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Data is everywhere. But is it ready for consumption? Morningstar developed the language of global investment data so you have the right ingredients to help you shine. Morningstar, where data speaks
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anthropic, is valued at least at 380 billion in OpenAI, at least at 830 billion. Meaning even at those valuations, more than a trillion dollars of value was created in the private markets, away from the S&P 500, away from the NASDAQ 100.
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Hello, and welcome to the Baron Streetwise podcast. I'm Jack Howe, and the voice you just heard, that's Gil Luria. He's an analyst at DA Davidson who covers software where stocks have been blown up. Gil has recommendations for software companies looking to win back investors and for investors looking for software stocks that can bounce back. First, we'll say a few words about Allbirds. And speaking of allbirds, our own Jackson Cantrell, our audio producer, is about to fly the nest a second time.
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Right.
C
I mean, we have to frame this properly for what are sure to be irate listeners, because people have gotten the wrong idea. I've seen, like in the comments, they say you. You have to. You have to come up with more money to make Jackson's deal. Seven, eight, nine figures. It doesn't matter.
D
You got to stop me from entering the transfer portal.
C
But that's not really what's happened here. What's happening here is you're busy out west doing your thriving startup, and out of the goodness of your heart, you agreed to help us out here in the. In the interim with some episodes, and maybe you might pop in again down the road here and there. Right? Is that fair to say?
D
Yeah, I'm not. Not counting that out.
C
Okay. Because if it's about the nine figures to help me out, I'll get out front down in midtown Manhattan with a sandwich board, and I'll. I'll do what I can.
D
You're not serious, right? Because I could. I'd close up shop. The startup's not that successful.
C
To the. To the nine. How many. How many of those figures are after the decimal point is what is you? Let's talk all birds. Are you all birds? Caught on not too far from where you are. I mean, they caught on big in Silicon Valley, right? Are you now or have you ever been an all birds wearer?
D
You know what? I'm familiar, but I'm. I'm a creature of habits, so I don't. I don't like to do trends.
C
So what do you wear? What's. What's your brand? What's your brand?
D
I just, I, I pretty much just wear like Sambas and these like Puma sneakers.
C
Sambas are Adidas. This is not a Brazilian dance shoe or something like that that you're into
D
the soccer shoes.
C
Yeah, and I'm, I've been a New Balance guy. We talked about that. I was in when they weren't cool. Then I got out and then they got cool and then I got back in. Now, now I'm, now I'm in and they're cool.
D
I think you're a little, little trendier than I am.
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For people who haven't heard and don't know why we're talking about this company, Allbirds, There was a stock that had lost almost all of its value and that this past week jumped 582%. Things got pretty Mimi in a hurry. Let me give you some context. That Nike, Nike just hit a 12 year low and I've heard a lot of reasons for that. And one of them people say is an identity crisis. Some investors say it has strayed too far from performance sneakers into fashion. Maybe that's a topic for down the road. But then this fashion sneaker company, Allbirds announced this past week that it's leaving the feet business altogether and it's getting into quote, AI compute infrastructure. And that stock soared. So maybe an identity crisis can pay off. I don't know, maybe Nike's just having the wrong kind of one. If you don't know what Allbirds are, picture merino wool socks. You know how you hear wool and you think, oh, it's going to be itchy and hot, but you put on merino wool socks and they're surprisingly soft and breathable and you can wear them even in warm weather and so on. And then picture if you took those socks and you fashioned soles for them from sugar cane and then you call them echo friendly sneakers and they became a big hit in Silicon Valley, a status symbol with the Tech Bros. And then you took the company public in 2021 with a market value that briefly topped $4 billion. I'm grossly oversimplifying the origin story of Allbirds. I think there's tree fiber involved in there too. This stock peaked on day one, which is really, I think that's not what you want unless maybe you're doing the selling. But I don't think that's what you want. There were never profits for the company and sales have collapsed. And I can think of a lot of reasons. Making popular sneakers is hard to begin with. And if you make a popular One, it's hard to hold on to that core tech bro customer while expanding to regular people and also making sneakers from all natural materials. That's costly. Big companies can come along and reproduce the allbirds look and feel using stuff that comes mostly from crude oil. They can do it with much better profit margins.
D
And crude oil is a natural material. If you go back far enough.
C
I have made that argument myself about other things unsuccessfully. Like when people say, you know, when they talk about animals in nature and they talk about what the awful things that people do. Well, you could say it's a closed system. Planet Earth is a closed system and we're animals within that closed system. Everything that we do is by definition natural. It is our nature. It's just, you know, it might be awful, but.
D
And really like oil and coal and gas is solar power.
C
If you go back far enough, this is reminding me of that show Yellowstone. There's someone who's like a PETA type, like a vegan type person. They go out and they say, this is awful what you're doing, you know, raising beef out here. And he's, he basically gives a lecture like, how many animals do you think you kill when you till a field? Like, think about all the mice and the bugs and everything like that. It's just a, it's just epic destruction. And so. And he basically asks how cute does an animal have to be before you care? Which I'm not saying I'm on board with that philosophy. I'm not saying I'm against it. I'm just saying that's what it reminds me of. I eat beef and carrots. For the record. Where was I? Jackson?
D
All birds. Well, yeah, Natural fibers.
C
Right, right, right. Well, so the business has not been a raging success. And by this past Tuesday, the Stock was down 99.6% from its debut. The debut was back in 2021. That is, that's not a performance to brag about. Let's just say that the stock has been fantastic for generating offsets to your capital gains. But a day later, after Wednesday's six fold rise, the stock was down only 97.1%. To quote LL Cool J in 1990s, Mama said, Knock you out, don't call it a comeback. I mean, the context is totally different here. But really, do not call this a comeback. I mean, the idea is not, it's not fully crazy in the sense that it's not without precedent. There's a company called coreweave that did just this. It pivoted from crypto to buying Nvidia chips and renting out computing power. And that one was recently valued at $74 billion in even though it's burning huge sums of cash each year. Allbirds that'll change its name to New Bird AI as part of its makeover. It was recently worth only around $125 million. It gave back some of those gains. So you could say that All Birds looks cheap relative to Core Weave. But people are going to laugh at you if you do, including me, unless you turn out to be right. And then I'll say I knew it all along. Because even though this idea isn't 100% crazy, it's at least 99.6% crazy. Allbird secured $50 million in funding for its chips adventure. I know that people who don't work day in and day out with large numbers think of $50 million as a lot of money. And it is a lot of money if it were, you know, dropped into our laps. But it is a drop in the bucket for the kind of thing we're talking about. For example, Coreweave is expected to have capital expenditures this year of 635 times the amount that Allberg raised. But all we really want to know is what's next for the stock, right? Don't pin that on me. That's up to what you do next. If what happens next is this thing achieves critical mass meme status, what I'm talking about There is like GameStop levels of Reddit Buzz and Rocket ship emojis. If that happens and the stock were to trade high enough for long enough, then the new Allbird AI could use a secondary stock offering. In other words, sell more shares to the public and raise real amounts of cash. And maybe then it would be perceived as a more serious AI player and maybe it would attract even more investment. It's hard to tell in meme land because you enter this world where it feels sometimes like the least probable thing to happen does happen. So bet on the bet on the long shot. But that for me is not really an investment strategy. I would say for Allbird to pull that off, it would be the financial equivalent of achieving sustained flight with a self administered pants hike. If you're wondering whether that's possible, I'll pause here to give you a chance to try it. No, I'm just kidding. Don't try it, please. That's all I have to tell you about Allbird for now. We'll keep an eye on what happens next. I want to see if any companies do the same thing. I'M thinking about launching a company called Turdbird and raising $50 million to fund only AI pivots. Remember those? Remember those shoes? Well, Jackson, you don't remember them, but back in the 90s there was something called LA gear and they made shoes that light up. The company's still around, but not the stock. And it's too bad because that's a perfect company to pivot into hyperscale cloud computing for model training and inference workloads. There's at least 580% upside there.
D
I'm still confused. What's like the Allbirds? What's the angle here? Like, what's their expertise that I put in a question.
C
I reached out to the company for their comment. I haven't heard back. I don't know. I don't want to put words in their mouth. Let me just read from their statement because they did put out a statement about this. Okay. They write, new bird AI's long term vision is to become a fully integrated GPU as a service. That's gpu, as if I'm pronouncing that correctly. An AI native cloud solutions provider. Over time, the company intends to grow its NEO cloud platform by expanding its compute and service offerings, deepening partnership with operators and customers, and evaluating strategic M and A opportunities. So, you know, somewhere in those words, I think of another way they could get their hands on money, which is one thing Core Weave has done is you go to the companies that you're buying the stuff from and you say, hey, can you help us out with some money to buy the stuff?
D
I feel like we can do that. Well, yeah, maybe we should get you a $20,000 microphone. What confuses me about this is there's no rationale for why they're the best positions or best capable of executing such a strategy. Like, I don't know if you remember in January there was an analyst who wrote about the Japanese toilet company Toto being an AI play because it, you know, makes these advanced ceramic parts that are special for semiconductor chips in some part of that supply chain.
C
I'm hearing a lot of negativity here, Jax, and a lot of skepticism. That's not, that's not New Bird AI thinking. Okay, that's, that's gloomy Bird stuff. Let's move on to, to software. What do you say?
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Sounds good.
C
Investing in software used to be, I think, so easy. There was an episode of the HBO show Silicon Valley, which is about a software startup. And this episode aired almost exactly 11 years ago. And I quoted it recently in Barron's. There's a venture capitalist named Russ Hanneman and he scolds someone for thinking about profitability. He says it's not about how much you earn, but what you're worth and who's worth the most, companies that lose money. And I think that that was satire. But it turns out if on the day that episode aired, you were inspired by Russ's logic and you put money into something called iShares Expanded tech software Sector. That's an exchange traded fund. You made 278% over the following six years and that was more than double the S&P 500's return. This was a time when software stocks traded on multiples of revenue and investors didn't always care much about profits. They were talking about how software companies can scale and stay asset light and how they're great returners. And they were for a while. But returns for the past five years have stunk, and that's especially following a 28% tumble for that same ETF since the end of October. There are basically two problems here, maybe more, but let's focus on two. One is that sometime after the COVID 19 pandemic, as interest rates climbed from near zero back to more ordinary levels, investors decided that they were no longer such fans of Russ's approach. They like valuing companies according to profits and cash flows, not just revenue. I mean, technically, I'm mischaracterizing Russ's philosophy here. People who are very familiar with that show know that he disliked revenue, too. He said, if you show revenue, people will ask how much and it will never be enough. But I think you see what I'm saying here. Investors became fussier. The other, more immediate problem is that investors have decided that software companies will be victimized by artificial intelligence. And they are partly right about that, according to longtime industry analyst Gil Luria at DA Davidson. I spoke with Gil recently about what these companies have to do differently to win back stock buyers and which stocks look likeliest to bounce back. Let's hear some of that conversation now.
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So what's interesting is that software is down broadly. The broad index, the IGV is down 25%. And there's very few software companies that are not down very significantly. The ones that are down more are are the ones where the market has decided that their business is most severely impaired by AI and are most likely to suffer the consequences of broader deployment of AI tools and AI agents. So think of companies like call center software companies like NICE and Five9, or work automation companies like UiPath Workflow management companies like Asana and Monday. So those are the stocks that have been impacted the most. But broadly speaking, there's been very few software companies that have escaped the downdraft.
C
You've been covering companies like this for a long time. Tell me about the playbook. Pre chatgpt, let's call it. What was the playbook? For a company to be successful, keep investors happy, keep their stock going up, what did they have to do?
B
Well, so just being a software company used to be great and for good reason. Software companies have very highly recurring revenue with very high incremental margins. They're very asset light in general. And so for several years they did phenomenally well. And investors really measured them based on their growth, sometimes rule of 40, which combined growth and profitability and even just quarter, quarter, how much they exceeded expectations. Those were the key things. And for a while there, for almost a decade, these stocks traded on a revenue multiple. So they didn't even really have to be that profitable because they traded on a revenue multiple based on the fact that they were growing very fast. That's been changing over the last three years and it's changed abruptly over the last six months when the market and investors concluded that software companies would be at the forefront of the adjustment to an economy that's dominated by AI. And now we no longer have software companies trading on revenue multiples. They're being treated like any other stock, any other company. So they're valued based on their profitability, which is probably a healthy thing. It balances the fact that there will be a lot of disruption from AI with the fact that all those things that I said at the beginning are still true. They're still very profitable, fast growing companies with high incremental margins and highly recurring revenue.
C
I can remember, and I'm sure you do too, a widely read essay from a well known investor who wrote that software was eating the world. And now here we are with a chip company, a hardware company is the biggest company in America. I guess that has been a big transformation. But as you say, these software companies are still making excellent money. So what are they out there saying to investors, perhaps unsuccessfully, what are they trying to do right now to soothe investors fears and what might not be working for them at the moment?
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Yeah. So for the last couple of years, the message from these software companies was we get AI, we're going to build AI products and those products are going to be very successful. And a couple of years ago that message somewhat resonated with investors, but recently it started falling on deaf Ears. Because what investors are seeing, that AI spend is actually going entirely on the software layer to Anthropic and OpenAI. So this whole notion that, oh, all these package software companies are going to build their own agents and sell AI upsells is mostly being dismissed now by investors.
C
And these are, by the way, privately held companies. So if you're sitting there plunking part of your savings into an s and P500 fund, that particular flow of cash isn't helping you. Many of these other flows of cash toward hardware companies are, but that particular one isn't really helping.
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That's right. So if we were to think about where most of the valuation, the value creation has happened, it's at the chip companies, right? Nvidia, Broadcom, amd, Micron in the US Listed stocks. But also, let's not forget that Anthropic is valued at least at 380 billion and OpenAI at least at 830 billion. Meaning even at those valuations, more than a trillion dollars of value. It was created in the private markets away from the S&P 500, away from the NASDAQ 100. Most of the gains in the public markets went to the chip companies. Yes.
C
So what the companies have been telling their investors right now, you say that's not working for them. The investors don't want to hear these things right now. What sort of things are they saying that are not working?
B
So say, oh, we have great AI products and our customers are adopting them and we're going to get incremental growth from AI and we're winning in AI. That message is not resonating with investors because they know that the incremental dollars are actually going to Anthropic and OpenAI. What we're suggesting is there's room for a different message, which is we as a software company are adapting ourselves to AI. We understand that a lot of the agents are going to be made by Anthropic and OpenAI, and we're going to help our customers incorporate those agents into our product so our product is more useful to them. They'll pay us more for the software. Maybe not as much as they're paying anthropic and OpenAI, but they will be willing to pay us more, which is a message I think investors would be far more open to than this notion that these companies can compete successfully with OpenAI and Anthropic.
C
Thanks, Gil. Gil has plenty more to tell us about software stocks, including which ones investors should look at. Now, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with more of my conversation.
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Data is everywhere. But is it ready for consumption? Morningstar developed the language of global investment data so you have the right ingredients to help you shine. Morningstar, where data speaks.
C
Welcome back, Jackson. I have a bad habit. Sometimes I'll ask a question that's, like, longer than the answer. Sometimes I find myself monologuing under the thin disguise of asking a question.
D
That's podcasting, baby.
C
I hope I didn't do that with Gil because he had great information for us on software. If I did it, I hope you edited me down and kept him.
D
You're just fine.
C
Thank you. Let's leave it there. All right, let's get back to software stocks. Here's my conversation with Gil from DA Davidson. Tell me if I've got this right. You're saying that they should just basically acknowledge the state of the world, acknowledge that all this money is flowing to these two big players and say, hey, we're on board. You want to work with the tools and the technology that these two players are producing. We're going to find ways to facilitate that for you. We're going to build that into what we're doing. Is that the message that would work right now?
B
Exactly. And then I would take it a step further and say, look, if I'm a software company, I have more costs on the code development, software engineer side than any other company. There's now, the AI tools are the best at that. So how about I, as a software company, take a look at my cost structure and say, no, I can deliver a lot more growth with the same amount of headcount or maybe even less headcount. There's an opportunity that software companies are actually in the best position to benefit from the AI revolution because their costs are software development, which can now be done 10 times more efficiently.
C
So you should be able to grow your profits faster than your costs. You should be able to keep your maybe your headcount flat, maybe even, maybe even trim your headcount. And that's what investors want to see. You had a very specific thought on, on the message companies send with their stock compensation. Tell me about that.
B
So what we have in software land these days are some tourists, some value investors that have never looked at software because software was not something value investors could look at. Because if a software company was cheap even three years ago, it was because it was broken.
C
I feel like I know these tourists pretty well. And they're cheap, aren't they? They're pretty cheap.
B
That's right.
C
They obviously want to See that money is being wisely spent. So tell me what, what do they need to do?
B
That's right. And they're used to looking at GAAP earnings in really on almost any other sector. And here they show up and they look at a software company because somebody told them that this software company is trading at 15 times cash flow. And then they look at the gap results and it tells them something completely different. That this company is actually has very little profitability on a GAAP basis because much of it goes to stock based
C
comp in the GAAP earnings you have to subtract for that, but it doesn't affect your cash coming in and out the door. So your free cash flow still looks great. And value investors don't like that discrepancy.
B
That's right.
C
So what should companies do?
B
So here's what we tell so first of all, we start with the fact that the reason we exclude stock based comp from our estimates for these software companies is because the gap accounting for stock based comp is actually very, very flawed. GAAP accounting makes you expense every single dollar of the stock award in spite of how this actually works. And how this actually works is when I sign up a new employee into one of these software companies, I usually give them the stock award on a five year vest with a one year cliff, which means they don't really see any of the stock until they're at the company for two years and then they get a little bit more every year they stay after that. Well, turns out the typical software employee works at a company for less than two years, meaning very little of this expense actually happens out of the shareholder's pocket. And in fact there's a very easy way to see that. If you look at the dilution in shares year over year for many of these companies, it's maybe 1, 2 or 3% of actual dilution by the company issuing shares to its employees. Which is actually not as bad as saying, oh, 20, 25% of the revenue goes to stock based comp. So that's the discrepancy, that's the what these value investors are learning, wrapping their head around. But what we're saying to these companies now to these software companies is look, you want these value investors, they're great investors, they're long term investors, they, they will help you succeed. Here's what you can do for them. The market for hiring software engineers is much better for you than it ever has because those jobs aren't as plentiful. You don't have to give as much stock anymore. You could just have nice cash compensation. You don't have to give a biggest stock an award, a stock award. In fact, you probably don't even have to pay as much because the market has softened so much from the employee standpoint. This is your opportunity to make the most of this crisis and tell your people, I'm not going to issue more stock. Tell people you're hiring, we're going to issue a lot less than we used to and reduce that number. Make it easier for these value investors to get involved in your stock.
C
Gil, tell me about some names under your coverage that look like particularly good opportunities. Now start, if you could, with any of these software companies that have really been beaten up. Is there anything down a lot that suddenly looks tempting where you think investors have got it wrong or they've overreacted and then after that you can open it to anything else under your coverage that you think is an especially good deal right now?
B
Yeah, so many of them have been beaten up so much that it's a target rich opportunity. So let me focus on a couple of categories. One is companies that have an opportunity to accelerate growth for the balance of the year there I'm talking about Microsoft, Oracle, Snowflake, Datadog. These are companies that are very much riding the AI boom, have an opportunity to accelerate growth and yet they're down significantly because they have software in the name. So that's one really big opportunity because that narrative that these companies are suffering because of AI is going to go away pretty quickly when they keep accelerating. That's one category. Another category is the category we just talked about, which is companies that have an opportunity for a really big bottom line beat as they deploy AI to cut their costs. And there we talk about some of the companies I mentioned, so Braze, Zeta Amplitude, Datadog. But beyond that as well, there's several companies that have a real opportunity to beat a lot on the bottom line. And then I'd also include a category of MA targets. One of the things that's happening right now is that you have strategic buyers that haven't been buying for a while or haven't been buying a lot for a while and are now a little gun shy because their valuation is low, but so are all their targets. For the first time, they can buy companies at very attractive valuations. So if Salesforce used to buy companies at 20 times revenue, it can now go out and buy companies at 20 times cash flow that's much more accretive. So we look at their targets and some of those are the same Group, so Braze and Zeta Klaviyo. But we also look at targets in the infrastructure software as a place where the attractive valuations are that much worthwhile. So you're looking at Dynatrace, JFrog, Elastic, GitLab. These are very valuable companies now trading at pretty low cash flow multiples with a lot of companies that could benefit from owning that piece of the infrastructure. So a target rich environment because a lot of these valuations are attractive. But we're not broadly advocating for software, not broadly advocating for the igv, because that negative narrative of AI, it's not going away. The run of the mill software company that just has decelerating growth and won't expand margins and isn't for sale may not do well this year. That's why we are focused on the ones that are in one of those three categories.
C
So big picture, if I understand you correctly, this thing that investors believe about the harm that AI is going to cause some of these software companies, they're right. There are plenty of companies that are going to be harmed by that financially. It's just that there are some in the group that have traded down with the rest who maybe don't deserve that or have gotten too cheap.
B
That's exactly right. And in that sense it's like any other technology disruption. The advent of the, of the Internet, of mobile, of cloud. Every time you have a major technology disruptions, well positioned, well managed companies thrive and succeed and do better than ever. And companies that don't fit that criteria fall by the wayside. It's the creative destruction that makes technology so interesting and software so interesting.
C
Since you cover so many different types of companies, you must be looking at this massive amount of, of spending right now on data centers and chips and everything else. And it just feels like so much of what directly impacts, let's say the average savers 401k is hinging right now on this spending being sustainable, on there being a payoff for these companies and companies being able to sustain this level of suspending. What do you think when you look at the overall level of spending and investor expectations and Wall street expectations, do you think we're okay? Do you think that, you know that the money changing hands right now that we're going to continue to see that type of activity for years to come?
B
Overall, we're optimistic. There's a lot of moving pieces in what you just said, but overall we're optimistic. And here's why. If you are using any of the most advanced tools and we don't even have access to Mythos yet. But if you, even if you're just using Opus or Claude or the most recent iterations of OpenAI and Google products, you can see how capable these tools are. Now it's going to take time for them to get diffused into the enterprise for us to have enough imagination to use them. But clearly they're very powerful. So that's the first thing to point. The second thing is that OpenAI and Anthropic are now at over a $50 billion annual run rate. That number was zero three years ago, it was almost zero two years ago, and now it's over 50 billion. So that return that we want to get, we're starting to get it. And I'll even point out that that 50 billion is severely under monetized. That when anthropic and OpenAI actually start charging us for the value they're delivering and put ads in chat and price discriminate on some of the API access, their revenue capacity is even higher than that. So you look at the companies providing them compute, which is probably the most important category, that's Microsoft, Amazon, Google and then some others. Of course they're building more data centers. They need to serve those two. They need to serve every other company that wants to use AI. Most of the data centers they're building right now are pre sold. So we do have the justification right now, those companies have the justification right now to continue to invest, to take their operating cash flow and turn around and build new data centers because they're going to get very good returns on that. So that should carry over into next year, which should address a lot of the concerns people have about this build out. And then the last thing to consider on this is that there's this race and notion that this may be a winner take all or winner take most market. And there's at least five companies in the US that that are not willing to lose. Right. So if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta and Elon, none of them is willing to lose, they will continue to build data centers because they want to be one of those one, two or three winners. And so we're going to have that level of investment for a while. And then the last thing I'll point out on valuation is if you look at the companies supplying those data centers and their valuation, it's actually not that high. You have Nvidia trading at a market multiple, you have Micron trading at single digit earnings multiples. Now I understand that these are cyclical businesses, but we doesn't look like we're at the top of the cycle. So I would say overall, I'm optimistic. We need this capacity. It is generating value and in fact, we expect the value to diffuse to the rest of the economy over the next few years.
C
Thank you, Gil, and thank all of you for listening. Jackson Cantrell is our audio producer. Jackson, is it back to the compost heap with you? Is it. Do you know, do you get offended when I generalize, when I, when I talk down? I know it's an industrial scale business and there's a lot, there's software and a lot of fancy things, but when I talk about it in terms of just banana peels, does that you don't mind a little composting, you know?
D
Well, we're thinking of pivoting from banana peels to compute as a service.
C
I like that idea. I like. Well, no, actually I like the idea the other direction. I think if you're out there doing startup compute as a service, maybe think about the banana peels. I hear you're doing well with those peels out there. You can subscribe to the podcast on how's it go? Apple and Spotify and wherever you listen. If you listen on Apple, you can write a review and you can what? You can email us a question. If you have a question, send it in. It could be. We could answer it on the podcast, right? You just record your voice on a voice memo on your phone and you send it to Jack. How that's H O u G H eharrons.com Jackson any last thoughts for us?
D
Yeah, well, you can leave comments on Spotify too.
C
Those are timeless words. We did get people saying that they like your AI generated nonsense songs. It's tempting to play us out with one of those, but yeah, you can't. You can't give them too much. You gotta leave them waiting for the next one. So when you come back to visit us, you bring us an AI song, right? Will there see you soon, my friend, and see everyone next week.
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Data is everywhere. But is it ready for consumption? Morningstar developed the language of global investment data so you have the right ingredients to help you shine. Morningstar, where data speaks.
Host: Jack Hough
Guest: Gil Luria, Analyst at DA Davidson
Date: April 17, 2026
In this episode, Barron’s Streetwise host Jack Hough sits down with Gil Luria, a veteran software analyst at DA Davidson, for a deep dive into what’s driving the current turbulence in software stocks and what value investors should be looking for. The conversation covers why software valuations have cratered in the wake of the AI boom, why companies’ current messaging doesn’t resonate with investors, and what constitutes a “target-rich” buying environment for opportunistic investors. They also touch on meme-stock mania, the Allbirds pivot to AI, and how traditional stock compensation metrics are tripping up value-minded investors.
Gil Luria explains:
Investor Preference Shift:
The market now values profitability and cash flow, not just growth, as interest rates have normalized and tech disruption fears dominate.
Unsuccessful Messaging:
What Might Work:
1. Growth Accelerators with AI Exposure
2. Businesses That Can Drastically Cut Costs via AI
3. M&A Targets
Major platforms (like Salesforce) can now acquire software targets at cash-flow multiples vs. revenue multiples, making deals much more accretive.
“But we're not broadly advocating for software, not broadly advocating for the igv, because that negative narrative of AI, it's not going away.” — Gil Luria (29:38)
Data center and chip buildout is enormous and primarily benefits hardware suppliers (Nvidia, Micron, Microsoft, Amazon, Google). Most of that infrastructure is already pre-sold for the next phase of AI deployment.
AI foundational companies (Anthropic, OpenAI) have reached $50B+ run rate from nearly zero in just a few years; current revenue is “severely under monetized” with plenty of headroom.
Competition is intense; none of the “big five” (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Elon) want to lose, so the spending race should continue.
Valuations for suppliers aren’t as stretched as they seem; e.g., Nvidia trades at a “market multiple,” Micron at single digits.
| Category | Rationale | Example Companies | |----------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------| | AI Growth Accelerators | Accelerating revenue vs. market narrative | Microsoft, Oracle, Snowflake, Datadog | | AI-enabled Cost Efficiency | Opportunity for margin/earnings “beats” via AI | Braze, Zeta, Amplitude, Datadog | | M&A Targets (Low Valuations) | Major strategics can now buy at cash flow multiples | Braze, Zeta, Klaviyo, Dynatrace, JFrog, Elastic, GitLab |
Jack Hough’s signature mix of wit and clarity pervades the episode. The dialogue is conversational with humorous detours ("self-administered pants hike") and cultural references ("Mama Said Knock You Out," "Silicon Valley" show), but remains serious and incisive when unpacking sector fundamentals.
This episode breaks down why software stocks have slumped dramatically, how investor priorities have shifted post-AI boom, and what both management teams and investors need to focus on next. Between sharp analysis and quotable moments, it’s a must-listen for anyone interested in where tech investing goes from here.