He joined Data Domain at pre-revenue stage in 2003, grew revenue from zero to $600 mn in 6 years, IPO’ed in 2007 and eventually sold it to Dell for $2.1 Bn.
2/5 He later became CEO of $NOW in 2011 when it had $75 mn revenue.
In 2012, $NOW came to IPO and in just 6 years, revenue grew to ~$1.5 Bn.
$NOW market cap at IPO was ~$2 Bn. When Slootman left, it was ~$20 Bn.
3/5 $SNOW former CEO Bob Muglia raised $450 mn at $3.5 Bn valuation in late 2018. Then Slootman happened.
In less than two years since he joined, $SNOW became one of the most anticipated IPOs of recent times and market cap exceeded $70 Bn yesterday.
4/5 That’s 20x the valuation of just two years ago!
Slootman owns 5.9% of $SNOW.
5/5 Only time will tell whether they can stay there, but if anyone needs to turbocharge the growth trajectory for smooth transition to IPO in a few years, consider giving this dutch CEO a call to learn the tricks.
Or if you can (a big if), just hire him.
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another great interview of @danielgross and @natfriedman by @benthompson
Some notes from the interview:
on Japan:
"...We’ve been puzzled by why TSMC’s margins aren’t better for a little while. Why are they not taking more of the margin? And I think you just said it, they’ve been through so many rounds of boom and bust and they’ve outlived a lot of people who made the wrong moves."
...I find a really interesting mispriced thing in the world might be Japan, the entire country.
...if you’re trying to consolidate all your bets on semiconductors, Japan’s a pretty interesting geography, because I think they’re going to have all these components at the end of the day, in basically one single country.
...What I sort of wonder is in a world where, if AI really happens, maybe the 2030s are the decade of Japan, if they really are able to manufacture all of these components that have to get offshore from Taiwan for various reasons."
"Don't bet against Zuck"
On Gemini:
"...not only did they deliver a good model, but they delivered innovation along an axis, a couple orders of magnitude out from what anyone else had delivered so far
...it’s clear that Google has figured something out here, and they have a bit of a secret and we’ve all been looking for clues and poring over the literature to figure out what it is. But this is a real axis of differentiation."
Imagine opening Amazon’s earnings report 5 years from now and what do you think you might hope you paid more attention to? It’s very unlikely to be AWS topline growth rate this (or any) quarter.
If I have to guess, it’s the shipping+ fulfillment costs related developments that you would find more consequential 5 years from now.
I’ll explain why but let’s first take a look at some numbers quickly before going back to that discussion.
3P revenue grew by almost +20%, ads +25%, subscription mid-teen, and 1P MSD+.
AWS, which was the key focus for many, grew by ~12%. More on AWS later; let’s start more segment level discussion with Amazon, ex AWS.
Thread on $META follow-up call and some more thoughts on the quarter
Meta's DAU/MAU is at all-time high. Consumers vote with their time whereas "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class remains busy dissecting "surveillance capitalism"
chart h/t @east_cap
it seems the impact from the war so far has been minimal, and the wider 4Q revenue guide was likely just out of caution.
Meta had a terrific third quarter which makes the after-hours reaction (down ~3%) tad bit surprising, but perhaps understandable given the wider range of scenarios for advertising going forward.
Here are my highlights from tonight’s call.
Since 4Q’19, Meta added 880 Mn Daily Active Users/People (DAU/DAP) to its Family of Apps (FOA) properties.
Given Snap currently has 406 mn DAU, this means Meta added two “Snap” (and then some) in less than four years!!
DAU/MAU engagement looks steady across all regions. Overall DAU/MAU ratio has been inching up for the last seven consecutive quarters.
While Google Service segment did just fine, Google Cloud’s pace of deceleration in topline was a bit disappointing.
Here are my highlights from the call tonight.
After four consecutive quarters of single digit growth, Google returned to double digit growth this quarter.
Both Search and YouTube grew by double digit, but Google cloud’s topline growth came down from ~28% last quarter to 22.5% this quarter.
Google Services maintained mid-30s EBIT margin, but after posting QoQ margin expansion for the last 6 quarters, Google Cloud’s margin declined from 4.9% in 2Q’23 to 3.2% in 3Q’23.