investment thesis by vintage:
2015: good management, earnings grow, long
2021: TAM $500bn, only 20x sales, covid win, long
2026: AI maybe hurt, chart bad, short
Been digging into a software stock everyone forgot about. Worth sharing some of it.
Last August, BigCommerce quietly changed its name to Commerce and swapped its ticker to $CMRC. No big announcement, no fanfare — most people still have it filed under “dead 2021 SaaS name.”
Here’s what’s actually interesting: while nobody was looking, the business did something the stock price doesn’t reflect.
— Operating loss cut from -$72M to -$16M in two years
— Flipped to positive free cash flow
— Gross margins near 79%
— $141M in cash and short-term investments, basically no debt
And yet the stock is down ~65%. It now trades around 0.70x sales. For context, healthy SaaS names with margins like this usually go for 4-8x.
So the whole debate comes down to one question: is this a melting ice cube that deserves to be cheap, or a business the market wrote off too early?
There’s a real bear case too — growth has slowed to a crawl and it’s fighting Shopify. I’m not going to pretend it’s a layup. That part’s in the full writeup.
Broke down both sides this week on Cheap Software Stocks: the numbers that made me look twice, the risks that keep it honest, and where it could go from here.
Link in bio if you want the whole thing.
A powerful piece on the suffering of pigs in gestation crates in the US and why it’s important to speak out against legislative threats to animal welfare https://t.co/uvXXuCidhl
Rush to defend exchanges on crypto perp competition means we are in first inning of de rating. Can revisit in 12-24 months since not a ton of NT catalysts to get them to work $ice $cme $cboe
I've been working on farm animal protection for a while now, and I haven't seen anything quite like what's happening around the Save Our Bacon Act.
People who have never organized before, including some genuinely prominent voices, are hosting events, calling senators, and fundraising from friends. And those of us who have been here a while, across many ideological divides and every strategic disagreement, are showing up together.
We've always punched above our weight (out of necessity!), but this feels substantively very different. The political and social cost of supporting this barbarism is finally rising.
Factor/sector vs. stock debate is somewhat tail wagging dog bc the sector usually works when individual stocks are cheap and starting to inflect.
If you are a quality-biased investor and opportunistically buying cheap you will likely u/p factor exposure in the NT bc when an industry works the best companies will u/p nt even if they o/p thru-cycle (bottlenecks vs. ASML/TSM today, or any high-cost producer in a commodity boom). but ex-ante the process is lower perma impairment of capital risk even if less efficient (and the risk not captured ) from the lens of a barra/axioma model
An interesting topic with the increasing popularity of factors.
If you buy a stock because of the fundamentals and the stock goes up, does the fact the industry went up more matter at all (ASML v SOXX in this case)?
I lean no, assuming the actual business performed as you expected
Imagine your dog trapped in a metal coffin for her entire life. She cannot go outside. She cannot walk. She cannot even turn around to see what's behind her. She is forced to live this way her entire life.
This is the mind-blowing that the pork industry is not just trying to hide, but trying to force YOU to accept through underhanded tactics. It has slipped this provision (the Save Our Bacon Act) into the Farm Bill, legislation that otherwise does things like fund food stamps.
But now that is all being exposed. The NYTimes published an op ed yesterday condemning the corruption and abuse and calling the fight for animals "one of the great but incomplete moral revolutions of our lifetime."
Columnist @NickKristof will be remembered by history for his moral prescience. But this is all being exposed not just because of Kristof. My friend @joshbalk has worked tirelessly to lobby legislators. @Lewis_Bollard has relentlessly pushed this story on social media. @leah_garces has worked for years to successfuly win over allies from within the industry. And, most important, countless Americans like you have raised YOUR voice.
Stories like this NYT piece are in many ways the product of the small efforts of millions. Every person who shares on social media, tells their friends or co-workers about the corruption they've read about, or sheds a quiet tear for these defenseless creatures — you are the ones triggering this moral revolution.
And exposure is just the beginning. Soon, because of you, every animal will be freed from their tormenter's cage.
Voters at the state level are voting to end factory-farming practices that amount to mass animal torture.
But Republicans in Congress are doing their utmost to protect businesses' right to torture animals.
https://t.co/NzkOPNalQ3
SK Telecom invested ~$100M in the same round, a bigger check even than Spark (the institutional lead). It's unclear how much they've invested in later rounds, but doing some back of the envelope math, I'd assume ~$6B, which is 35% of their $17B market cap
After 14+ years at @salesforce, I’m joining @OpenAI as VP of Global Partnerships. It’s been an honor and a privilege leading the ecosystem at @salesforce and @SlackHQ and working with incredible people day in day out for more than a decade. Salesforce is an amazing and unique company to work for - I highly recommend it! Thank you to @Benioff and the amazing executives over the years for the opportunity to be part of this special place.