Best Tech News Site: Palantir and the great revenue mystery

Saturday, August 22, 2020

Palantir and the great revenue mystery

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. You can subscribe to the newsletter here if you haven’t yet.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

As I write to you on Friday afternoon, the Palantir S-1 has yet to drop, but TechCrunch did break some news regarding the impending filing and just how big the company actually is. Please forgive the block quote, but here’s our reporting:

In screenshots of a draft S-1 statement dated yesterday (August 20), Palantir is listed as generating revenues of roughly $742 million in 2019 (Palantir’s fiscal year is a calendar year). That revenue was up from $595 million in 2018, a gain of roughly 25%. […] Palantir lists a net loss of roughly $580 million for 2019, which is almost identical to its loss in 2018. The company listed a net loss percentage of 97% for 2018, improving to a loss of 78% for last year.

A few notes from this. First, those losses are flat icky. Palantir was founded in 2003 or 2004 depending on who you read, which means that it’s an old company. And it was running an effective -100% net margin in 2018? Yowza.

Second, what the flocking frack is that revenue number? Did you expect to see Palantir come in with revenues of less than $1 billion? If you did, well done. After a deluge of articles over the years discussing just how big Palantir had become, I was anticipating a bit more (more here for context). Here are two examples:

Reporting from TechCrunch that Palantir expected “more than $1 billion in contracts” in 2014
Reporting from Bloomberg that Palantir had “booked deals totaling $1.7 billion in 2015”

Notably, Palantir’s real revenue result, or one very close to it, made it into Business Insider this April. The reporting makes the company’s S-1 less of a climax and more of a denouement. But, hey, we’re still glad to have the filing.

The Exchange will have a full breakdown of Palantir’s numbers Monday morning, but I think what Palantir coverage over the years shows is that when companies decline to share specific revenue figures that are clear, just presume that what they do share is misleading. (ARR is fine, trailing revenue is fine, “contract” metrics are useless.)

The Exchange spent a lot of time digging into e-commerce venture capital results this week, including notes from some VCs about why e-commerce-focused startups aren’t raising as much as we might have guessed.

Overstock!

We got a chance to fire a question over to the CEO of Overstock.com on the matter, adding to what we learned from private investors on the same topic. So here’s the online retailer’s CEO Jonathan Johnson, answering our question on how many smaller vendors are signing up to sell on its platform during today’s e-comm boom:

We have had increased demand to sell on Overstock and we are adding new partners daily. To protect the customer experience, we have become more selective and have increased the requirements to become a selling partner on our site. Our customers’ experience is critical to our long-term success and if partners cannot perform to our operational standards, we do not allow them to sell on our site.

We care because Shopify and BigCommerce are stacking up new rev, and we were curious how widely the e-commerce step-change from major platforms extended. Seems like all of them are eating.

How today’s evolving economic landscape isn’t working out better for e-commerce-focused startups is still a surprise. Normally when the world changes rapidly, startups do well. This time it seems that Amazon and a few now-public unicorns are snagging most of the gains.

Airbnb!

Anyhoo, onto the Airbnb world; we have a few data points to share this week. According to Edison Trends data that was shared with us, here’s how Airbnb is doing lately:

Per Edison Trends, “Airbnb July spend was 22% higher than it had been in 2019” in the United States.
From the same source, Airbnb has seen U.S. spend rise around 10% week-over-week “increase in customer spending” since April 27th.

This explains why the company is prepping to go public sooner rather than later: The second-half of Q2 was a ramp back to normal for the company, and July was pretty good by the looks of it. If Airbnb is worth what it once was is not clear, but the company is certainly doing better than we might have expected it to. (More on the comeback here.)

For more on the big unicorn IPOs, I wrote a digest on Friday that should help ground you. I can say that with some confidence, as I wrote it to ground myself!

Finally some loose ends and other notes like an after-dinner amuse-bouche:

A PE deal caught our eye, namely that the Williams Formula 1 team has been sold to Dorilton Capital. We had two thoughts: First, who is that. And second, it’s all good so long as they make the car faster but still slower than Haas F1, the official team of this newsletter, I’ve just decided. (Note to F1 lawyers: I am kidding, please don’t sue.)
The folks at Sensor Tower sent over some fintech data this week that we tucked into our pocket for this newsletter. According to the data and analytics firm, “the five largest mobile payment apps saw their average monthly active users grow 41.5% year-over-year in 1H20 when compared to 1H19” for “Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Google Pay.”
Now, we’ve covered fintech often on The Exchange because it matters. But we’ve mostly been covering the startup/unicorn side of things. The above growth rates for some of the incumbent-led apps was a surprise, with faster growth than we would have guessed.
If momentum from the majors is good or bad for startups, we leave to you to decide.
Robinhood raised more money on the back of its huge revenue gains.
Until the Palantir brouhaha, the lead story of our missive today was going to be about BlockFi, which we’re still working to understand. The crypto outfit just raised more money, so we got curious. I wound up chatting with the CEO on Twitter about, you know, what BlockFi is. Turns out it’s like a credit union, but in the crypto space. That seems fair enough. Credit unions work! Maybe this will, too! We have some questions into the company, the answers to which we might post if they are interesting. (The company has detractors, as well.)
I made a bad bet.
The Exchange chatted with a number of VC firms this week, including Tribeca Venture Partners for the first time. We caught up with Brian Hirsch from the firm, who told us a bit about the SaaS market (doing better than anticipated pre-COVID thanks to “rocket fuel” from the accelerating digital transformation) and the future of New York and cities in general (going to be fine long-term). We’ll cut out the best bits from the chat for next week if we have time.

And we’ll wrap with a tiny note from Greg Warnock, managing director at Mercato via email about the late-stage venture capital market. We asked for “notes on current valuation trends, in particular re: ARR/run rate multiples.” Here’s what we heard back:

I think valuations are correlated with economic activity and certainly something like COVID would qualify, but it’s very much a lagging indicator. It takes a while for entrepreneurs’ expectations to shift. Once they feel like the economy has moved in a permanent way, they begin to rethink. The first thing that they experience a little bit more urgency. They start from a belief that they can raise money any time they want, from anyone they want. Soon they realize there are fewer investors in market, that those opportunities appear less frequently, and each one should be managed more carefully. From there they go to thinking about terms. They might have to be flexible around some terms or some construct. Finally, they go to just fundamentally thinking about valuation in terms of multiples.

Going back to my first comment about economic factors being a lagging indicator, COVID related shocks haven’t moved through the system yet. It will take something more like a year for all the expectations to shift. My experience is that a shift in the economy from an investor standpoint creates a flight to quality. Companies with lackluster performance are first to feel lack of options in fundraising and exits. High performing businesses are the last ones to experience a change in valuation multiples. It disproportionately affects average businesses more quickly and more dramatically than high quality businesses which may feel no significant effects.

Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,

Alex