Run the Numbers
00:43:55 · CJ Gustafson, S1
Really depends on what number you pick. Pick a card, any card. So trailing twelve month gap revenue through June. So this is the most intellectually honest version. So 19,700,000,000. That will get you to 101 x multiple. Wow. If we go off our back into TTM revenue through September, with some assumptions, that's 35,000,000,000. That's only 57 x revenue only. Q two revenue times four, that's 46,000,000,000 or 43 x. The 65,000,000,000 run rate reported for July, that brings it down to 31 x. The 100 to 120,000,000,000 year end run rate investors expect per the Financial Times gets you to a paltry 17 x. I mean, multiples anywhere from like 17 to 100, depending on whether you believe the run rate or the gap. And if you strip out the cloud providers cut from the gross booked revenue, every one of those multiples goes up by about a fifth. Remember? Because they say it's gross. For context, here's what recent names landed in our breakdown this year. So SpaceX asked for 60 to 70 x forward revenue. Cerebras came out around 50 x when it was said and done. Enscaler is asking about 90 x in its run rate at the time. Palantir trades around 36 x today, but earlier this year, they traded at a 100. Nvidia is around 18 x at the time of our SpaceX piece when we published that. Miscellaneous stuff a note. First, they listed their threads account just in case you need to contact them. That was in the contact section. Number two, they switched auditors year before filing. They dismissed Grant Thornton engaged in October 2025. [00:45:22] S1: Sponsor the pod.
00:45:23 · CJ Gustafson
[00:45:23] S0: They cut the vest and cliff in half. In January 2026, they changed the one year cliff to six months on all stock options they hadn't hit yet, which is a nice recruiting move. Their boomerang rate is super high. So of the employees who left, they wanted to keep 19% came back. You know, apologies and shout out to Societe Generale. Is it Societe Generale? They were listed in the fourth row of the 22 banks. This bank caught astray by me in my SpaceX breakdown, but I gotta say, you punch above your weight class. So the bull case is basically the efficiency section that I went through. This business is growing 10 x a year with 900% net revenue retention. If you price it like based on their run rate, you're only looking at 20 to 30 x multiple, which is less than what CrowdStrike and Cloudflare get on forward revenue with a fraction of their growth. On trailing gap revenue though, you're paying about 95 x. That's a lot more than Palantir for a company that buys its compute from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, who sell competing models on the same clouds that resell Cloud. And it all hinges on my number one question, which is whether the use cases keep showing up as fast as the price per task keeps falling. And finally, never let your company be worth a dollar more than it is actually worth. They said it, not me. Remember, none of this is investment advice. I wrote it at my kitchen table full of pancakes with my dog Walter waiting for a bite that he never got. Do your own homework. This is for information and entertainment purposes only. Wishing you a short stack, a long lockup, and the real maple syrup. Peace. Run the Numbers is a Mostly Media production. Yelling an intro by Fat Joe. Artwork by Meg D'Alessandro. Nothing said on this podcast is intended to be business or investment advice. It's the sole opinion of me, a guy who feeds his dog way too much ice cream and has a history of net operating losses. LOL. If you like this podcast, hit subscribe and give us five stars. It'll take like two seconds and our algorithm overlords love it. Drink water, call your mom, and have a great day. Peace.