Category Archives: BI

Kellblog 2021 Predictions

I admit that I’ve been more than a little slow to put out this post, but at least I’ve missed the late December (and early January) predictions rush.  2020 was the kind of year that would make anyone in the predictions business more than a little gun shy.  I certainly didn’t have “global pandemic” on my 2020 bingo card and, even if I somehow did, I would never have coupled that with “booming stock market” and median SaaS price/revenue multiples in the 15x range.

That said, I’m back on the proverbial horse, so let’s dig in with a review of our 2020 predictions.  Remember my disclaimers, terms of use, and that this exercise is done in the spirit of fun and as a way to tee-up discussion of interesting trends, and nothing more.

2020 Predictions Review

Here a review of my 2020 predictions along with a self-graded and for this year, pretty charitable, hit/miss score.

  1. Ongoing social unrest. No explanation necessary.  HIT.
  2. A desire for re-unification. We’ll score that one a whopping, if optimistic, MISS.  Hopefully it becomes real in 2021.
  3. Climate change becomes new moonshot. Swing and a MISS.  I still believe that we will collectively rally behind slowing climate change but feel like I was early on this prediction, particularly because we got distracted with, shall we say, more urgent priorities.  (Chamath, a little help here please.)
  4. The strategic chief data officer (CDO). CDO’s are indeed becoming more strategic and they are increasingly worried about playing not only defense but also offense with data, so much so that the title is increasingly morphing into chief data & analytics officer (CDAO).  HIT.
  5. The ongoing rise of devops. In an era where we (vendors) increasingly run our own software, running it is increasingly as important as building it.  Sometimes, moreHIT.
  6. Database proliferation slows. While the text of this prediction talks about consolidation in the DBMS market, happily the prediction itself speaks of proliferation slowing and that inconsistency gives me enough wiggle room to declare HITDB-Engines ranking shows approximately the same number of DBMSs today (335) as one year ago (334).  While proliferation seems to be slowing, the list is most definitely not shrinking.
  7. A new, data-layer approach to data loss prevention. This prediction was inspired by meeting Cyral founder Manav Mital (I think first in 2018) after having a shared experience at Aster Data.  I loved Manav’s vision for securing the set of cloud-based data services that we can collectively call the “data cloud.”  In 2020, Cyral raised an $11M series A, led by Redpoint and I announced that I was advising them in March.  It’s going well.  HIT.
  8. AI/ML success in focused applications. The keyword here was focus.  There’s sometimes a tendency in tech to confuse technologies with categories.  To me, AI/ML is very much the former; powerful stuff to build into now-smart applications that were formerly only automation.  While data scientists may want an AI/ML workbench, there is no one enterprise AI/ML application – more a series of applications focused on specific problems, whether that be C3.AI in a public market context or Symphony.AI in private equity one.  HIT.
  9. Series A remains hard. Well, “hard” is an interesting term.  The point of the prediction was the Series A is the new chokepoint – i.e., founders can be misled by easily raising $1-2M in seed, or nowadays even pre-seed money, and then be in for a shock when it comes time to raise an A.  My general almost-oxymoronic sense is that money is available in ever-growing, bigger-than-ever bundles, but such bundles are harder to come by.  There’s some “it factor” whereby if you have “it” then you can (and should) raise tons of money at great valuations, whereas, despite the flood of money out there, if you don’t have “it,” then tapping into that flood can be hard to impossible.  Numbers wise, the average Series A was up 16% in size over 2019 at around $15M, but early-stage venture investment was down 11% over 2019.  Since I’m being charitable today, HIT.
  10. Autonomy CEO extradited. I mentioned this because proposed extraditions of tech billionaires are, well, rare and because I’ve kept an eye on Autonomy and Mike Lynch, ever since I competed with them back in the day at MarkLogic.  Turns out Lynch did not get extradited in 2020, so MISS, but the good news (from a predictions viewpoint) is that his extradition hearing is currently slated for next month so it’s at least possible that it happens in 2021.  Here’s Lynch’s website (now seemingly somewhat out of date) to hear his side of this story.

So, with that charitable scoring, I’m 7 and 3 on the year.  We do this for fun anyway, not the score.

 Kellblog’s Ten Prediction for 2021

1. US divisiveness decreases but unity remains elusive. Leadership matters. With a President now focused on unifying America, divisiveness will decrease.  Unity will be difficult as some will argue that “moving on” will best promote healing while others argue that healing is not possible without first holding those to account accountable.  If nothing else, the past four years have provided a clear demonstration of the power of propaganda, the perils of journalistic bothsidesism, and the power of “big tech” platforms that, if unchecked, can effectively be used for long-tail aggregation towards propagandist and conspiratorial ends.

The big tech argument leads to one of two paths: (1) they are private companies that can do what they want with their terms of service and face market consequences for such, or (2) they are monopolies (and/or, more tenuously, the Internet is a public resource) that must be regulated along the lines of the FCC Fairness Doctrine of 1949, but with a modern twist that speaks not only to the content itself but to the algorithms for amplifying and propagating it.

2. COVID-19 goes to brushfire mode. After raging like a uncontained wildfire in 2020, COVID should move to brushfire mode in 2021, slowing down in the spring and perhaps reaching pre-COVID “normal” in the fall, according to these predictions in UCSF Magazine. New variants are a wildcard and scientists are still trying to determine the extent to which existing vaccines slow or stop the B117 and 501.V2 variants.

According to this McKinsey report, the “transition towards normalcy is likely during the second quarter in the US,” though, depending on a number of factors, it’s possible that, “there may be a smaller fall wave of disease in third to fourth quarter 2021.”  In my estimation, the wildfire gets contained in 2Q21, with brush fires popping up with decreasing frequency throughout the year.

(Bear in mind, I went to the same school of armchair epidemiology as Dougall Merton, famous for his quote about spelling epidemiologist:  “there are three i’s in there and I swear they’re moving all the time.”)

3. The new normal isn’t. Do you think we’ll ever go into the office sick again? Heck, do you think we’ll ever go into the office again, period?  Will there even be an office?  (Did they renew that lease?)  Will shaking hands be an ongoing ritual? Or, in France, la bise?  How about those redeyes to close that big deal?  Will there still be 12-legged sales calls?  Live conferences?  Company kickoffs?  Live three-day quarterly business reviews (QBRs)?  Business dinners?  And, by the way, do you think everyone – finally – understands the importance of digital transformation?

I won’t do detailed predictions on each of these questions, and I have as much Zoom fatigue as the next person, but I think it’s important to realize the question is not “when we are we going back to the pre-COVID way of doing things?” and instead “what is the new way of doing things that we should move towards?”   COVID has challenged our assumptions and taught us a lot about how we do business. Those lessons will not be forgotten simply because they can be.

4.We start to value resilience, not just efficiency. For the past several decades we have worshipped efficiency in operations: just-in-time manufacturing, inventory reduction, real-time value chains, and heavy automation.  That efficiency often came at a cost in terms of resilience and flexibility and as this Bain report discusses, nowhere was that felt more than in supply chain.  From hand sanitizer to furniture to freezers to barbells – let alone toilet paper and N95 masks — we saw a huge number of businesses that couldn’t deal with demand spikes, forcing stock-outs for consumers, gray markets on eBay, and countless opportunities lost.  It’s as if we forget the lessons of the beer game developed by MIT.  The lesson:  efficiency can have a cost in terms of resilience and agility and I believe,  in an increasingly uncertain world, that businesses will seek both.

5. Work from home (WFH) sticks. Of the many changes COVID drove in the workplace, distributed organizations and WFH are the biggest. I was used to remote work for individual creative positions such as writer or software developer.  And tools from Slack to Zoom were already helping us with collaboration.  But some things were previously unimaginable to me, e.g., hiring someone who you’d never met in the flesh, running a purely digital user conference, or doing a QBR which I’d been trained (by the school of hard knocks) was a big, long, three-day meeting with a grueling agenda, with drinks and dinners thereafter.  I’d note that we were collectively smart enough to avoid paving cow paths, instead reinventing such meetings with the same goals, but radically different agendas that reflected the new constraints.  And we – or at least I in this case – learned that such reinvention was not only possible but, in many ways, produced a better, tighter meeting.

Such reinvention will be good for business in what’s now called The Future of Work software category such as my friends at boutique Future-of-Work-focused VCs like Acadian Ventures — who have even created a Bessemer-like Future of Work Global Index to track the performance of public companies in this space.

6. Tech flight happens, but with a positive effect. Much has been written about the flight from Silicon Valley because of the cost of living, California’s business-unfriendly policies, the mismanagement of San Francisco, and COVID. Many people now realize that if they can work from home, then why not do so from Park City, Atlanta, Raleigh, Madison, or Bend?  Better yet, why not work from home in a place with no state income taxes at all — like Las Vegas, Austin, or Miami?

Remember, at the end of the OB (original bubble), B2C meant “back to Cleveland” – though, at the time, the implication was that your job didn’t go with you.  This time it does.

The good news for those who leave:

  • Home affordability, for those who want the classic American dream (which now has a median price of $2.5M in Palo Alto).
  • Lower cost of living. I’ve had dinners in Myrtle Beach that cost less than breakfasts at the Rosewood.
  • Burgeoning tech scenes, so you don’t have go cold turkey from full immersion in the Bay Area. You can “step down,” into a burgeoning scene in a place like Miami, where Founder’s Fund partner Keith Rabois, joined by mayor Francis Suarez, is leading a crusade to turn Miami into the next hot tech hub.

But there also good news for those who stay:  house prices should flatten, commutes should improve, things will get a little bit less crazy — and you’ll get to keep the diversity of great employment options that leavers may find lacking.

Having grown up in the New York City suburbs, been educated on Michael Porter, and worked both inside and outside of the industry hub in Silicon Valley, I feel like the answer here is kind of obvious:  yes, there will be flight from the high cost hub, but the brain of system will remain in the hub.  So it went with New York and financial services, it will go with Silicon Valley and tech.  Yes, it will disperse.  Yes, certainly, lower cost and/or more staffy functions will be moved out (to the benefit of both employers and employees).  Yes, secondary hubs will emerge, particularly around great universities.  But most of the VCs, the capital, the entrepreneurs, the executive staff, will still orbit around Silicon Valley for a long time.

7. Tech bubble relents. As an investor, I try to never bet against bubbles via shorts or puts because “being right long term” is too often a synonym for “being dead short term.” Seeing manias isn’t hard, but timing them is nearly impossible.  Sometimes change is structural – e.g., you can easily convince me that if perpetual-license-based software companies were worth 3-5x revenues that SaaS companies, due to their recurring nature, should be worth twice that.  The nature of the business changed, so why shouldn’t the multiple change with it?

Sometimes, it’s actually true that This Time is Different.   However, a lot of the time it’s not.  In this market, I smell tulips.  But I started smelling them over six months ago, and BVP Emerging Cloud Index is up over 30% in the meantime.  See my prior point about the difficultly of timing.

But I also believe in reversion to the mean.  See this chart by Jamin Ball, author of Clouded Judgement, that shows the median SaaS enterprise value (EV) to revenue ratio for the past six years.  The median has more than tripled, from around 5x to around 18x.  (And when I grew up 18x looked more like a price/earnings ratio than a price/revenue ratio.)

What accounts for this multiple expansion?  In my opinion, these are several of the factors:

  • Some is structural: recurring businesses are worth more than non-recurring businesses so that should expand software multiples, as discussed above.
  • Some is the quality of companies: in the past few years some truly exceptional businesses have gone public (e.g., Zoom).  If you argue that those high-quality businesses deserve higher multiples, having more of them in the basket will pull up the median.  (And the IPO bar is as high as it’s ever been.)
  • Some is future expectations, and the argument that the market for these companies is far bigger than we used to think. SaaS and product-led growth (PLG) are not only better operating models, but they actually increase TAM in the category.
  • Some is a hot market: multiples expand in frothy markets and/or bubbles.

My issue:  if you assume structure, quality, and expectations should rationally cause SaaS multiples to double (to 10), we are still trading at 80% above that level.  Ergo, there is 44% downside to an adjusted median-reversion of 10.  Who knows what’s going to happen and with what timing but, to quote Newton, what goes up (usually) must come down.  I’m not being bear-ish; just mean reversion-ish.

(Remember, this is spitballing.  I am not a financial advisor and don’t give financial advice.  See disclaimers and terms of use.)

8. Net dollar retention (NDR) becomes the top SaaS metric, driving companies towards consumption-based pricing and expansion-oriented contracts. While “it’s the annuity, stupid” has always been the core valuation driver for SaaS businesses, in recent years we’ve realized that there’s only one thing better than a stream of equal payments – a stream of increasing payments.  Hence NDR has been replacing churn and CAC as the headline SaaS metric on the logic of, “who cares how much it cost (CAC) and who cares how much leaks out (churn) if the overall bucket level is increasing 20% anyway?”  While that’s not bad shorthand for an investor, good operators should still watch CAC and gross churn carefully to understand the dynamics of the underlying business.

This is driving two changes in SaaS business, the first more obvious than the second:

  • Consumption-based pricing. As was passed down to me by the software elders, “always hook pricing to something that goes up.”  In the days of Moore’s Law, that was MIPS.  In the early days of SaaS, that was users (e.g., at Salesforce, number of salespeople).  Today, that’s consumption pricing a la Twilio or Snowflake.   The only catch in a pure consumption-based model is that consumption better go up, but smart salespeople can build in floors to protect against usage downturns.
  • Built-in expansion. SaaS companies who have historically executed with annual, fixed-fee contracts are increasingly building expansion into the initial contract.  After all, if NDR is becoming a headline metric and what gets measured gets managed, then it shouldn’t be surprising that companies are increasingly signing multi-year contracts of size 100 in year 1, 120 in year 2, and 140 in year 3.  (They need to be careful that usage rights are expanding accordingly, otherwise the auditors will flatten it back out to 120/year.)  Measuring this is a new challenge.  While it should get captured in remaining performance obligation (RPO), so do a lot of other things, so I’d personally break it out.  One company I work with calls it “pre-sold expansion,” which is tracked in aggregate and broken out as a line item in the annual budget.

See my SaaStr 2020 talk, Churn is Dead, Long Live Net Dollar Retention, for more information on NDR and a primer on other SaaS metrics.  Video here.

9. Data intelligence happens. I spent a lot of time with Alation in 2020, interim gigging as CMO for a few quarters. During that time, I not only had a lot of fun and worked with great customers and teammates, I also learned a lot about the evolving market space.

I’d been historically wary of all things metadata; my joke back in the day was that “meta-data presented the opportunity to make meta-money.”  In the old days just getting the data was the problem — you didn’t have 10 sources to choose from, who cared where it came from or what happened to it along the way, and what rules (and there weren’t many back then) applied to it.  Those days are no more.

I also confess I’ve always found the space confusing.  Think:

Wait, does “MDM” stand for master data management or metadata management, and how does that relate to data lineage and data integration?  Is master data management domain-specific or infrastructure, is it real-time or post hoc?  What is data privacy again?  Data quality?  Data profiling?  Data stewardship?  Data preparation, and didn’t ETL already do that?  And when did ETL become ELT?  What’s data ops?  And if that’s not all confusing enough, why do I hear like 5 different definitions of data governance and how does that relate to compliance and privacy?”

To quote Edward R. Murrow, “anyone who isn’t confused really doesn’t understand the situation.”

After angel investing in data catalog pioneer Alation in 2013, joining their board in 2016, and joining the board of master data management leader Profisee in 2019, I was determined to finally understand the space.  In so doing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the vision of what IDC calls data intelligence is going to happen.

Conceptually, you can think of DI as the necessary underpinning for both business intelligence (BI) and artificial intelligence (AI).  In fact, AI increases the need for DI.  Why?  Because BI is human-operated.  An analyst using a reporting or visualization tool who sees bad or anomalous data is likely going to notice.  An algorithm won’t.  As we used to say with BI, “garbage in, garbage out.”  That’s true with AI as well, even more so.  Worse yet, AI also suffers from “bias in, bias out” but that’s a different conversation.

I think data intelligence will increasingly coalesce around platforms to bring some needed order to the space.  I think data catalogs, while originally designed for search and discovery, serve as excellent user-first platforms for bringing together a wide variety of data intelligence use cases including data search and discovery, data literacy, and data governance.  I look forward to watching Alation pursue, with a hat tip to Marshall McLuhan, their strategy of “the catalog is the platform.”

Independent of that transformation, I look forward to seeing Profisee continue to drive their multi-domain master data management strategy that ultimately results in cleaner upstream data in the first place for both operational and analytical systems.

It should be a great year for data.

10. Rebirth of Planning and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). EPM 1.0 was Hyperion, Arbor, and TM1. EPM 2.0 was Adaptive Insights, Anaplan, and Planful (nee Host Analytics).  EPM 3.0 is being born today.  If you’ve not been tracking this, here a list of next-generation planning startups that I know (and for transparency my relationship with them, if any.)

Planning is literally being reborn before our eyes, in most cases using modern infrastructure, product-led growth strategies, stronger end-user focus and design-orientation, and often with a functional, vertical, or departmental twist.  2021 will be a great year for this space as these companies grow and put down roots.  (Also, see the follow-up post I did on this prediction.)

Well, that’s it for this year’s list.  Thanks for reading this far and have a healthy, safe, and Rule-of-40-compliant 2021.

The Domo S-1: Does the Emperor Have Clothes?

I preferred Silicon Valley [1] back in the day when companies raised modest amounts of capital (e.g., $30M) prior to an IPO that took 4-6 years from inception, where burn rates of $10M/year looked high, and where $100M raise was the IPO, not one or more rounds prior to it.  When cap tables had 1x, non-participating preferred and that all converted to a single class of common stock in the IPO. [2]

How quaint!

These days, companies increasingly raise $200M to $300M prior to an IPO that takes 10-12 years from inception, the burn might look more like $10M/quarter than $10M/year, the cap table loaded up with “structure” (e.g., ratcheting, multiple liquidation preferences).  And at IPO time you might end up with two classes common stock, one for the founder with super-voting rights, and one for everybody else.

I think these changes are in general bad:

  • Employees get more diluted, can end up alternative minimum tax (AMT) prisoners unable to leave jobs they may be unhappy doing, have options they are restricted from selling entirely or are sold into opaque secondary markets with high legal and transaction fees, and/or even face option expiration at 10 years. (I paid a $2,500 “administrative fee” plus thousands in legal fees to sell shares in one startup in a private transaction.)
  • John Q. Public is unable to buy technology companies at $30M in revenue and with a commission of $20/trade. Instead they either have to wait until $100 to $200M in revenue or buy in opaque secondary markets with limited information and high fees.
  • Governance can be weak, particularly in cases where a founder exercises directly (or via a nuclear option) total control over a company.

Moreover, the Silicon Valley game changes from “who’s smartest and does the best job serving customers” on relatively equivalent funding to “who can raise the most capital, generate the most hype, and buy the most customers.”  In the old game, the customers decide the winners; in the new one, Sand Hill Road tries to, picking them in a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Hype Factor
In terms of hype, one metric I use is what I call the hype ratio = VC / ARR.  On the theory that SaaS startups input venture capital (VC) and output two things — annual recurring revenue (ARR) and hype — by analogy, heat and light, this is a good way to measure how efficiently they generate ARR.

The higher the ratio, the more light and the less heat.  For example, Adaptive Insights raised $175M and did $106M in revenue [3] in the most recent fiscal year, for a ratio of 1.6.  Zuora raised $250M to get $138M in ARR, for a ratio of 1.8.  Avalara raised $340M to $213M in revenue, for a ratio of 1.6.

By comparison, Domo’s hype ratio is 6.4.  Put the other way, Domo converts VC into ARR at a 15% rate.  The other 85% is, per my theory, hype.  You give them $1 and you get $0.15 of heat, and $0.85 of light.  It’s one of the most hyped companies I’ve ever seen.

As I often say, behind every “marketing genius” is a giant budget, and Domo is no exception [4].

Sometimes things go awry despite the most blue-blooded of investors and the greenest of venture money.  Even with funding from the likes of NEA and Lightspeed, Tintri ended up a down-round IPO of last resort and now appears to be singing its swan song.  In the EPM space, Tidemark was the poster child for more light than heat and was sold in what was rumored to be fire sale [5] after raising over $100M in venture capital and having turned that into what was supposedly less than $10M in ARR, an implied hype ratio of over 10.

The Top-Level View on Domo
Let’s come back and look at the company.  Roughly speaking [6], Domo:

  • Has nearly $700M in VC invested (plus nearly $100M in long-term debt).
  • Created a circa $100M business, growing at 45% (and decelerating).
  • Burns about $150M per year in operating cash flow.
  • Will have a two-class common stock system where class A shares have 40x the voting rights of class B, with class A totally controlled by the founder. That is, weak governance.

Oh, and we’ve got a highly unprofitable, venture-backed startup using a private jet for a bit less than $1M year [7].  Did I mention that it’s leased back from the founder?  Or the $300K in catering from a company owned by the founder and his brother.  (Can’t you order lunch from a non-related party?)

As one friend put it, “the Domo S-1 is everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley in one place:  huge losses, weak governance, and now modest growth.”

Personally, I view Domo as the Kardashians of business intelligence – famous for being famous.  While the S-1 says they have 85 issued patents (and 45 applications in process), does anyone know what they actually do or what their technology advantage is?  I’ve worked in and around BI for nearly two decades – and I have no idea.

Maybe this picture will help.

domosolutionupdated

Uh, not so much.

The company itself admits the current financial situation is unsustainable.

If other equity or debt financing is not available by August 2018, management will then begin to implement plans to significantly reduce operating expenses. These plans primarily consist of significant reductions to marketing costs, including reducing the size and scope of our annual user conference, lowering hiring goals and reducing or eliminating certain discretionary spending as necessary

A Top-to-Bottom Skim of the S-1
So, with that as an introduction, let’s do a quick dig through the S-1, starting with the income statement:

domo income

Of note:

  • 45% YoY revenue growth, slow for the burn rate.
  • 58% blended gross margins, 63% subscription gross margins, low.
  • S&M expense of 121% of revenue, massive.
  • R&D expense of 72% of revenue, huge.
  • G&A expense of 29% of revenue, not even efficient there.
  • Operating margin of -162%, huge.

Other highlights:

  • $803M accumulated deficit.  Stop, read that number again and then continue.
  • Decelerating revenue growth, 45% year over year, but only 32% Q1 over Q1.
  • Cashflow from operations around -$150M/year for the past two years.  Stunning.
  • 38% of customers did multi-year contracts during FY18.  Up from prior year.
  • Don’t see any classical SaaS unit economics, though they do a 2016 cohort analysis arguing contribution margin from that cohort of -196%, 52%, 56% over the past 3 years.  Seems to imply a CAC ratio of nearly 4, twice what is normally considered on the high side.
  • Cumulative R&D investment from inception of $333.9M in the platform.
  • 82% revenues from USA in FY18.
  • 1,500 customers, with 385 having revenues of $1B+.
  • Believe they are <4% penetrated into existing customers, based on Domo users / total headcount of top 20 penetrated customers.
  • 14% of revenue from top 20 customers.
  • Three-year retention rate of 186% in enterprise customers (see below).  Very good.
  • Three-year retention rate of 59% in non-enterprise customers.  Horrific.  Pay a huge CAC to buy a melting ice cube.  (Only the 1-year cohort is more than 100%.)

As of January 31, 2018, for the cohort of enterprise customers that licensed our product in the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, the current ACV is 186% of the original license value, compared to 129% and 160% for the cohorts of enterprise customers that subscribed to our platform in the fiscal years ended January 31, 2016 and 2017, respectively. For the cohort of non-enterprise customers that licensed our product in the fiscal year ended January 31, 2015, the current ACV as of January 31, 2018 was 59% of the original license value, compared to 86% and 111% for the cohorts of non-enterprise customers that subscribed to our platform in the fiscal years ended January 31, 2016 and 2017, respectively.

  • $12.4M in churn ARR in FY18 which strikes me as quite high coming off subscription revenues of $58.6M in the prior year (21%).  See below.

Our gross subscription dollars churned is equal to the amount of subscription revenue we lost in the current period from the cohort of customers who generated subscription revenue in the prior year period. In the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018, we lost $12.4 million of subscription revenue generated by the cohort in the prior year period, $5.0 million of which was lost from our cohort of enterprise customers and $7.4 million of which was lost from our cohort of non-enterprise customers.

  • What appears to be reasonable revenue retention rates in the 105% to 110% range overall.  Doesn’t seem to foot to the churn figure about.  See below:

For our enterprise customers, our quarterly subscription net revenue retention rate was 108%, 122%, 116%, 122% and 115% for each of the quarters during the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018 and the three months ended April 30, 2018, respectively. For our non-enterprise customers, our quarterly subscription net revenue retention rate was 95%, 95%, 99%, 102% and 98% for each of the quarters during the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018 and the three months ended April 30, 2018, respectively. For all customers, our quarterly subscription net revenue retention rate was 101%, 107%, 107%, 111% and 105% for each of the quarters during the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018 and the three months ended April 30, 2018, respectively.

  • Another fun quote and, well, they did take about the cash it takes to build seven startups.

Historically, given building Domo was like building seven start-ups in one, we had to make significant investments in research and development to build a platform that powers a business and provides enterprises with features and functionality that they require.

  • Most customers invoiced on annual basis.
  • Quarterly income statements, below.

domo qtr

  • $72M in cash as of 4/30/18, about 6 months worth at current burn.
  • $71M in “backlog,” multi-year contractual commitments, not prepaid and ergo not in deferred revenue.  Of that $41M not expected to be invoiced in FY19.
  • Business description, below.  Everything a VC could want in one paragraph.

Domo is an operating system that powers a business, enabling all employees to access real-time data and insights and take action from their smartphone. We believe digitally connected companies will increasingly be best positioned to manage their business by leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, correlations, alerts and indices. We bring massive amounts of data from all departments of a business together to empower employees with real-time data insights, accessible on any device, that invite action. Accordingly, Domo enables CEOs to manage their entire company from their phone, including one Fortune 50 CEO who logs into Domo almost every day and over 10 times on some days.

  • Let’s see if a computer could read it any better than I could.  Not really.

readability

  • They even have Mr. Roboto to help with data analysis.

Through Mr. Roboto, which leverages machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, Domo creates alerts, detects anomalies, optimizes queries, and suggests areas of interest to help people focus on what matters most. We are also developing additional artificial intelligence capabilities to enable users to develop benchmarks and indexes based on data in the Domo platform, as well as automatic write back to other systems.

  • 796 employees as of 4/30/18, of which 698 are in the USA.
  • Cash comp of $525K for CEO, $450K for CFO, and $800K for chief product officer
  • Pre-offering it looks like founder Josh James owns 48.9M shares of class A and 8.9M shares of class B, or about 30% of the shares.  With the 40x voting rights, he has 91.7% of the voting power.

Does the Emperor Have Any Clothes?
One thing is clear.  Domo is not “hot” because they have some huge business blossoming out from underneath them.  They are “hot” because they have raised and spent an enormous amount of money to get on your radar.

Will they pull off they IPO?  There’s a lot not to like:  the huge losses, the relatively slow growth, the non-enterprise retention rates, the presumably high CAC, the $12M in FY18 churn, and the 40x voting rights, just for starters.

However, on the flip side, they’ve got a proven charismatic entrepreneur / founder in Josh James, an argument about their enterprise customer success, growth, and penetration (which I’ve not had time to crunch the numbers on), and an overall story that has worked very well with investors thus far.

While the Emperor’s definitely not fully dressed, he’s not quite naked either.  I’d say the Domo Emperor’s donning a Speedo — and will somehow probably pull off the IPO parade.

###

Notes

[1] Yes, I know they’re in Utah, but this is still about Silicon Valley culture and investors.

[2] For definitions and frequency of use of various VC terms, go to the Fenwick and West VC survey.

[3] I’ll use revenue rather than trying to get implied ARR to keep the math simple.  In a more perfect world, I’d use ARR itself and/or impute it.  I’d also correct for debt and a cash, but I don’t have any MBAs working for me to do that, so we’ll keep it back of the envelope.

[4] You can argue that part of the “genius” is allocating the budget, and it probably is.  Sometimes that money is well spent cultivating a great image of a company people want to buy from and work at (e.g., Salesforce).  Sometimes, it all goes up in smoke.

[5] Always somewhat truth-challenged, Tidemark couldn’t admit they were sold.  Instead, they announced funding from a control-oriented private equity firm, Marlin Equity Partners, as a growth investment only a year later be merged into existing Marlin platform investment Longview Solutions.

[6] I am not a financial analyst, I do not give buy/sell guidance, and I do not have a staff working with me to ensure I don’t make transcription or other errors in quickly analyzing a long and complex document.  Readers are encouraged to go the S-1 directly.  Like my wife, I assume that my conclusions are not always correct; readers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions.  See my FAQ for complete disclaimer.

[7] $900K, $700K, and $800K run-rate for FY17, FY18, and 1Q19 respectively.

My Appearance on DisrupTV Episode 100

Last week I sat down with interviewers Doug Henschen, Vala Afshar, and a bit of Ray Wang (live from a 777 taxiing en route to Tokyo) to participate in Episode 100 of DisrupTV along with fellow guests DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth and big data / science recruiter Virginia Backaitis.

We covered a full gamut of topics, including:

  • The impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on the enterprise performance management (EPM) market.
  • Why I joined Host Analytics some 5 years ago.
  • What it’s like competing with Oracle … for basically your entire career.
  • What it’s like selling enterprise software both upwind and downwind.
  • How I ended up on the board of Alation and what I like about data catalogs.
  • What I learned working at Salesforce (hint:  shoshin)
  • Other lessons from BusinessObjects, MarkLogic, and even Ingres.

DisrupTV Episode 100, Featuring Dave Kellogg, Billy Bosworth, Virginia Backaitis from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

 

Kellblog Predictions for 2018

In continuing my tradition of offering predictions every year, let’s start with a review of my hits and misses on my 2017 predictions.

  1. The United States will see a level of divisiveness and social discord not seen since the 1960s.  HIT.
  2. Social media companies finally step up and do something about fake news. MISS, but ethical issues are starting to catch up with them.
  3. Gut feel makes a comeback. HIT, while I didn’t articulate it as such, I see this as the war on facts and expertise (e.g., it’s cold today ergo global warming isn’t real despite what “experts” say).
  4. Under a volatile leader, we can expect sharp reactions and knee-jerk decisions that rattle markets, drive a high rate of staff turnover in the Executive branch, and fuel an ongoing war with the media.  HIT.
  5. With the new administration’s promises of $1T in infrastructure spending, you can expect interest rates to raise and inflation to accelerate. MISS, turns out this program was never classical government investment in infrastructure, but a massive privatization plan that never happened.
  6. Huge emphasis on security and privacy. PARTIAL HIT, security remained a hot topic and despite numerous major breaches it’s still not really hit center stage.
  7. In 2017, we will see more bots for both good uses (e.g., customer service) and bad (e.g., trolling social media).  HIT.
  8. Artificial intelligence hits the peak of inflated expectations. HIT.
  9. The IPO market comes back. MISS, though according to some it “sucked less.”
  10. Megavendors mix up EPM and ERP or BI. PARTIAL HIT.  This prediction was really about Workday and was correct to the extent that they’ve seemingly not made much progress in EPM.

Kellblog’s Predictions for 2018

1.  We will again continue to see a level of divisiveness and social discord not seen since the 1960s. We have evolved from a state of having different opinions about policies based on common facts to a dangerous state based on different facts, even on easily disprovable claims, e.g., the White House nativity scene.  The media is advancing, not reducing, this divide.

2.  The war on facts and expertise will continue to escalate. Read The Death of Expertise for more.   This will extend to a war on college. While an attempted opening salvo on graduate student tuition waivers didn’t fire, in an environment where the President’s son says, “we’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange we’ll train your children to hate our country,” you can expect ongoing attacks on post-secondary education.  This spells trouble for Silicon Valley, where a large number of founders and entrepreneurs are former grad students as well as immigrants (which is a whole different area of potential trouble).

3.  Leading technology and social media companies finally step up to face ethical challenges. This means paying more attention to their own culture (e.g., sexual harassment, brogrammers).  This means taking responsibility for policing trolls, spreading fake news, building addictive content, and enabling foreign intelligence operations.  Thus far, they have tended to argue they are simply keepers of the town square, and not responsible for the content shared there.  This abdication of responsibility should start to stop in 2018, if only because people start to tune-out the services.  This leads to one of my favorite tweets of the year:

Capture

4.  AI will move from hype to action, meaning bigger budgets, more projects, and some high visibility failures. It will also mean more emphasis on voice and more conversational chatbots.  For finance departments, this means more of what Ventana’s Rob Kugel calls the age of robotic finance, which unites AI and machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA), natural language bots, and blockchain-based distributed ledgers.

5. AI will continue to generate lots of controversy about job displacement. While some remain optimistic, the consensus viewpoint seems to be that AI will suppress employment, most likely widening the wealth inequality gap.  A collapsing educational system combined with AI-driven pressure on low-skilled work seems a recipe for trouble.

6.  The bitcoin bubble bursts. As a reminder, at one point during the peak of tulip mania, the Dutch East India Company was worth more, on an inflated-adjusted basis, than twenty of today’s technology giants combined.

tulips

7.  The Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to build momentum.  IoT won’t hit in a massive horizontal way, instead B2B adoption will be lead by certain verticals such as healthcare, retail, and supply chain.

8.  The freelance / gig economy continues to gain momentum with freelance workers poised to pass traditional employees by 2027. While the gig economy brings advantages to high-skilled knowledge workers (e.g., freedom of location, freedom of work projects), this same trend threatens low-skilled workers via the continual decomposition of full-time jobs in a series of temp shifts.  This means someone working 60 hours a week across three 20-hour shifts wouldn’t be considered to be a full-time employee and thus not eligible for full-time benefits, further increasing wealth inequality.

freelancers

9.  M&A heats up due to repatriation of overseas cash. Apple alone, for example, has $252B in overseas cash.  With the new tax rate dropping from 35% to 15.5%, it will now be ~$50B less expensive for Apple to repatriate that cash.  Overall, US companies hold trillions of dollars overseas and making it cheaper for them to repatriate that cash suggests that they will be flush with dollars to invest in many areas, including M&A

10.  2018 will be a good year for cloud EPM vendors. The dynamic macro environment, the opportunities posed by cash repatriation, and the strong fundamentals in the economy will increase demand for EPM software that helps companies explore how to best exploit the right set of opportunities facing them.  Oracle will fail in pushing PBCS into the NetSuite base, creating a nice third-party opportunity.  SAP, Microsoft, and IBM will continue to put resources into other strategic investment areas (e.g., IBM and Watson, SAP and Hana) leaving fallow the EPM market adjacent to ERP.  And the greenfield opportunity to replace Excel for financial planning, budgeting, and even consolidations will continue drive strong growth.

Let me wish everyone, particularly the customers, partners, and employees of Host Analytics, a Happy New Year in 2018.

# # #

Disclaimer:  these predictions are offered in the spirit of fun.  See my FAQ for more on this and other usage terms.

Why has Standalone Cloud BI been such a Tough Slog?

I remember when I left Business Objects back in 2004 that it was early days in the cloud.  We were using Salesforce internally (and one of their larger customers at the time) so I was familiar with and a proponent of cloud-based applications, but never felt great about BI in the cloud.  Despite that, Business Objects and others were aggressively ramping on-demand offerings all of which amounted to pretty much nothing a few years later.

Startups were launched, too.  Specifically, I remember:

  • Birst, née Success Metrics, and founded in 2004 by Siebel BI veterans Brad Peters and Paul Staelin, which was originally supposed to be vertical industry analytic applications.
  • LucidEra, founded in 2005 by Salesforce and Siebel veteran Ken Rudin (et alia) whose original mission was to be to BI what Salesforce was to CRM.
  • PivotLink, which did their series A in 2007 (but was founded in 1998), positioned as on-demand BI and later moved into more vertically focused apps in retail.
  • GoodData, founded in 2007 by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, which early on focused on SaaS embedded BI and later moved to more of a high-end enterprise positioning.

These were great people — Brad, Ken, Roman, and others were brilliant, well educated veterans who knew the software business and their market space.

These were great investors — names like Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Emergence, Matrix, Sequoia, StarVest, and Tenaya invested over $300M in those four companies alone.

This was theoretically a great, straightforward cloud-transformation play of a $10B+ market, a la Siebel to Salesforce.

But of the four companies named above only GoodData is doing well and still in the fight (with a high-end enterprise platform strategy that bears little resemblance to a straight cloud transformation play) and the three others all came to uneventful exits:

So, what the hell happened?

Meantime, recall that Tableau, founded in 2003, and armed in its early years with a measly $15M in venture capital, and with an exclusively on-premises business model, literally blew by all the cloud BI vendors, going public in May 2013 and despite the stock being cut by more than half since its July 2015 peak is still worth $4.2B today.

I can’t claim to have the definitive answer to the question I’ve posed in the title.  In the early days I thought it was related to technical issues like trust/security, trust/scale, and the complexities of cloud-based data integration.  But those aren’t issues today.  For a while back in the day I thought maybe the cloud was great for applications, but perhaps not for platforms or infrastructure.  While SaaS was the first cloud category to take off, we’ve obviously seen enormous success with both platforms (PaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS) in the cloud, so that can’t be it.

While some analysts lump EPM under BI, cloud-based EPM has not had similar troubles.  At Host, and our top competitors, we have never struggled with focus or positioning and we are all basically running slightly different variations on the standard cloud transformation play.  I’ve always believed that lumping EPM under BI is a mistake because while they use similar technologies, they are sold to different buyers (IT vs. finance) and the value proposition is totally different (tool vs. application).  While there’s plenty of technology in EPM, it is an applications play — you can’t sell it or implement it without domain knowledge in finance, sales, marketing or whatever domain for which you’re building the planning system.  So I’m not troubled to explain why cloud EPM hasn’t been a slog while cloud BI absolutely has been.

My latest belief is that the business model wasn’t the problem in BI.  The technology was.  Cloud transformation plays are all about business model transformation.  On-premises applications business models were badly broken:  the software cost $10s of millions to buy and $10s of millions more to implement (for large customers).  SMBs were often locked out of the market because they couldn’t afford the ante.  ERP and CRM were exposed because of this and the market wanted and needed a business model transformation.

With BI, I believe, the business model just wasn’t the problem.  By comparison to ERP and CRM, it was fraction of the cost to buy and implement.  A modest BusinessObjects license might have cost $150K and less than that to implement.  That problem was not that BI business model was broken, it was that the technology never delivered on the democratization promise that it made.  Despite shouting “BI for the masses” in 1995, BI never really made it beyond the analyst’s desk.

Just as RDBMS themselves failed to deliver information democracy with SQL (which, believe it or not, was part of the original pitch — end users could write SQL to answer their own queries!), BI tools — while they helped enable analysts — largely failed to help Joe User.  They weren’t easy enough to use.  They lacked information discovery.  They lacked, importantly, easy-yet-powerful visualization.

That’s why Tableau, and to a lesser extent Qlik, prospered while the cloud BI vendors struggled.  (It’s also why I find it profoundly ironic that Tableau is now in a massive rush to “go cloud” today.)  It’s also one reason why the world now needs companies like Alation — the information democracy brought by Tableau has turned into information anarchy and companies like Alation help rein that back in (see disclaimers).

So, I think that cloud BI proved to be such a slog because the cloud BI vendors solved the wrong problem. They fixed a business model that wasn’t fundamentally broken, all while missing the ease of use, data discovery, and visualization power that both required the horsepower of on-premises software and solved the real problems the users faced.

I suspect it’s simply another great, if simple, lesson is solving your customer’s problem.

Feel free to weigh in on this one as I know we have a lot of BI experts in the readership.