Man, a quarterly conference call webcast solution with a highly accurate, live transcript that populates under the webcast would be a killer app. Has to be achievable with off-the-shelf technology at this point, right?

Anyone have a good explanation for the surge of hiring at $YEXT? Almost looks like a mistake in the LinkedIn data (non-affiliated profiles getting counted somehow) but I can't quit lock it down. Headcount on LinkedIn up 22% in the past few months (!!).

@ShortSightedCap @quinwoodlncap @Beutty @SkeleCap I think there's a natural role of "leading financial center" and most of the other traits of NYC are correlated, probably causally. Singapore, London, HK all have lots of similarities (though two of them manage to be much cleaner...)

@ShortSightedCap @quinwoodlncap @Beutty @SkeleCap Maybe! But I'm not sure that's the right thought experiment. You can do most financial careers in LA, Chicago, etc. Won't be at the epicenter, but that's not a big deal- and in each case the cost of living/quality of life can arguably be much higher.

@ShortSightedCap @quinwoodlncap @Beutty @SkeleCap The main point is that everyone has different utility curves, and I think for many NYC is a great place to be. Otherwise, it wouldn't be so expensive. :) Implicitly, this factors in the increase in serendipity proximity provides. Friends passing through, random invites, etc.

@quinwoodlncap @Beutty @ShortSightedCap @SkeleCap Probably just as interesting, but more tradeoffs on the other side. :)

@ShortSightedCap @SkeleCap (!!) Density and centrality create: * Subcultures that don't exist at scale elsewhere * The best public transit in the US * Regular magical moments (e.g. 1am Comedy Cellar surprises) * Unending entertainment Not surprising at all that many prefer it to the alternatives.

Maybe my favorite ChatGPT use case yet. A friend is flirting with a French man who said “let me be evasive” out of the blue, which confused her. To help, I asked GPT-4 what he might have meant. The response seems to absolutely nail the language nuance. Incredible.

It's amazing to me that immigration isn't framed in nationalistic terms. Birthrates are declining in all countries, globally. The fact that millions of people per year want to move here can be America's secret demographic weapon. It's ours to lose.

This chart demonstrates how far we have yet to go in teaching the basics of data visualization... yikes

@MRatable Not necessarily if the new contract had different payment terms and so wasn't billed in Q1.

Subway ridership in NYC as a % of the comparable pre-pandemic day. The next few months will be important but an uptrend still seems to be intact. BART ridership is regularly below 40% of the pre-pandemic baseline, for comparison.

@AlphaSeeker84 That's why I think it is best to think of SaaS companies on multiples of some sort of terminal margin. Then you can use revenue growth as the driver of the multiple without worrying about base effects. On their nums, trading ~31x CY25 and growing 30%+. Still ties out, imo

@AlphaSeeker84 They model for 63% FCF growth CY25/CY24. Not saying the model is correct and one could nit pick it other ways, but that's not a crazy multiple at that growth rate.

SaaS cos that have added headcount this year (ranked by growth): $SNOW $S $AI $DDOG $TOST $NET $WDAY $NOW $NEWR $ZS $OLO $FROG $ASAN $DBX $AMPL $PCTY $TENB $FIVN $CWAN $CRWD $CFLT $SHOP $SUMO $MNDY All others shrinking. Also, 7 of the names above stopped growing by March.

Moving from low-touch, bottoms-up selling motions to top-down enterprise sales is hard and very prone to over-optimistic spreadsheet math. See: TWLO.

Well, it's official. Total headcount for the Bessemer Cloud Index has rolled over and was down by 2500+ heads in March and by another 5000+ in April. Both probably underestimates. If anything close to this pace is maintained, SaaS headcount will be down Y/y by June.

$NOW work life balance on a clear uptrend since Slootman left. 👀

@MRatable 🙏👌

The four commandments of naming a startup: 1. Benign SEO competition 2. Easy to spell after you hear it spoken 3. Memorable 4. Easy to pronounce when you see it written "Datadog" and "Shopify" are both 👌.

I know a founder who was hounded by wealth managers after exiting. He ended up paying a guy 1% per year to "manage" an 8-figure portfolio of mutual funds charging 1-2% annual fees, each with a ~5% upfront fee that went to the "Wealth Manager" as a kickback. Legalized theft.

4/ Confluent- Middleware generally seems like a winner, but one bottleneck to streaming data utility is the fundamental slowness of humans- for many use cases batch processing is enough for us. AI agents won't be so encumbered.

5/ ZoomInfo- A unique and hard-to-replicate dataset and we're all going to be getting very personalized/unique to us emails/phone calls, etc. in the near future. Hard to imagine ZoomInfo doesn't manage to benefit from being the system of record for contact data.