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B (3:16)

For by Public Investing Full Disclosures and Podcast Description well, it's been a big.

A (3:21)

Week for human resources software provider Workday. The company's analyst day yesterday was well received, and Elliot Investment Management announced it has taken a $2 billion stake in the company. Good signs in what's a challenging environment for software companies as they move to incorporate AI to fend off being replaced by AI. We're going to get into why the market is feeling good about Workday. Market cap, by the way, $63 billion. But John, give us some background.

B (3:49)

All right, so Workday is one of these companies, like others like Salesforce, Adobe, Monday.com, they're SaaS businesses. So that's software as a service and basically it's software in the cloud that allows businesses to run their projects or manage people. Anyone who has worked in an office has used these services and through payroll, for example, for years it's been a robust sector. Software has high margins, it's subscription based for recurring revenue, and it's sticky. Once a company adopts a product, it can be a real hassle to change.

A (4:18)

I've seen this actually. So the companies I've been involved with, both in media and outside, you really see this resistance. John as soon as someone says we're changing our system, everyone's head drops into their hands, right? So it's just it's human nature to want to resist this kind of change. And there's another kind of change that's coming, and that is AI. And we've been hearing about it left, right and center. But there is this threat that AI models and agents will become powerful enough to do software tasks on their own, effectively replacing legacy SaaS platforms, which still requires a certain amount of human interaction to get things done right.

B (4:54)

And that future is a concern. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on a podcast last year, quote, I think the notion that business applications exist, that's probably where they'll all collapse right in the Agent era. So that's what we're hearing about these AI agents. And so these software companies are trying to get ahead of the outside AI threat by incorporating AI features into their existing platforms, often through acquisition of AI companies.

A (5:18)

There's so there's always, always, always this debate when it comes to new technologies, which is should a corporation, particularly a mature one? And there's this perception that mature companies move more slowly. Should they try and build Capab something new like AI or should they go buy it to be able to move more quickly? And so this is what caught our eye. We spent a lot of time in Workday's financial analyst presentation. There's a 95 page PowerPoint deck which I went through, John went through, we nerded out so you don't have to. And I mean literally the first sort of 30 slides just repeat the word agentic or AI over and over and over again. And what Workday was really trying to hammer home to Wall street analysts and in turn to all of us who may be investors in the business, it was saying, look, this is it, this is the year. It's 2025. We are going to shift aggressively from SAS to Agentic. We're going to go into 2026 with a very clear infusion of AI into our lifeblood. And these are exactly the kinds of agents that the Microsoft CEO was talking about. Right.

B (6:23)

They can do recruiting, planning, payroll, even employee sentiment. So maybe even your year end review could be done through AI and they highlight big gains in efficiency across all these areas. And just one more thing, Workday is calling itself the AI enterprise platform for managing people, money and agents. There's that word again. Agents.

A (6:43)

Yeah, also that is just, you know, that tagline is way too long. They need to deploy some AI to figure out a way to tighten that up a little bit. Well, let's talk about how Workday has been using the acquisition strategy to accelerate its capabilities in AI. And over really just the last couple of months, there's been a slew of announcements coming out of AI stepping up its AI integration by buying big companies, including AI firm Sana, announced just yesterday for $1.1 billion. Last month, Workday announced acquiring Flowise, which is a low code platform that helps to build AI agents easily doubling down on that thesis of making sure they have capabilities in house. And then also in August announcing the acquisition of Paradox for a billion dol in cash. So this is a lot of activity.

B (7:32)

A lot of acquisition and I read a little bit about that. Paradox deal.

A (7:35)

Yeah.

B (7:35)

Paradox is a, quote, AI powered talent acquisition suite to help customers more efficiently find, hire and onboard every type of worker. And to me, and that just sounds.

A (7:46)

Why does that sound awful? Why?

B (7:49)

Because maybe it'll also fire the workers. I don't know.

A (7:51)

Oh, okay. Well, you didn't say that when we were prepping for the show. Now that you say it out loud, I now understand why you were looking so sort of peaky about it. Well, that's fair enough. Well, I just want to talk a bit more about the numbers around all this because one of the things that caught my eye is just how specific Workday was prepared to get in talking about how AI and investing in AI is going to translate into tangible outcomes. And if we look again at that presentation, it actually said for the latest quarter it saw $450 million of annualized run rate revenue. ARR. It's a piece of jargon that you see a lot actually when you look at sort of fast growing businesses, particularly in the startup world, and think one of the reasons that this was so well received was not enough. Software companies have been willing to say, this is the amount of money that we're seeing coming out of our expensive AI investments right now and this is what we think the platform's going to look like going forward. Now, one of the big signs here, and there are two ways you can read this, right? Activist investor Elliot Management has taken a $2 billion stake, John, in this company and said it was, quote, pleased with its dialogue with the company and expressed confidence that the multi year plan would drive significant long term value for shareholders. There's a couple of things I wanted to unpack in here. First of all, when you're a public company and an activist investor, particularly one as famous as Elliott Management, turns up, there are two ways you can interpret this way. Number one is to say a really highly regarded investor shown up with big scale, that's a lot of money. That's a vote of confidence. Okay. The other way, if you're the CEO of Workday, you may respond to that to say, wow, I've really got someone watching over my shoulder. I've got a powerful investor with a powerful voice that is not shy about rattling the cage to force companies to shake things up. Looking over my shoulder, they're happy now, they're happy now, but you know, let's see if that actually continues. So that's sort of observation number one.

B (9:47)

The Guggenheim analyst said they raised the stock to buy from neutral, issuing a $285 price target and so that implies a 23% from its current level and workday share price has been up over seven and a half percent today.

A (10:00)

So there have been some positive signs. Now another piece that I just want to lean into here is this situation with Elliott. Management is specifically talking about a multi year plan. And one of the things we talk a lot about on this show is how the market tends to be too short term focused. The one of the reasons that turnarounds are hard to do is there's a focus on quarter after quarter reporting. But the fact that Elliot was able to talk about a multi year view I actually found quite encouraging. And there's one area I want to just nerd out which is with respect to how a multi year plan and long term value is measured often by the market. And there's something called the PEG ratio. So bear with me on this, don't go to sleep quite yet. The PEG ratio is short for the price to earnings to growth ratio. The lower that ratio is, the lower that number is. It basically means that the price you're paying for each unit of growth is cheaper. So just to put it in perspective, Workday is currently trading at a PEG ratio of about 0.93. Okay. In contrast, Salesforce is trading at a 1.3 times PEG ratio. So which one would you choose, John?

B (11:06)

Well, I'd choose the first. It's less expensive.

A (11:08)

It's less expensive. So you know, this is an investment advice. But just one metric, it's worth keeping an eye on because this is going to get more and more and more focus. I think as this price relative to growth value continues to to be such an important point, particularly because prices are so high in the market right now. I think it's also just worth taking a look at how some of these other big SaaS businesses are doing. John, I know you took a peek at the share prices earlier today.

B (11:33)

Yeah, there's just a question about they may be doing well now, but are they positioning themselves for the future with success with AI? So Adobe has been down 18% year to date and that's even though they reported third quarter revenue of $6 billion. And then Salesforce also reported revenue up $10 billion, but they're down 28% year to date.

A (11:52)

Their stock price really difficult. And just back to Adobe. There was no more powerful example of this debate around AI versus SAS than when we looked at the figma ipo. Figma is AI native. Adobe tried to buy figma, wasn't able to do it. Figma had an unbelievable ipo. Adobe and contrast. Share price down. I actually bought Adobe shares a couple of years ago and I've not been happy with the performance. It's been a bit of a rocky one, that one. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, shares in Lyft shot up today and we're going to learn a bit more about the CEO driving the success. Each week we shine the light on a CEO. Some you'll have heard of, others maybe not, at least not yet. But all of them have an interesting story. Well, this week we're honing in on Lyft CEO David Risher because today the company stock spiked up 14 on news that the company has struck a new partnership with Waymo. This will bring Waymo's full autonomous ride hailing service to Nashville in 2026, with Lyft managing the fleet. So providing a depot and vehicle charging and also making sure those vehicles are maintained. Now at around $22 a share, Lyft's stock is significantly far off. Still the $72 at which the company went public in 2019 after consistently failing to show a path to fighting off rideshare giant Uber, Lyft announced David as CEO in March 2023, replacing the founders. Lyft at that time was then trading at around $10 a share. So who is David Risham? Well, I interviewed David for our sister podcast after earnings in June and when I spoke with him, he recounted the moment when the Lyft board chair called him and asked him to consider becoming the CEO. Let's listen to what David's response was and hear a bit more about his background in his own words.

C (13:41)

And I said absolutely not. That's ridiculous. What are you talking about? Like I run a non profit. I've been doing this for the last decade. It's my life's work. And anyway, you know, no, but they said no, you should really consider this. Your background at Microsoft, you had to compete very hard against other companies. Your background at Amazon, where I worked for Jeff for a long time, really understanding customer obsession and I think equally importantly your background running World Reader, which is a very mission based organization of course seems like a perfect fit for us.

A (14:11)

So we just heard that David had a lot of experience at blue chip tech companies, Amazon, Microsoft. But here's what's extraordinary. He'd been running his non profit world reader for three, 13, 13 years before jumping into Lyft's CEO seat. And it is extremely rare for a public company to take a non founder CEO who has been out of the corporate world for so long. He had been on lifts board for just under two years by then, but it's nonetheless been a fascinating path. Now earlier in life, David was raised in Maryland and he said primarily by his single mother and he studied literature in college. Those of you who like to read and still interested in business, take note. He did subsequently earn a master's in business administration. Known for hands on leadership, David advocates for something he calls Falcon Mode, mostly staying strategic with broad assessment of lifts business, but sometimes swooping into the details to keep pushing progress. He famously drives a lift himself every six weeks and solicits direct feedback from passengers on their experience. And one of these driving experiences on his part actually prompted changes to lift surge pricing policy. Just one example of how a customer saying something to him really did prompt a little bit of differentiation. So far, Falcon Mode seems to have worked. Lyft share price has more than doubled since David took the helm, taking the market cap to $9 billion today. Now, Lyft achieved a record 235 million rides last quarter and the company has beaten expectations in multiple recent earnings. But more than half of the Wall street analysts who cover Lyft rate the stock are hold right now, which is their way of saying we need more visibility into growth, to sustained growth for us to be really doubling down on this one. We're going to keep watching.

B (15:56)

And I just want to add, I love every time I hear stories of the CEO doing that undercover boss thing where they get boots on the ground, I think that's really cool.

A (16:05)

It's 4pm on the east Coast. The markets have closed. We don't have a ticker tape, but we'll throw it over to our human ticker. Our producer John the S and P.

B (16:12)

Was down a tenth of a percent, the Nasdaq down a third of a percent and the Dow finished up half a percent. Some market headlines. Shares in General Mills, the maker of Cheerios, were down about a percent today after the company reported a decline in first quarter sales. Over to Netflix, which saw its stock price up 2% today after an upgrade from analysts at Loop Capital who announced the company has, quote, won the streaming wars. Shares of Netflix are up 38% year to date. And Ann, on Monday we gave a Preview of the StubHub IPO which happened today. And on that program you said it didn't make sense that StubHub was 20 times oversubscribed and thought it would have a cool debut in an otherwise hot year for IPOs. It wasn't investment advice, but it was prescient. Stubhub debuted today and shares rose as much as 19% before pulling back to trade more than 5% below their offering price.

A (17:01)

Fascinating watching that one continue to play out. Well, look, as a final thought today, I wanted to just touch briefly on an article that broke in the Financial Times earlier today and in that the FT reported that the cyber based administration of China had ordered companies including parent company of TikTok, ByteDance and including Alibaba not to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 6000D chip that was specifically made for the country. Now in response to that, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang weighed in and said he was disappointed after reading that. Now, the reason I bring this up is the US And China are still in the throes of negotiating. This is a really critical moment in the trade dispute that we're seeing and tariffs with respect to the United States and China. Now the deadline for a Tick Tock deal to be figured out. Don't forget that was supposed to be the make or break time this week where Tick Tock was maybe going to get switched off. Well, that deadline has been kicked again, kicking the can through to December. But again these have been decoupled. We're still seeing China leaning in, really taking aim at Nvidia. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying look disappointed but nevertheless, don't forget markets. I Nvidia CEO guided you to look at the rest of the year assuming no h, you know, really limited shipments to China. Just as a reminder, Nvidia's most recent earnings knocked it out of the park yet again. And yet again it was even, you know, even including this idea that China wouldn't really be part of the numbers. So we're going to keep watching this one. That's it folks for today's Brew Markets Daily.

B (18:40)

And Brew Markets Daily is hosted by Ann Berry and produced by Jean Couteau, Tarkab Delatif and Emily Milian. Our technical director is Yuchena Waoghu, audio assistants by Brittany Dottocco and the president of Morning Brew Inc. Is Devin Emery.

A (18:51)

Wake up tomorrow with the Morning Brew newsletter and tune in to Neil and Toby on Morning Brew Daily. We'll see you back here tomorrow, same time, same place.