The Razor’s Edge

We talk Netflix again this week. As you may recall, Akram published a lengthy report late last year on why Netflix was and would remain the king of streaming. The company reported earnings last week, and it was a bit of a royal flex, as they beat on subscriber numbers and boasted that they would not need to raise debt capital going forward. The stock popped 17% the next day. So what did the market...

There's something about Twitter that leads to market knee-jerk reactions and, depending on how you look at it, opportunities for investors. After Twitter decided to permanently ban the sitting President from the platform, a lot of questions came up, and the market's immediate answer was to sell the stock off to the tune of a 6.5% drop. Thus, we invited Rajiv Sud, a former Twitter employee and ad-t...

Happy new year! We kick 2021 off on the Razor's Edge by looking at a couple of the biggest trends from 2020 – COVID market distortions and SPACs. Our guest is George Arison, Co-CEO of Shift Technologies, an online used car seller. Used cars were a surprisingly hot market in 2020, in part spurring Shift to move up their calendar to go public by a year. They went public via a SPAC. So our conversati...

Tesla entered the S&P 500 yesterday. What does that mean for the long-running bull vs. bear battle? A month after posting our interview with a bull - Rajiv Sud - we speak to Mark Spiegel, one of the longest-tenured, loudest, and most notorious members of TeslaQ, the short Tesla camp. The question, after a ruinous 1100% run over the past 14 months and a wild market in general, is whether there’s st...

Third time appears to be the charm. After seeing the football get pulled away from investors after Q1 and Q2 earnings, Slack and PagerDuty brought much cheer to shareholders, in the spirit of the holiday season. Slack has agreed to a deal with Salesforce.com and PagerDuty reported another solid quarter that finally woke the market up to its consistent growth opportunity. We break down all that new...

Famed activist investor Daniel Loeb wrote a letter to Disney management arguing that the time to go all in on streaming is now. We've been following the streaming wars pretty closely, and we decided to break down the letter and then reconsider Disney and Netlfix's positions a year after Disney+'s launch, and 8 months into a pandemic that has accelerated the streaming game. The question came down t...

We continue our conversation with Rajiv Sud, ad tech veteran and private and public markets investors. In this episode - essentially parts 2 and 3 of our conversation - we start with Slack and its challenges, as well as its surprising similarities to Twitter. We also quiz Rajiv on his time at AdMob and his outlook for the private tech sector, before concluding with a breakdown of his Tesla bull th...

Oops, it happened again. A company we follow closely on The Razor’s Edge reported earnings, met or beat expectations, and then sold off heavily along with a major market sell-off. Last time it was PagerDuty, this time it’s Twitter. To work through the quarter and perhaps the angst and anxiety around it, we speak with Rajiv Sud. Rajiv is a Silicon Valley veteran, with time logged at Google, AdMob –...

This week’s episode is a conversation with Jaime Lester. Jaime has been a professional investor for more than two decades, has a lot of experience with short selling, as evidenced from our conversation with him back on episode #3, on Invitae. We revisit Invitae during this conversation, but we're more focused on the overall macro picture. Whatever happens in the last 8 weeks of the year, it's been...

Twilio has had an exciting fall. First, Microsoft announced Azure Communication Services, viewed as a shot across the bow at Twilio in the developer driven communications space. Then, Twilio had its first investor day in three years, refreshing investors on their trajectory. Lastly, Twilio announced the purchase of Segment, a customer data platform that signals Twilio’s climbing of the value chain...

This week’s The Razor’s Edge goes back out to the streets. We speak with Ali Naqvi, owner of a ride-share car supplier in New York, about his experience with the COVID lockdown, what he’s hearing from his customers – rideshare drivers – and the state of New York. While a few work from home comments pop up hear and there, this is more focused on the state of Uber and Lyft’s end markets and what tha...

We continue our discussion with Jens Schumacher and Justen Stepka, long-time Atlassian vets who have seen the software sector inside and out. We take a broader focus in this discussion, looking at SaaS competition, the importance of integrated cloud stacks, and the broader COVID and macro set-up. This leads to us diving in on Atlassian, on PagerDuty, on Zoom, and on Snowflake, among other topics....

We speak with a couple of Atlassian alums on this week's episode, as the first of a two-parter. Our guests are Justen Stepka, co-owner of Enterprise Fund, Atlassian alum, and previous The Razor's Edge guest (episode #16); and Jens Schumacher,  employee number #12 at Atlassian, and the Head of Product for Jira Service Deck, who is now Chief Product Officer at Sajari, a search technology company. In...

In a growth-y market, it pays to have a fresh perspective. We interview WallStSaaSBro, a notorious member of fintwit who has firsthand experience on what's going on in the software sector. As an account executive in New York who has seen one sector - healthcare - go beyond acceleration into actual soup to nuts adoption of modern technology in 2020 - he has a value-added take on what's going on in...

The end of summer often serves up surprises for the market, and this year was no different. The cadence of Zoom reporting and setting the market ablaze towards the end of earnings season, followed by PagerDuty reporting just as the euphoria faded is an all too familiar one for PagerDuty shareholders. We discuss the smaller SaaS company's report and why, for all the talk of billings, net retention,...

We flip the script. Daniel pitches Akram on a new idea - f5 Networks - and Akram plays the role of portfolio manager, hearing out and testing the thesis. While Daniel might hope you like the idea itself, this episode should be a little more educational, as we break down what makes it a good or not-so good pitch, what's missing, and what could go into the thesis next. It also highlights a lot of th...

With the economy working through a recession - though certainly a unique mix of crosswinds - we thought it would be good to get out of the software space. Scott Norton, co-founder and CEO of Sir Kensington's, joins the Razor's Edge to talk about what he's seeing in this macro environment, both as someone who started out in finance and as the CEO of the condiments maker. He shares insights from the...

Today’s episode continues our conversation with Captain Twilio. Our guest, a financial professional and a friend of Akram’s, invests personally in a very concentrated fashion. Last time, we spoke about his previous position, Netflix. This time, we cover his current position, that’s a single position, Twilio. Akram and he talk about why he’s so confident in the stock, the risks of such concentratio...

We're joined by friend of The Razor's Edge and professional investor Captain Twilio, as he's known. As someone who has only owned two stocks in his portfolio since 2012 - Netflix from 2012-2017 and Twilio in the three years since - he has a laser focused approach to growth investing, and it's worked.   In the wake of Netflix's most recent, pandemic-fueled earnings report, we brought him on to see...

We've gone to some length covering Slack, Zoom, and other software companies, as the 2020 work from home environment has accelerated and amplified business's rush to the cloud. But what about email, that old standby? Where does it fit in? We got the chance to speak with Rahul Vohra, someone whose career has been built on optimizing email. He founded Rapportive, a Gmail plug-in, before selling that...

A quick update about the programming on this channel - this channel will be only featuring the Razor's Edge going forward. To get new Value Investor's Edge Live podcasts, subscribe to the Marketplace Roundtable Podcast channel, available here: iTunes/Apple Podcasts Spotify Stitcher Seeking Alpha

One of the stranger dislocations in 2020 has been the behavior of stocks that are bound to or have already filed bankruptcy, with Hertz's offering of new equity this week as the biggest example of the phenomenon. We speak with Sam Zughayer, managing director of Berenson & Company, about what might explain this, what he's seeing, and where this may end up. Topics Covered 4:00 – Where Sam gets invol...

We visit the software as a service sector for the third time in a row, as the earnings week we were waiting for came to pass. Zoom reported the so-called 'greatest quarter ever in software', and skewed expectations for peers like PagerDuty and Slack. So, does the market have the reaction right, and where do we go from here? Akram's Razor and Daniel Shvartsman break it down. Topics Covered 2:00 min...

We continue to follow the software as a service sector and the impact of the work from home world, but this time with an outside perspective. Justen Stepka, the founder of Authentisoft and then a longtime product management executive at Atlassian and Docker, joined us to talk about his positions in Slack and Atlassian and what makes the companies stand out. Currently the co-CEO/co-founder of Enter...

With attention still focused on the tanker segment, J Mintzmyer speaks to underfollowed Torm PLC about what they're seeing in the wake of a solid Q1 earnings report and Q2 outlook. Topics Covered 1:15 minute mark - Overview of current product tanker markets: 3:15 - Differences between LR & MR markets? 7:00 - How many of your LR2s are trading dirty vs. clean? 9:15 - How long is the destocking perio...