chrisrangen

Strategy advisor @strategytoolsIO & @engageinnovate, business school faculty, investor @Linkcapital. @thinkers50 2022 Radar. Proud Dad Alex & Isabella.

[Radosław Sikorski 🇵🇱🇪🇺 @sikorskiradek]

Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again?
As your European customers, we are watching you.

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

New!! The Latest SaaStr AI Agent Playbook for GTM Is Out

53 pages on running SaaStr with 3 humans and 21+ AI agents.

$4.8M in agent-sourced pipeline. $2.4M closed. Revenue went from -19% to +47% with the same three people.

https://t.co/1ydG2zrMlr

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

bummed i won't get liquidity on my early investment in Oura. https://t.co/qR6Mtvne1Y. Me thinks what killed it was that > 60% of capital raised would have gone to early investors like me not to grow the company. In this market with memory of Peleton and GoPro tanking after IPO that is a huge ⛳️⛳️

[Ken Sobajima | I read S-1 filings @S1Journal_EN]

@MartinGTobias I went to the cover of Oura's S-1/A, filed Sept 21. Of the 50,000,000 shares offered, the company was offering 13,500,000 and the selling stockholders 36,500,000.

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

Bending Spoons is worth $24 billion.

It trades at 8x ARR and buys B2B companies at 2.3x to 2.7x ARR.

5 learnings from its first 102 days as a public company:

#1. Revenue grew 126%. Organic growth was 3%.

Nearly all of the $393M of added revenue in Q2 came from six acquisitions. The CEO says he doesn't optimize for organic growth. He optimizes for EPS, which grew 167%.

#2. R&D is 8% of revenue. Sales and marketing is 10%.

HubSpot and Datadog each spend about 70% of revenue on those two lines. Bending Spoons spends 18.6%. About 60 people run Vimeo. The core team is under 700 people, at $4M+ of revenue each.

#3. Miro sold at 2.3x ARR, five weeks after Airtable at 2.7x.

$1.08B of ARR for $2.64B, signed 37 days apart. Miro was valued at $17.5B in 2022. Bending Spoons underwrites to a 25% unlevered return. At its 54% margin, that supports about 2.2x ARR.

#4. 1,830 people came with AOL, Eventbrite and Vimeo. Only a few hundred were kept.

Airtable arrived with 935 employees, more than Bending Spoons’ entire core team. Reorganization costs were $51M in Q2 alone.

#5. AI writes 90%+ of the code. Customers pay about 10% more for the AI features.

The CEO says a customer who paid 100 will now pay about 110. The AI gain shows up as capacity: the same 60 people on a business four times the size.

If you're at $300M to $800M in ARR growing under 25%, this is the buyer most likely to at least call. But ... the only do a handful of deals a year.

Its own stock trades at roughly 7x to 8x revenue. Your revenue is worth about 3x more inside Bending Spoons than it is in your hands.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[chrisrangen @ChrisRangen]

@dunkhippo33 Congrats!! Exciting🎉🎉

[Elizabeth Yin 💛 @dunkhippo33]

11/ For more on building an angel portfolio with small checks, I'm writing a book called The $1000 Angel: https://t.co/Ko7qwy0KRU

[Roddy 🇨🇦 @RodKahx]

Hey America.

Canada has a diesel surplus. We export more than we use domestically. Most of it to the United States.

Trump bought you 12 days worth from Russia for double what Canada charges everyday to you.

Choke on that.

[Michael MacKay @mhmck]

I appeal to the Armed Forces of Ukraine to increase their attacks on oil refineries on the territory of the russian terrorist state. I encourage the sinking of every russian "shadow fleet" tanker, anywhere in the world. I call on every country to help in this necessary task.

[Boris Johnson @BorisJohnson]

It is sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel, and transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Putin is murdering innocent Ukrainian civilians every day. The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. And yet the White House is apparently determined to force American drivers to bankroll Putin’s slaughter. It won’t work and I doubt it will make much difference to the price of fuel.

If we want Russian oil and gas back on the world market then let’s end this war - with a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The rage I'm seeing on X today, and the fury the world is aiming at Trump, is the biggest I've ever witnessed. It's coming from every direction. My guess is the Republican Party is finished for the next 200 years once Trump is gone. Any Democratic opponent now has something like 23 million statements to pull from, and there will never again be a race where a Republican can't be flattened by something Trump said or did.

[Jonas Gahr Støre @jonasgahrstore]

Today I discussed new efforts to meet Ukraine’s urgent needs with President Zelenskyy. Main priority: air defense and protecting civilians and critical infrastructure. Norway will continue to stand with Ukraine.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

We’re officially on the side of the bad guys. Absolutely appalling.

[Phillips P. OBrien @PhillipsPOBrien]

Maybe the most amazing aspect of the Russo-Ukraine War is that Russia is getting backing from both China and the USA, the two largest powers of the moment--and Ukraine could still emerge triumphant as long as Europe backs it stoutly.

[Dr. Fred Hoffman, Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) @InfoAgeStrategy]

Good question then. Better question now.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

When all this is over, @realDonaldTrump will be remembered as the greatest traitor to America in its history.

Children in school will learn of his treachery as a warning to future generations. People will spit on the ground when they hear his name. His works will be torn down, one and all.

[John Jackson @hissgoescobra]

The last 24 hours have seen the Trump administration commit to live streaming the firing squad execution of a man in a wheelchair and openly side with Putin, in humiliating fashion. This is the lowest moral point for America since the days of slavery.

[David Frum @davidfrum]

Another way to think about Trump announcement today: If he increased US diesel imports from Canada by 4%, he would gain as much fuel as from this Russia deal. But the Canadians are global super-villains, so who wants to buy from them when you could enrich Putin instead?

[Michael MacKay @mhmck]

Russia invaded Ukraine. The first country to surrender was the United States.