Danny Alberson
1.6K posts
Danny Alberson
@DannyAlberson
Co-founder & CEO Agentive. @YCombinator S23. Previously Product Manager @Meta and @EY_US. @BYU accounting grad. I tweet about startups and audit.
Palo Alto, CA เข้าร่วม Haziran 2011
1.6K กำลังติดตาม1.3K ผู้ติดตาม
I have never met a top-performing CEO who likes the role of HR.
They are here to slow us down and instill meaningless process.
English
English
@Daeshawn @scottastevenson @mfts0 Consider it done. Will ship proposal next week and ask for commentary from relevant stakeholders.
English
Big learning from the past 24 hours?
You can configure Stripe to report MRR in this deceitful way with the flip of one switch
Founders can export juiced MRR waterfalls directly from Stripe
VCs look at Stripe exports in diligence
This trick is widely known
via @mfts0
Scott Stevenson@scottastevenson
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage. The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M). They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now. The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract. In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation. On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins. At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing. And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
English
@_renatov @SecretCFO How else do you calculate ARR if it’s not what you’re actually collecting? I don’t understand the alternative. Genuinely.
English
@DannyAlberson @SecretCFO 1. Unrealistic
2. Start ups have bigger things to worry about
English
@_renatov @SecretCFO I’m proposing GAAP for ARR and MRR. What exactly is the alternative? And how is that not dishonest?
English
@DannyAlberson @SecretCFO GAAP metrics pre-series B is a TERRIBLE idea.
English
@_renatov @SecretCFO Still dumb though. Should be gaap metrics.
English
@SecretCFO This graph is seriously misleading.
Startups have ALWAYS been doing this.
Anyone telling you otherwise is stupid.
English
@scottastevenson @patrickc Sorry my discounts were not subtracted by default. So my MRR was higher than it should have been.
English
@scottastevenson @patrickc It’s a toggle users can control. But by default my MRR was calculated with discounts subtracted. support.stripe.com/questions/impa…
P.S. to customers of Agentive (we stopped doing discounts a while back)
English
If this is true, Stripe should not be supporting the absurd financial dishonesty of cARR @patrickc
Danny Alberson@DannyAlberson
@scottastevenson Stripe does this by default for contracts that have temporary discounts.
English
@scottastevenson Stripe does this by default for contracts that have temporary discounts.
English
It’s time to expose a huge scam in AI startups: Contracted ARR
The reason many AI startups are crushing revenue records is because they are using a dishonest metric
The biggest funds in the world are supporting this and misleading journalists for PR coverage.
The setup: Company signs 3-year enterprise deals. Year 1 is discounted (say $1M), Year 2 steps up ($2M), Year 3 is full price ($3M).
They report $3M as “ARR” — even though they’re only collecting $1M right now.
The worst part: The customer has an opt-out option at 12 months! It’s not actually a 3 year contract.
In the chart below, by Q5 the company is trumpeting ~$100M “ARR” to press, while actual cash-generating, in-effect ARR is ~$35M. That’s ~3x inflation.
On top of this, enterprise AI companies are bundling full-time “forward deployed engineers” into deals massively reducing margins, sometimes producing Year 1 negative margins.
At some point customers are going to start triggering their opt-out clauses or aggressively negotiating down Year 3 pricing.
And a wave of enterprise AI companies may collapse.
English
Danny Alberson รีทวีตแล้ว
HTML videos are here!
HTML is eating everything
HeyGen@HeyGen
We built our launch video in Claude Code using HyperFrames. Now it's yours. Open source, agent-native framework. HTML to MP4. $ npx skills add heygen-com/hyperframes RT + Comment "HyperFrames" to get the full source code of this launch video (must follow)
English
@scottew DCL. I still add a true lime packet to these just for fun.
English
Name it after Patti Edwards. She’s the one that helped the BYU players feel at home here in Provo.
BYUtv Sports Nation@BYUSportsNation
Hey Provo Airport and @BreezeAirways, we've got an idea for a rebrand 👀 ✈️
English
@scottastevenson @fahdananta Can’t we just set 10x OKRs? (Just kidding)
English
@fahdananta 100%, this is one reason that setting OKRs are a challenging way to innovate
English
If you set an incremental goal, naturally you try to iterate your way there with low variance
Aim for a 10x improvement and you’ll rethink all underlying assumptions
Use these devices accordingly
English
You sold when it was capitulating? LMAO
Big boner today. $META +4.6%
Supreme Bagholder@SupBagholder
Imagine selling when market is capitulating. $meta
English
@scottastevenson This is why AI is outperforming doctors in diagnosis. More context capacity and pattern recognition.
English
AI is teaching us that context digestion is more important than IQ.
An IQ test tests how fast and accurately humans can respond to very short prompts
But impressive human or AI performance in the real world has more to do with how we can synthesize vast quantities of context.
We need a CQ test
English
English
Utah pretends to care about data protection and privacy. Why did our elected leaders just decide to mange all voter data public? This is so self-serving @GovCox. I’m disappointed.
English
