5 Interesting Learnings from Palo Alto Networks at $11.4 Billion in Revenue: 60% ARR Growth, 120% NRR, and a $25B Acquisition That Doubled the Stock
Palo Alto Networks is now a ~$265B market cap company. The stock is up roughly 100% over the past twelve months and hit an all-time high of $368.80 in July. What makes it interesting isn’t the run. It’s how they got it. They spent about $29B on...
How Mailchimp Went From $1B+ ARR to … Shrinking Inside Intuit. A Death Spiral in the Age of AI?
A product that won by doing one thing perfectly spent seven years becoming several. Now its parent publishes growth figures with it removed, and the platforms where new apps get built don’t list it at all. Prompted by a read of Doug Dennison’s “The...
5 Interesting Learnings from Shopify at $14B in Revenue: 34% Growth, 18% Free Cash Flow Margins, and AI Orders Up 3x
Shopify reported Q2 2026 this week and the stock jumped roughly 18% on the news, erasing most of a 25% year-to-date decline in a single session. The headline numbers: $3.58 billion in quarterly revenue, up 34% year-over-year $115.6 billion in GMV, up 32%, the fifth...
Airtable Just Sold for $2.25B at 2.7x ARR. It Raised $1.4B and Was Once Worth $11.7B. This Was … Market
Bending Spoons is acquiring Airtable in an all-cash deal at a $1.285B enterprise value. With Airtable’s net cash, that’s roughly $2.25B of equity value. Expected to close by year end, subject to regulatory approval. What they’re buying: approximately...
5 Interesting Learnings from Palantir at $7.7 Billion ARR: 93% Growth (!), 157% NRR, and a Rule of 40 Score of 155%
Almost everyone's growth rate decays at scale Not Palantir. It just pulled off a quarter (and a year) like we've never seen: – Revenue grew 93% year-over-year to $1.935 billion– The twelfth consecutive quarter of accelerating growth– 47% GAAP...
5 Interesting Learnings from Procore at $1.5 Billion in ARR: 16% Growth, Its First GAAP Operating Profit, and $845M for DroneDeploy
Procore’s one of the great pre-AI vertical software leaders. Construction software, 3 million projects, 150+ countries, roughly $1.5B in ARR. But growth slowed as for many the past 24 months. They’ve finally turned it around a bit. And then spent $845...
5 Interesting Learnings from Stripe at $6.8 Billion in Revenue: 33% Growth, 47% Free Cash Flow Margins, and a $53B Bid for PayPal
Stripe is still private, so we mostly get data when the company chooses to give it to us. This week we got more than usual. The Information reported Stripe’s 2025 revenue hit $6.8 billion, up roughly a third year-over-year, its fastest growth since 2021. Free...
The Sub-5% Club: The Terminal State of Software
For twenty years, the slow lane in B2B wasn’t great. But it was an OK place to be. Growth faded, but the annuity was forever. High NRR, high margins, sticky contracts, structured data that was stuck in an app and couldn’t leave, predictable cash. You...
5 Interesting Learnings from Zoom at ~$5 Billion in ARR: Modestly Re-Accelerating Growth, Real AI Monetization, a $27B Market Cap, and a 25x Anthropic Windfall
Almost everyone wrote Zoom off a few years back. The innovative app everyone loved before 2020, but then almost a COVID one-hit-wonder that peaked in 2021 after going from $1B to $4B in ARR in one year. That would slowly bleed out as people went back to the office...
Three $3B B2B Acquisitions in 30 Days: Intercom/Fin, Cognite, and MaintainX. They All Bought the Same Thing: Data for AI
Three $3B B2B Acquisitions in 30 Days: Intercom/Fin, Cognite, and MaintainX In about a month, three B2B companies recently were acquired for right around $3 billion each. On the surface they have nothing to do with each other: Salesforce bought Fin (the company...
5 Interesting Learnings from Vertical B2B Leader ServiceTitan at $1B+ in ARR. Not Slowing Down, Growing 25%, Fintech Growing Fastest, 110% NRR
ServiceTitan has somewhat quietly become one of the most important vertical software stories of the past decade. It sells an end-to-end operating system to the trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage doors. And it just crossed a $1B revenue run rate the...
By Year-End, Anthropic Will Out-Earn Every Public Software Company Except Microsoft
Our jaws drop at Anthropic’s growth rate, and its valuation. But sometimes we can lose sight of just how big it already is … versus everyone else in software. Anthropic exited 2025 at roughly $9 billion in run-rate revenue. By February 2026 it was $14...
5 Interesting Learnings from Toast at $6.5 Billion Run-Rate: 22%+ Growth, Profitable, No Deceleration. But AI Is Just Getting Started
AI Vertical SaaS is hot now. Toast is … a dominant vertical SaaS leader becoming AI-first. Toast is running at a ~$6.5 billion revenue run-rate. At its core Toast is a payments business, with a high-margin software business as a subset inside it, a fintech...
Figma Grows 46% and Trades at 6x. Everyone Else Growing 30%+ Trades at 15-36x.
Figma went public on July 31, 2025 at $33 a share, popped 250% on day one to close at $115.50, and got valued near $68 billion. It peaked at $142.92. This week it trades around $19, with a market cap near $10 billion. That is down roughly 87% from the high. Down about...
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