The $GOOGL bull case 2.0

As many of you know I was a vocal bull in March 2024 as I thought $GOOGL was the least risky, most highly dislocated asset in the market

The rest of the Mag 7 had all rallied to highs and Google was lagging

At the time Google was considered a loser in AI as Gemini’s launch was a massive fumble, the culture was described as too soft to ship, and Perplexity was raising a new round every month causing people to proclaim Google was dead

The first puzzle piece in changing the narrative was seeing Sergey back in the office full time working on AI and later as they started shipping at rapid speed, Google’s stock ran up to outperform the market from March

In Jan 2025 or whenever the quantum chip got announced, the stock started to get overheated and I sold my whole position

In May 2025, we’re back to Google being a highly dislocated asset

Here’s why:
- Google is shipping leading frontier models now not just in text, image, video but science, semiconductors, biology, etc
- Google is serious about capital allocation, buying back stock, paying a dividend, investing in capex and moonshots BUT outlaying some of the cost once the product starts to work (ie Waymo taking outside funding)
- AI mode is Google’s “have your cake and eat it to moment”, tons of people are prognosticating that it’s not enough but have you showed it to your mom or your relative in healthcare or anyone outside of the early adopter segment? It’s blowing minds of everyday users while preserving the blue links
- Google’s treasure trove of data is still the best in the world
- Google’s infrastructure is the best in the world allowing for the lowest cost to serve and aka the most spread
- Consumer AI is still the biggest pie and Google’s cost to serve positions them to win
- Jeff Dean is still at Google
- Sergey and Larry are back at Google
- Mag 7 is once again rallying with Google left behind

Not a single investor or talking head can mention Google without talking about risks to search

#escapethefilterbubble

In a world where all the focus is on Net Retention

ServiceNow $NOW stands alone on consistently reporting renewal rates every year

The results are 🤯

Cohort chart showing expansion is below Just in case someone was worried that $NOW was reporting renewal rates because they didn't have good net retention

Huge congrats @wlaufer720 & Alex Soto, co-founders of @prelude_team on their acquisition by @Calendly 🎉

They built the 1st product within a different startup, bootstrapped to $300k ARR before taking any funding, and reached multi-million ARR on only $2.4M

More in 🧵

https://twitter.com/prelude_team/status/1574786818851078145

Will and Alex started their journey together at a company called @clever in the Edtech space

They realized that hiring was a huge PITA particularly coordinating schedules between candidates & internal stakeholders

They launched their 1st product as Interview Schedule

Mark Leonard of Constellation Software is media shy so when he speaks I listen multiple times. This didnt fail.

Talks through vertical market software, capital allocation, growing talent from within, culture, incentives, and investing in network of people
buzzsprout.com/832150/5135959 Given Constellation's niche focus on vertical market software, Mark prefers to promote from within to preserve culture but also knowledge compounding within this niche

He says if CSU were to expand beyond or become very big in one vertical, he would probably hire from outside

Spurred on by the podcast between @collision & @patrick_oshag I continue to think one of the most fun things about studying public companies is the broader learnings you can use to apply to company building at the earlier stages, 👇🏾 Salesforce is the best model to study in terms of how to leverage a direct sales team, build a ecosystem of developers on app marketplace, SIs/consultants getting paid to distribute your product and how to use cash flows of a mature product to expand TAM through M&A

Anaplan's FQ1 report was our first look at how SaaS businesses have been affected by Covid-19, 10% billings growth not all attributable to Covid but certainly impacted.

Some good learnings on how they're tweaking top down sales model to deal that I'll expand upon in this thread Before getting into some of the transcript, I just wanna say hopefully multiples of public software businesses will show entrepreneurs and investors that the public markets do indeed think long term. PLAN just reported 10% YoY billings growth and still trades at 17x LTM rev!!

Hello Twitter! For my first post, I thought I'd share the slides of a talk I've recently given at a large tech company and institutional investment funds on qualitative aspects of enterprise software investing and the way to identify the quality companies

slideshare.net/ShomikGhosh3/f… Since I can't give you all the talk, some more detailed thoughts are also in this blog post which helped spur the ideas in the deck and the talk I gave around it.

linkedin.com/pulse/aligned-…