Amplitude hasn't gotten as much excitement as the larger data/analytics companies like Snowflake and Palantir, but I think it's got all the secular tailwinds you'd like to see in a high-growth stock. It just went public under 2 weeks ago and is one I am slowly building a position in.

I wrote a longer deep dive on the stock here, but I'll summarize below.

Amplitude is a product analytics company that enables product teams to better understand user behavior and iterate on their product experience. As mobile and SaaS exploded, you had an explosion of "product data" that teams were attempting to wrangle with. Companies like Facebook and Netflix built large scale systems to not only process this data, but also identify pain points and improve on them. Amplitude is democratizing the $37B product analytics market and helps answer questions like:

The reason I am particularly excited is that they have built a strong wedge product (Amplitude Analytics) and have launched two new products this year alone. I think we're going to see Amplitude continue to keep product velocity high (with help from M&A) and drive significant expansions into existing accounts.

While they have competition from notable companies like Mixpanel, Heap, and Pendo, they seem to be farther along in transitioning from mid-market to enterprise. As such, I think they'll have a significantly easier time adding these product expansions to the largest customers.

The quick financial highlights are:

Forward guidance is:

I think it's still early days for Amplitude and am excited to follow the stock and hear the journey progress.

I typically don't bet against companies with most of my research time being spent on identifying emerging categories and taking long positions. But Oatly's very premium valuation is very enticing. As a quick snapshot, the oat milk brand is at:

Of course the market for plant-based dairy has been growing and there's an argument to be made that it will erode regular milk sales to some degree. It also appears to be true that oat-milk is emerging as the champion of plant-based alternatives in many major markets. Of course, Oatly's home market of Sweden are die-hard oat milk fans, but the UK and Germany numbers are particularly impressive.

Despite the tide that appears to be shifting in favor of oat milk, I still think Oatly is more attractive as a short at the current valuation. Ultimately, I struggle to believe that they won't be heavily commoditized and stripped of its pricing power. Today, Oatly's brand communicates a level of trust in a relatively new category, but as oat milk is more broadly accepted, I anticipate that consumers' will be less brand-conscious in this market. Absent brand, I don't believe that the company has significant sources of defensibility.

I still need to do the actual heavy lifting on translating some of these beliefs into numbers, but at the end of the day low margin, commoditized goods should not trade like software.

Also, pea-based milk > oat milk.

$OKTA has decided to acquire one of its leading competitors, Auth0, for a pretty generous $6.5B valuation. The company was privately valued at $1.9B in July 2020.

It’s an interesting play for Okta which has been so vehemently focused on serving the enterprise whereas Auth0 has very much been about the developer. My read is that this is another indication of the growing importance of the developer in all things cloud, identity, and security.

What’s actually really interesting is how negative the markets have been today for Okta overall.

$SINCH is putting its $690m from Softbank to work, acquiring Chicago-based Inteliquent for $1.14B. The business is profitable, generating $500m+ in revenues, and maybe most importantly concentrated in the US.

This seems to be a push into the US for the Swedish CPaaS player. The company has been one I’ve wanted to spend more time learning about given its had a hell of a ride the past couple years (>10x stock performance).

To be clear, I’m still long $TWLO and their earnings this week was encouraging. 65% YoY growth and 139% net dollar retention is incredible at their scale.

I’m more just amazed at how this market has embraced M&A both as a way to add new communication channels, new product lines, and now new geographies.

Some of the notable ones:

→ $TWLO acquires SendGrid for $3B

→ $TWLO acquires Segment for $3.2B

→ $BAND acquires Voxbone for ~$500m

Agora has now become my largest position so I wanted to outline how I'm thinking about holding the stock. For context, Agora had a lackluster initial 6 months of trading (relative to other high-growth names), but it appears the time has come for $API, whose stock has doubled in the past month.

At this point, I think the bull case has been brought to light especially with the buzz that Clubhouse is using Agora to power its social audio product. I remain bullish on the company, but here is what would have to happen for me to consider trimming my position:

---

1/ market seems too early for video streaming in US -> The majority of the revenue today has been coming from China, which is largely ahead of the curve in certain livestreaming use cases. In the US, Clubhouse is a major win on the audio side, but I think the larger opportunity is in video-streaming so I would like to see more validation that we are at an inflection point in the US. What will be the clubhouse type of customer in newer use cases like EdTech or live commerce? Both those categories have been hot in the startup world, so I would look to see them land a notable new logo there. Outside of social audio, which are the markets that will catapult their US presence?

2/ clubhouse builds internally SOON -> Agora falls into the bucket of API companies that are "undifferentiated heavy lifting", but in the case of Clubhouse I'm not sure that's as true. The performance of their audio seems paramount to their end user experience, so I would understand the motivations to build this in-house. I think this is what separates Agora from Twilio and Stripe APIs in my head, which focus on a non-core business problem that makes more sense to "outsource". How long will Clubhouse stay on Agora?

Databricks just raised a Series G at a huge $28B valuation, hopefully the last round before an IPO this year. The business brought in $425 ARR in 2020 growing at 75% YoY, which puts it as one of the fastest growing $100m+ ARR companies.

CEO Ali Ghodsi mentioned the round was "oversubscribed by 2x and that the company could easily have raised at $35B" according to an interview with Forbes.

I wanted to see how this tracked against $SNOW's fundraising history given they are in adjacent spaces. For the most prat, Databricks and Snowflake have followed similar trajectories and were founded only a year apart. It's incredible to see the pace at which these companies can go from $1B to $10B to $100B.

I'm sure that this latest fundraise benefits from some halo effects of Snowflake's success in the public markets. While the two are not direct competitors, they overlap in some of the use cases around enabling data analytics and data science for the modern enterprise.

I think Snowflake has done a tremendous job painting the narrative around data analytics in particular and I am hoping that Databricks will do the same around AI/ML and open source.

I am working on writing more in-depth about the data infrastructure space, can follow that on Substack: http://nandu.substack.com/

After a pretty shaky 6 months or so, Agora seems to be gaining momentum. This seemed like one of the most exciting winners of the year, playing on hot themes like voice/video, developer tools, usage-based pricing, etc. The one-line description is that $API provides developer tools to incorporate real-time voice and video into apps.

In particular, the company excels at 1:many use cases rather than 1:1 which is offered by myriad vendors including $TWLO. Think use cases like live shopping, edtech apps, social-audio, etc.

The stock is up 25% today and 78% the past month fueled by the large growth of one of it's customers, Clubhouse. A few tweets noted that Clubhouse was using the Agora SDK, meaning that it's social-audio was powered by Agora. And last night, the app was really on display as Elon Musk essentially maxed out the app's room capacity minutes before he even appeared. In my opinion, Clubhouse legitimizes Agora's product and highlights a potential shift towards more livestreaming use cases in America.

I'm still long Agora because I think we'll see more apps that are wrapped in live audio and video, but am continuing to ask myself two key questions:

More of an open question, but i’m curious how people think about SPACs prior to any official announcement of a potential target. Of course, there’s really no fundamentals to evaluate, but I think there are lots of great funds that have SPACs and a track record of making excellent bets in certain industries. Couple that with what feels like consistent underpricing of the hottest tech IPOs and it does get me interested.

This tweet seemed to generate some buzz today:

I think Chamath is obviously leading the charge on SPACs with the Social Capital vehicles, but there are plenty of other strong names. Curious if others are watching any high quality sponsors, but I recently took small positions in both of Altimeter’s tickers based on their investing record.

$AGC

some interesting “down exits” that turned around in a big way after an initial public market debut:

$MDB IPO’d at $1.2B which was done from a $1.6B private valuation — today, they’re at $22B just a few years later

$SQ IPO’d at $2.9B down from a $6B private valuation — today $96B!

I’m not suggesting these are indicative of the norm or a trend, but rather that the pace at which company narratives can change are dramatic. Winners may not always look like winners, but things can turn around quickly.

I was taking a look at stocks that I had been tracking or following with the largest 5 years gains and came up with this list. I think it's just a good reminder that run-ups in a relatively short period of time are not a reason to sell if the narrative and opportunity remains strong. The best businesses continue to expand TAM and deliver.

10x — $VEEV $TDOC $WIX $CHGG

15x — $MELI $TWLO $TSLA $NVDA

20x— $SQ $ETSY

45x — $SHOP

There are certainly businesses in this group that haven't been public for 5 years like $OKTA and $ROKU so it'll be interesting to see how high they climb at the 5 year mark.