Cowork spend in three days…game changing tech but hard to build real workflows and change my behaviors if I can’t reliably use it

@bgurley AI is going to be the true stress test of “moats”. If there is a true moat, companies will be able to continue raising pricing. AI exposing who truly has a moat and who doesn’t, in my opinion, particularly in software land

We all know with certainty that AI will drastically reduce the costs of corporate auditing. This cost-reduction already widespread in legal. One problem - the big 4 are holding the line, telling clients despite AI, we are not lowering rates. Curious how this lands. The "task" is way cheaper. Will one of the "next three" start disrupting with price? Will the PCAOB circle ranks in an ugly act of regulatory capture? I'm watching with interest. Any predictions?

Everytime I read/listen to Tobi I think “why haven’t I invested 50% of my net worth in this guy?” $SHOP so well-positioned for AI era.

First experience ordering at @WEN drive thru with their AI voice bot. Something strangely unsatisfying about the experience, though I do appreciate how good the voice AI tools have gotten. It got my rather complicated order correct where I fumbled over my words and altered the ordered midway through.

@politicalmath I totally agree but it might not matter because the iPhone moat is so wide nobody can touch it and everybody still needs phones to use AI

"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T" So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia. Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him? In the meantime, Apple had the most compelling pre-AI experience in Siri. They had everything! They had mountains of user data, audio and transcription training data, the biggest and most sophisticated user data network in the world *by far*. And they blew it. They should be so far ahead of the competition on AI that it makes their competitors fall into despair. Instead, they are a non-player in the biggest tech revolution since mobile, maybe even since the internet. They could have leveraged their data advantage to create astonishingly powerful models. They make their own silicon, they could have beat NVidia to the punch on hardware if Cook had any foresight. Instead they still just make high-end devices and now also they make TV shows and won an Oscar for a movie no one saw. I'm sorry, but that's underwhelming.

@buccocapital @Jesse_Livermore No wonder why a majority of people have a negative view of AI

The goal of AI isn't to replace software. It's to replace labor

And everybody wonders why the public is scared of AI…the face of the industry constantly warns of impending doom. Gotta be the first tech revolution where the literal people making the tech are the ones most fearful of it. Bill Gates didn’t focus on the massive amount of back office employees that the personal computer would displace. Why not focus on the massive amount of society and personal efficiencies society will gain!?

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: “50% of all tech jobs, entry-level lawyers, consultants, and finance professionals will be completely wiped out within 1–5 years.”

Couldn’t agree more. I’m working on initiating on several new companies. I have deep research breaking these businesses down for me, and it feels like a super power. But then when I step back and really think about it, I don’t really understand/know these businesses cold. An underrated part of the learning process is actually the hard work of compiling/reading and creating charts, building models, talking to people, etc.

The simplicity of understanding the difference between knowing a thing and understanding a thing is going to become clearer to people as they integrate AI into their investment process. Context matters for humans too.

I don’t think Jensen did the best job explaining to Dwarkesh why it’s important to get Chinese AI companies hooked on $NVDA chips. You want them using NVDA because if you back them into a corner and cut them off, they will eventually figure out their own way and build their own ecosystem as this is far too critical a technology for them not to. Then the US has no geopolitical leverage over them at that point and they very well could steam right past us in capabilities. Choke off $ASML EUVs, yes. Not chips. Hooked on US chips = geopolitical leverage. @benthompson talks about this frequently.

@themattharbaugh @crowdturtle When value guys start mucking around in “deep value software” be wary. It rarely works. These aren’t hard asset businesses going through cyclical downturns

Bill Nygren buys $ADBE in Q1 "We believe that the company retains durable competitive advantages across multiple growing markets, and that recent skepticism has created an opportunity to invest in this highly profitable and well-managed category leader at a meaningful discount to our estimate of intrinsic value."

@aakashgupta $WDAY does $10b of subscription revenue…

Parker Conrad was forced out of his own company in 2016. Resigned as CEO. Paid half a million in SEC fines. Surrendered his insurance license. The startup he'd built to a $4.5 billion valuation got cut to $2 billion within months. Six weeks later, he started coding Rippling in his living room. Spent two years in stealth because nobody in Silicon Valley would fund the guy who just blew up a unicorn over compliance shortcuts. That company just crossed $1 billion in ARR. Growing 78% year over year. And the growth rate is accelerating. Three straight quarters of acceleration. At a billion dollars. To understand how abnormal that is: Workday does $4.6 billion in ARR and grows around 15%. Growth at scale is supposed to decelerate. The law of large numbers catches everyone. Rippling is running in the opposite direction, and the reason is the compound startup model. Rippling runs 24+ products on a single employee data layer. Each new product hits $1 million in ARR within 5 to 6 months of launch. Because they all share the same underlying data, each addition makes the platform harder to rip out. Net dollar retention hit 200% at peak. Customers sign up for payroll and end up buying device management, corporate cards, identity tools, and now an AI analyst. Conrad still personally runs payroll for all 5,000 Rippling employees using his own product. The CEO is the company's admin. That's a product feedback loop nobody at Workday or ADP can replicate. The founder who got ousted for compliance shortcuts just built the fastest-growing workforce platform at billion-dollar scale. Same industry. Same problem. Same decade.

@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?