Software Stack Investing
Investing analysis of the software companies that power next generation digital businesses. The host has significant experience leading software engineering for a number of large consumer Internet properties. He brings insights as a technology practitioner and budget owner to evaluating software infrastructure companies in categories like developer tooling, big data, observability and application hosting. Sample company stocks covered include SNOW, NET, DDOG, MDB, CRWD, ZS and GTLB. Podcast supplements the content on SoftwareStackInvesting.com. Follow on Twitter @StackInvesting.
Episodes
44 episodes
Cloudflare (NET) Q2 2023 Earnings Review
Following a disappointing Q1 earnings report highlighted by challenges in the go-to-market effort, Cloudflare demonstrated renewed momentum in Q2. The sales reorganization is progressing well. Large enterprises expanded spend, adding to multi-p...
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Season 2
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Episode 20
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51:13
Confluent (CFLT) Q2 2023 Earnings Review
After delivering favorable results in Q1, Confluent continued on largely the same trajectory in Q2. Sequential growth rates even imply stabilization around 30% annually, after almost 2 years of deceleration from Covid highs. This growth is bein...
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Season 2
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Episode 19
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43:45
Q2 2023 Hyperscaler Earnings Review
Headwinds from workload optimization may have peaked in Q2. After nearly a year of negative drag on revenue growth for the hyperscalers, it appears that cloud infrastructure customers are shifting their focus away from workload optimization and...
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Season 2
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Episode 18
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38:44
Insights From A Pair Of Data Summits
AI has crashed onto the investing stage in 2023, driving significant stock price gains for several companies. Some, like Nvidia and Microsoft have already projected a direct revenue benefit as part of recent earnings reports. Others have indica...
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Season 2
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Episode 17
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1:04:30
MongoDB Q1 FY 2024 Earnings Review
After guiding for a sequential 4% drop in revenue for Q1, MongoDB delivered a strong beat. More importantly, their preliminary estimate for Q2 revenue would achieve a reacceleration of annual growth if they outperform at the same level as Q1. T...
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Season 2
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Episode 16
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50:51
Snowflake Q1 2024 Earnings Review
Snowflake’s consumption business continues to feel pressure as large enterprise customers look for ways to optimize usage. While it seemed that management had a handle on forecasting the impact of this effect when they lowered guidance back in ...
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Season 2
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Episode 15
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48:46
Datadog (DDOG) Q1 2023 Earnings Review
Datadog stock surged 45% over the month of May, following their earnings report on May 4th. The results aligned with the common theme of "better than expected", shared with several other software companies reporting results recently. This outpe...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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41:04
Confluent Q1 2023 Earnings Report
Following their Q1 earnings report on May 3rd, Confluent stock jumped by 16%. Since then, CFLT has continued appreciating, recently passing their previous high for 2023. While the report itself was pretty good (but not outstanding), the market ...
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Season 2
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Episode 13
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48:50
Cloudflare (NET) Q1 2023 Earnings Review
After setting an optimistic target for full year 2023 revenue growth in early February, Cloudflare management was forced to reset guidance lower after sales cycles unexpectedly elongated in March. While this can be attributed to exogenous effec...
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Season 2
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Episode 12
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51:55
Hyperscalers Q1 2023 Review
Coming out of 2022, the catchphrase of the Q4 earnings reports from the hyperscalers was "customer workload optimization". This referred to the process by enterprise customers of scrubbing their cloud infrastructure bills for savings. This exer...
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Season 2
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Episode 11
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32:58
Looping Back on Confluent (CFLT)
Following disappointing results from the hyperscalers, Confluent was one of the first independent software infrastructure providers to report
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Season 2
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Episode 10
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48:23
MongoDB Q4 FY2023 Earnings Report
With MongoDB's Q4 earnings report following most peers in the software infrastructure space, investors were bracing for decelerating revenue growth and a conservative guide for the upcoming year. MongoDB delivered just that. While Q4 notched a ...
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Season 2
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Episode 9
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44:48
Snowflake (SNOW) Q4 FY2023 Earnings Review
Leading up to Snowflake's Q4 FY2023 earnings report, investors felt insulated from the risk of a low revenue guide for the full year. This concern had been abated in the Q3 report, as management blunted a reduced Q4 revenue guide with a prelimi...
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Season 2
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Episode 8
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44:51
Datadog (DDOG) Q4 2022 Earnings Review
After enjoying several years of hypergrowth, Datadog's revenue outlook for this year reflects a substantial slowdown. The challenge for investors is to discern whether annual growth in the mid-20% range is the new norm for Datadog or reflective...
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Season 2
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Episode 7
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39:39
Cloudflare (NET) Q4 2022 Earnings Report
Cloudflare's Q4 FY2022 earnings report was much anticipated by the market. Like other software infrastructure companies with their fiscal Q4 aligned to the calendar year, investors received their first firm view of guidance for not just the cur...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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55:45
Q4 2022 Hyperscalers Earnings Review
Over the last two weeks, we received earnings results from the three hyperscalers - AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Additionally, several software companies reported, providing another view of trends in software infrastructure a...
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Season 2
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Episode 5
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45:36
ServiceNow - The Platform for Digital Business
ServiceNow has evolved over the last ten years from a specialized ITSM provider to a full-featured low code platform with ready-made solutions for a number of common enterprise business functions. If you were to believe the often hyperbol...
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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24:07
Okta Update
Okta has undergone a lot of change over the last two years. In 2020, the company was considered the leading independent provider of IAM (Identity and Access Management) services, enjoying great brand recognition and rapid growth. They had achie...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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23:51
Confluent (CFLT) – A Big Data Play
Confluent stock recently bounced off its 52 week low, yet still trades under the closing price from 2022. This is in spite of posting strong results in their Q3 report in early November, which drove an 11% after-hours pop. More broadly, Conflue...
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Season 2
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Episode 2
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49:33
Elastic's Ambitious Growth Plan
At their Analyst Day in September, the leadership team set an ambitious growth target for $2B in revenue by ...
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Season 2
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Episode 1
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34:31
MongoDB Q3 FY2023 Earnings Review
In Q3, MongoDB reversed a number of the trends that hampered their Q2 earnings report. They delivered a strong beat on revenue growth, a return to positive operating margin and a nice bump in customer activity. The market reacted as positively ...
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Season 1
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Episode 24
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44:55
Fastly (FSLY) Watching for a Turn Around
In this podcast, I will discuss indicators that are the catalysts for changing my position. I had owned FSLY during its COVID driven surge in 2020, enjoying price appreciation from the $20 range in May 2020 to break $100 by August. ...
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Season 1
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Episode 23
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26:01
Snowflake Earnings Review Q3 FY2023
Snowflake reported their Q3 FY2023 earning results on November 30th. The company beat revenue estimates, delivering 67% annual growth. The Q4 product revenue guide, however, missed expectations by about 2%, with annual growth decelerating to 49...
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Season 1
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Episode 22
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44:39
A Potential Silver Lining from Recent Tech Layoffs
While lay-offs are painful for those affected and the crypto implosion has seriously impacted some investors, there is a silver lining. As the exuberance of 2021 meets the economic reality of 2022, the intense battles for talent will calm down....
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Season 1
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Episode 21
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13:58
Datadog Q3 2022 Earnings Review
Datadog's Q3 earnings report was well-received by the market, with the stock popping as much as 9% after the release. Considering the macro backdrop and their outperformance during 2021, I thought the results were favorable. Datadog is maintain...
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Season 1
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Episode 20
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42:04