Cloudflare $NET has had a busy year, making huge strides in being at the nexus of Edge Networks and Zero Trust. I am very impressed with how Cloudflare One combines with CNI to make Cloudflare the one enterprise network to rule them all.
Read more:
Since tens of people have been asking: I am currently $CRWD 28% $NET 20% $DDOG 12% $ZM 12% $ROKU 7% $OKTA 6% $ZS 5% $SE 5% $SNOW 4%.
$DOCU and $PTON just exited, back to watch list. $U came and went. $ZS just reentered.
What are Edge Networks? I dove into the technical details of how these companies came to be, and what makes their architecture have so much potential now and going forward. $FSLY $NET $ZS $API are a few.
Some reading material for your weekend - my deep dive into the Snowflake $SNOW platform & architecture.
Snowflake wants to be the engine that drives all analytics – both business intelligence (BI) and data science (ML/AI) -- over the entire enterprise.
@iamminshawi
@TikTokInvestors
She is making up fictitious B2B transactions to make 2 LLCs look like legit businesses to banks and lenders, but sure pal give those loopholes a try.
This is that day we get every few months where the financial world realizes cybersecurity is of the utmost import. $CRWD $NET $ZS $OKTA all providing crucial pieces.
Zscaler $ZS is a global edge network dedicated to providing Zero Trust security over all your users and workloads, across all environments. Here is a deep dive into the various product lines.
What is Zero Trust? A look at the Zero Trust ecosystem, and how $OKTA & $CRWD are positioning themselves as invaluable partners to platforms like $ZS and $NET. Ultimately they will be an "Anything to Anything, Anywhere" platform.
An investment strategy: buy and forget
Another: buy and shift (from low to strengthening convictions)
Another: actively trade a well understood core
Another: actively trade market / momo
Another: bungle around just jumping on tips
(I am “buy and shift”)
I am not impressed with $FSLY's performance or mgmt ... yet again.
Rev +40%, decelerating -4pp YoY. That isn't the issue; they are usage based and bounce around.
But it's their first Q of SigSci -- adj out the $6M (an analyst had to wiggle out in Q&A), and they grew 30%.
Blink and you might have missed it. $DDOG decided to go beyond observability and SIEM... and pivoted to become an actual cybersecurity service.
Now doing server and container threat detection... $CRWD ‘s turf.
Okay okay ... finishing touches being made, new $NET post drops tonight. Some philosophy on my investing after that, then a Zero Trust one then covering $CRWD and $OKTA to start the new year.
Very pleased with $DDOG results. As reminder, YoY results always going to be muted by the difficult Q2. +56% might seem disappointing at first, but QoQ growth has been ramping back to 15%! — Prior Qs before Q2 were 15-18% QoQ.) $DDOG is fully back to its prior growth!! 🎯
I voted for Democracy. Counting every vote. Respect for military & sacrifice. A strong & stable economy. Compassion for our own citizens, and the world at a large. Strengthening national intel against bad actors. Maturity of leadership. I voted for the UNITED States of America.
If you want to see me drone on about quality enterprise SaaS companies in future-facing industries, I finally put up a page listing podcasts / videos I’ve been on over the last 6 months, talking on $SNOW, $NET, $FSLY, $CRWD, and more.
Wow, 10k+ followers. Thank you to all the new folks joining along.
A bit about me - I'm a technologist & investor who likes to dive into the tech behind today’s hypergrowth companies, and what drives the platforms they are creating. All through the lens of an investor.
Resolution: Greatly improve the security and privacy of the network traffic from your home network and device, with a few simple steps.
I follow
@Cloudflare
for their enterprise solutions, but they help us consumers out too. And a lot of it is free.
A thread... /1
Fun fact: all 4 companies I covered in depth in the latter half of my Flavors of Security series a year ago announced earnings today. All of them knocked it out of the park. Coincidence? I DON'T THINK SO. $CRWD $ZS $OKTA $ESTC
New class of Workers serverless coming from $NET: Workers AI, powered by nVidia GPUs (presumably the Data Center line).
(Cloudflare keeps checking off potential directions mentioned in my Flare Ups write up in December... Workers Observability earlier this week, now AI...)
Thrilled to partner with NVIDIA to bring AI to the edge!!
@Cloudflare
Workers is the largest, fastest, most used edge computing working. With NVIDIA's hardware running at our edge we open a whole new class of applications for developers.
#DeveloperWeek
Whoa, $TWLO bought Segment! They were mentioned in depth in my $SNOW deep dive. Ingest tool for customer data PLUS then extracts analytics back out, plus has a tool akin to $DDOG RUM (Real User Monitoring). Very different angle for Twilio.
some big news this week in Observability...
Splunk showed CEO the door awful fast, Dynatrace CEO just retired (new one from Akamai), New Relic's founder CEO stepped down a few mo ago. leader $DDOG remains the steady innovation machine while competition is transitioning.
Okta's latest Businesses at Work report is out! Always worth a read. $ZM $DOCU moving up the charts. $SNOW still on the fastest growing.
Thanks
@okta
and
@toddmckinnon
for this annual report!! $OKTA
I did a technical review of $OKTA over a year ago that I found most enlightening. It really solidified a lot of concepts around hypergrowth investing that I now look for in other companies. Here were a few takeaways that remain highly relevant to Okta and to SaaS in general. /1
Yesterday's $SNOW talk on Twitter Spaces really clarified for me what Spaces has that podcasts never will -- alternate voices.
Many great points emerged from the audience (a dev from a diff cloud platform, a former Snowflake sales person, a cloud industry insider, etc).
C3 AI $AI IPO just hit the wire. All the potential of $PLTR w none of the heavy implementation, plus a cloud based $AYX tool for data prep.
The market, of course, is overreacting.
if you are just tuning in to today's SaaS afterhours earnings smorgasbord...
... $DDOG accelerating and up +8% ah
... $CFLT accelerating and up +9% ah
... $BILL accelerating and up +11% ah
... $NET with a typical Q (tho swung non-GAAP positive which was surprise), flat ah
Today’s new $NET One feature is a bigger deal than I thought it’d be from yesterday’s teaser. Bold moves that are understated from the headline. Cloudflare just took a big step into $OKTA ‘s lane. /1
I was wrong on $PLTR in the short term. The market doesn’t give a crap about any of the negatives I saw. Up ~100% in 1.5 months since. Impressive. Congrats if you are an owner. As for me... still not interested.
A quick take on Palantir $PLTR - not interested in the least. What ultimately rules it out for me is how few customers they have, and hard it is to implement as a new customer. Yes, recent growth has spiked to 42% but 2019 ARPU growth was 8%. It's all about landing new custs.
Initial reaction to $NET results (just PR, not heard CC yet) - steady performance at 50% growth. Admit to a slight disappointment... was hoping to see CfOne/Teams show up as acceleration, being the first full Q since free period (for pandemic) ended. No sign of that yet.
I know Twilio $TWLO is still owned by many a SaaS investor, as it remains a crucial building block for app dev. While great to see reaccelerating revenue, the poor gross margin (being a middle-man in communications) is growing worse. No sign of operational leverage.
One tiny bit that sticks in my head from
#FinTwitSummit
, from
@FromValue
-- it behooves retail investors to work together. We aren't competing; we are each researching what we individually want to invest in. When that research overlaps, collaboration + discussion benefits all.
Lots of excitement over headline numbers but Digital Turbine $APPS did NOT grow +146%. They grew 88.7M plus 31.7M from major acquisition last yr (they are about to lap in 2Qs). Adjusting that out is +58% organic. Which yes is impressive acceleration from +50% last Q.
The market sure in love with $NET today in realizing they are a $ZS competitor. Some of us have known this was coming since... uh (checks notes).... February.
Let’s refresh on a few past tidbits.... /1
Over 2020, performance improvements by $SNOW made 3/4 of queries more than 50% faster YoY. So they grew platform rev 115% last Q even after making their customer’s compute way faster.
I (very roughly) calc this to mean it would have been 142% growth w/o those improvements.
In case you missed it - I spoke w/ James Wang on the ARK Invest’s FYI podcast on Snowflake $SNOW and impact on data analytics (like $AYX). [Later rated by one of the top episodes of the year - wow, thanks, FYI listeners.]
FYI | EP85 is live! This week,
@hhhypergrowth
joins the podcast to talk about big data and the future of analytics. In this episode, we'll also cover Snowflake, how it compares to its competitors, and much more. Listen!
Re-reviewing $FSLY Fastly’s Q4 guidance of 81-84M. Removing SigSci’s likely 8M contrib, means 73-76M. Q419 was 59M, so they guided to 24-29% organic growth.
To organically match their last YoY of 42% in Q3, they need 92M in Q4. Tall lift, but it is holiday traffic so 🤷🏻♂️.
if you want to see stellar product cadence look at Datadog
multiple product ideas went beta this summer in July and August ... now available in GA by October (just announced during their Dash customer conf today)
explore, find fit, iterate .... over and over
I need to again thank
@Quartr_App
to make earnings calls into a podcast.
making heavy use of the rewind to replay the interesting bits ✍️, and fastfwd or speed up buttons during slower bits🥱
new button "Q&A" in lower right jumps right that part of the call.
bravo Quartr.
Know what I need to see in my investments? PROOF of execution. No room for the added risk of turnarounds and executional problems and pipe dreams. This stance has greatly improved my batting avg and overall success over past few years. The companies I discuss execute now.
Gonna try this Clubhouse thingie out. I will be discussing “Initial reactions to $NET and $DDOG earnings”. Today, Feb 11 at 5:00 PM EST. Join! Will bring questioners to the stage.
Informative posts are about to start flying fast and furious from the blog again @ . Go sign up!
Topics this summer will be on Zero Trust, SASE Networks, Data Cloud, AI/Analytics, and more, plus looks at $CRWD, $DDOG, $OKTA, $SNOW, $NET, & others...
I talked to ARK Invest about $SNOW $AYX $CLDR Databricks and more, to discuss where data analytics has been and is going. Thanks
@jwangARK
for the great questions, that I felt weaved a good story about Data and Analytics players.
FYI | EP85 is live! This week,
@hhhypergrowth
joins the podcast to talk about big data and the future of analytics. In this episode, we'll also cover Snowflake, how it compares to its competitors, and much more. Listen!
$CRWD and $DDOG showing lately that they are both now moving toward common goalpost.
But Crowdstrike just leaned towards Datadog (moving into observability) a lot faster than the reverse (moving into crowdsourced threat intel).
Cloudflare $NET makes new feature (Waiting Room, edge-based web app queuing system using Workers and Durable Objects), immediately makes it free for vaccine distribution in Project Fair Shot.
Thanks
@Cloudflare
, signed Humanity
Nevermind I am going to beat
@jaminball
to the punch. (This Q vs last Q)
* AWS is growing +39%, accelerating from +37%.
* Azure is growing +48% CCURR, accelerating from +45%.
* Google's Cloud segment is growing +45%, decelerating from +54%
2021 Media Universe from
@eshap
on LinkedIn, showing major studios, content providers, telcom and gaming players in US. One immediate takeaway - $TWTR is not doing this whole "business" thing right.
If you own Snowflake $SNOW, I have been a bit obsessed with ‘em lately on my premium service (incl new post today), as well as Confluent $CFLT before IPO.
Switching gears now to obsess over Cloudflare $NET and Zscaler $ZS in July, then Datadog $DDOG and CrowdStrike $CRWD again.
Jane confirmed Cloudflare $NET behind the iCloud+ Private Relay announced by Apple $AAPL.
Apple and Cloudflare were authors (along with Fastly) of a new secure DNS protocol standard called Oblivious DoH in December. Then they made it a reality.
Hints about something coming down the pipe. I think the clue from
@chamath
about "best SaaS company i've ever seen" is related to the platform's purpose, not just the SaaS metric comparison.
But 154% and accellerating? Color me interested.
I’m finalizing an investment in “???” and will be leading their PIPE so it will soon be public.
Best SaaS company I’ve ever seen/invested in - and, as a public company, it will comp per the table and chart below.
One-pager to come soon.
What’s that? You wanted to hear drone on about edge networks $FSLY and $NET for 47 minutes? You’re in luck thanks to
@investing_city
! or on a podcast network near you.
Busy week: Zoomtopia user conf for $ZM, Falcon.con cybersecurity conf for $CRWD, ZeroTrust week at $NET (expanding Cf for Teams) ... not to mention Amazon Prime Day and Apple iPhone event. Still need to digest Okta Showcase and Twlo Signal too.
Raise your hand if you are listening to $NET Investor Day. 🙋♂️
Thanks for
@Cloudflare
and
@eastdakota
and
@zatlyn
for this.
I have a few questions in for Q&A. In particular, want more details on CNI, cloud interconnectedness, and Durable Objects use cases.
I recently chatted w the CCM dynamic duo, if you want to hear my current thoughts on the cyber edge... discussed $CRWD v $ZS and $NET v $FSLY. (Recorded last week during that fun massive drop on all hypergrowth SaaS.)
This week on Chit Chat Money
- Interview with
@hhhypergrowth
🎙(starts at 18:35)
- Cyber security, $CRWD vs. $ZS
- Edge computing, $FSLY vs. $NET
- Brett & Ryan talk Spotify’s acquisition and Doordash S-1
Spotify➡️
Apple➡️
As we await some fresh pod/web casts to go live, here is my first from 4mo ago (before this new blog and twitter persona). I discuss cloud tooling $MDB $ESTC $DDOG $OKTA $ZS $CRWD $NET $FSLY in a broad convo w fellow technologist
@7Innovator
. Enjoy!
Pssst!
Don’t tell anybody...
... but the curtain is about to drop on
@FintwitSummit
in 3 days, with the details finally made public.
It is going to be a fun event later this month, and chock full of educational content.
Hi all - I have decided to take my long form articles that I post on Saul's board on The Motley Fool's forums to a dedicated blog. Interested in understanding the tech behind today's hypergrowth companies? Come join me on my new adventure!
I despise all the stupid Fintwit dramas ... but I'm glad the popular Fintwit guru who committed massive PPP Fraud against the US (aka we the people) has finally gone silent. One must assume he started his 2 yr sentence. No idea why people followed him.