Your favorite / most interesting public tech companies
I'm not necessarily looking for what is or is not a good investment, so much as, I just got some unusual free time and want to learn some new things, and so wanted to hear what you think are the most interesting public tech companies, or your favorite public tech companies.
Cheers. I'll start. I'm reading into Nuance Communications today. I also think GoodRx is an interesting consumer internet business (I lump that in to tech) and has as good a shot as any of being the Booking.com type platform of Health.
I think Visa/Mastercard have a really interesting duopoly in the payments space where they have managed to survive & thrive when faced with 'disruptions' by partnering with competitors. Not too many similar instances like them and they definitely act as a unique case study
Definitely interesting history, especially re: Visa where individual players found it hard to succeed in the payments ecosystem and as such came together to form one company from a consortium of players.
It'll be interesting to watch in the coming years. Some say duopoly and Visa's DOJ case in the Plaid deal didn't help it's cause, but I'd argue their duopoly is largely a factor of consistent innovation, being first movers, and billions in investment to grow and modernize compared to the rest of the industry.
Agreed. They actually have a ton of disruption trying to take them on from every angle. They all seem to do plenty of M&A to, but most of it goes under the radar because they are relatively small, not household name fintech firms.
China hasn't really opened up to external payments companies to a large degree but I am definitely very interested to see what will happen there too.
Another interesting company (not most interesting in world but still) is PayPal. Since they have fantastic management which has kept them afloat and have benefitted largely from the network effect but none of their products are that unique in the grand scheme of things. Still, smart management has allowed the stock to thrive.
GameStop?
MongoDB, C3.ai, Snowflake and Zscaler
DataDog?
I'm a private markets guy so excuse the ignorant question but I went to build a model of DataDog and they are trading at ~450x forward EBITDA.
What is that even supposed to mean? That is useless information, no? Except, categorically, sure, this valuation is insane since EBITDA margins are still low.
The Trade Desk , Appian and PagerDuty
+1 on TTD. in the same industry space as my current company (am a PM at an ad-tech co) They were one of the first real success stories of self-serve programmatic.
Essentially building a “programmatic as a service” offering + relying very heavily on partnerships for scale. Will be neat to see how they react to the decline in volume from iOS 14.5 and the decimation of cookies by Google.
What does this mean? Do you mind giving a quick bit of background info? Thanks.
Apple are automatically opting out all devices from sharing device tracker IDs for targeted advertising purposes as part of the iOS 14.5 update. You have to consent to have this ID shared and with all the buzz about privacy concerns targeted at tech companies people are less likely to opt-in.
Without this ID, it becomes extremely hard to do any form of hyper targeted media (ad space) buying because nobody can trace the inventory (i.e. stream of data defining characteristics of devices seen on a site / app with ads - e.g. IP address, location, time of day, app / website name and importantly the device’s unique ID) back to distinct devices that they can keep track of.
Advertisers typically want to target a specific “audience” based on some commonality in their habits and characteristics. Programmatic companies facilitate this by keeping track of the habits of individual devices then forming a “targetable” audience of unique devices and devices that look like those unique devices to use as the basis of their ad space buying logic.
Without these tracker IDs companies are forced to come up with new methods of targeting that rely less on unique devices or create their own make-shift ID to continue being able to build targetable audiences. It also impacts reporting too because with fewer tracker IDs you have no real way to show how many actual devices you’ve reached through your campaign nor can you track when they’ve converted on the ad or not. You’re left only knowing the number of impressions (no. of times an ad was served) which isn’t useful since a single device could account for multiple impressions.
The above mainly applies on mobile because these are mobile tracker IDs (MAIDs) but the exact same thing applies with cookies (essentially web tracker IDs) on display (website) ads. So Google deciding to get rid of cookies altogether on Chrome is going to have the same impact for display inventory as it is with Apple’s move on mobile inventory.
jfrog/that whole devops ecosystem
CCC, E2open, agree Appian, JFrog
GoodRx I like as well - I urge their deck from syndicated deal a couple years ago. Also like R1 RCM - using ML to decrease inefficiency in healthcare rev cycle management process.
Also - any space industry decks are wild.
Have you looked at Hims?
HIMS core TAM is pretty limited - adjacencies put them in direct competition with market leader TDOC, which is a losing battle given recent acquisitions / overall market penetration
Plus if someone like Amazon (whos indicated interest in HC) gets into the space they are fucked
Internet: Poshmark, GoodRx, the SMB e-commerce opportunity (Facebook marketplace, Shopify, etc.)
SaaS: MongoDB, Snowflake, Zscaler, Crowdstrike, UiPath, Palantir, Twilio, application / infrastructure monitoring / observability space (Splunk, Datadog, Elastic, New Relic, Sumo Logic, etc.)
My Posh sales b boomin 📈📈📈 🐃🐃🐃
They’ve made several acquisitions in the last few years and were also acquired by Blackstone and CVC: Paysafe Group
Online Gambling and Sports Betting is picking up now that a few states have approved of it. Paysafe operates two of the largest digital wallets - Skrill and NETELLER - that caters to that space. They already have a nice footprint abroad and are partnered with the largest online gambling sites.
Blackline - the company literally doesn't have a direct competitor and solves a huge issue of end-of-period accounting book close.
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Some very interesting ideas guys. Any companies focused on the European market?
I like appharvest. SPAC company, no revenues, but I like the leadership and their vision. If they can get it right they will become big.
Roku
APPS
PLAYBOY
SEX DUNGEON SYNERGIES AND ORGIES
ADYEN
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