Sold MDB

Here’s their revenue growth for the last 2 years:

Apr 2018 55%
Jul 2018 67%
Sep 2018 71%
Dec 2018 71%
Apr 2019 78%
Jul 2018 67%
Sep 2018 54%
Dec 2018 44%

The growth was not all organic, but I think we’re starting to realize just how much slower the real growth rate is…40%? Less?

Too slow for me.

Bear

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Should have been:

Apr 2018 55%
Jul 2018 67%
Sep 2018 71%
Dec 2018 71%
Apr 2019 78%
Jul 2019 67%
Sep 2019 54%
Dec 2019 44%

I sold as well. Sold most my shares a while ago, but sold the rest at $107 today.

CTO and co-founder leaving – I don’t like that one bit.

also, non-GAAP net losses growing - don’t like that.

Net Loss: Net loss was $62.6 million, or $1.10 per share, based on 56.9 million weighted-average shares outstanding in the fourth quarter fiscal 2020. This compares to $22.2 million, or $0.41 per share, based on 53.8 million weighted-average shares outstanding, in the year-ago period. Non-GAAP net loss was $14.5 million or $0.25 per share. This compares to $9.1 million or $0.17 per share in the year-ago period.

Too many other good options right now.

Rolled proceeds into XP who just reported today too.

“This strong performance in Retail, coupled with a robust growth in our other businesses, drove Gross Revenue to
expand 72% in 2019 vs 2018, reaching R$5.5 billion. Adjusted Net Income for the year was R$1.1 billion, 119%
higher than in 2018, reinforcing our differentiated level of profitability (20.9% margin).”

https://investors.xpinc.com/static-files/cc528e37-c3f9-45d5-…

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TLDR, I’m selling tomorrow morning after this last quarterly report.

I had mentioned in another thread (from a few weeks ago) that I thought the board might have sold MDB a little too soon.

The reason I held a little longer than you guys, is that from my own personal experience as a software engineer, MDB truly does have the best NoSQL solution. My team experimented with Amazon’s DocumentDB last year and tried other solutions, but were sort of forced to use MongoDB. It was the only one that met our needs.

But at the end of the day, we as investors cannot let ourselves get caught up on the quality of the product. Yes, I like it and it’s very high quality, but the revenue and profit metrics are not keeping up with our other SAAS companies.

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Hey Bear

Just going through the MDB call now. It doesn’t look amazing, but then I did a comparison with ESTC (which I have quite a big position in - no position in MDB) and it doesn’t actually look a ton different.

Theres some sort of percentage gains where ESTC has the advantage, and MDB has some mLab stuff hanging around, but the companies look very similar. I sold out of MDB a while back (mainly because of competitive concerns) but to look at the companies, it’s still hard to tell them apart.

So now I’m revisiting ESTC given this new information.

eg: revenue


	Jan-19	Apr-19	Jul-19	Oct-19	Jan-20	Guide
ESTC	70835	80599	89710	101106	113181	120000
yoy	70%	63%	58%	59%	60%	49%

MDB	85,484	89,388	99,368	109,441	123500	121000
yoy	71%	78%	67%	52%	44%	42%

MDB posted some bigger +% numbers earlier, which shows a slowdown when compared with ESTC. MDB operating margin is better (-10% vs -17%), ESTC DBNRR is better (130% vs 120%). Gross margins almost the same.

Note that MDB guided for a $1-2m hit from Covid, whereas ESTC didn’t adjust.

Any thoughts on ESTC given the MDB quarter? ESTC is lagging a quarter behind MDB in terms of revenue, so maybe next quarter is make or break, although Covid-19 might cloud the waters.

cheers
Greg

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It is important to note that MongoDB acquired mLAB in Q4 2018, which resulted in a jump in Q4 2018 revenue. The quarter on quarter revenue growth was as follows:

Q4 2018: 28% (mLAB acquisition)
Q1 2019: 7.6%
Q2 2019: 11%
Q3 2019: 10%
Q4 2019: 13%

Q4 2019 had a tough comparison with Q4 2018, which included mLAB for the first time. Revenue growth has been improving over the year quarter-on-quarter.

So, MDB and Elastic are growing at very similar rates, and are both have cashflow of -30% revenue, yet MDB is on an EV/S of 11 vs ESTC EV/S of 8.8. I would expect them to end up around the same valuation.

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Greg, that’s not 42% growth guidance for MDB’s next quarter, it’s 35%.


	Jan-19	Apr-19	Jul-19	Oct-19	Jan-20	Guide
ESTC	70835	80599	89710	101106	113181	120000
yoy	70%	63%	58%	59%	60%	**49%**

MDB	85,484	89,388	99,368	109,441	123500	121000
yoy	71%	78%	67%	52%	44%	**35%**

Bear

A few comments during the call I found interesting because they are guiding amidst COVID concerns. In terms of guidance, it’s one of the only signals I’ve seen among so much noise. In other words, they are providing guidance on 17 March 2020 instead of a week ago or a month ago

These comments bear out what Saul and others have said about SAAS and enterprise software holding up during a recession. And a couple of the analysts on the call congratulate them on trying to provide guidance. could change of course, but again it’s a signal, not a pontification from an analyst

FROM THE OPENING REMARKS:

Our current assumption is that the disruption caused by COVID-19 will impact Q1 revenues by approximately $1 million to $2 million and fiscal ‘21 revenues by approximately $15 million to $25 million due to anticipated weaker bookings in the first half of the year. To be clear, at this point, we are seeing minimal impact across our sales channels around the world, including closing transactions in the first quarter, even in the countries hardest hit by COVID-19. However, as a management team, we believe that it is now prudent and responsible to incorporate that into our outlook that we expect what could be a much more challenging economic environment in the coming weeks and months.

We have assumed – as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have assumed a normalization of activity in the second half of the year. So, obviously, if things persist or prolonged, we of course would have to reevaluate that approach. But fundamentally, I think, we’re exceptionally well-positioned in the market overall. We haven’t seen any meaningful impact in the business to date. We have the benefit of having a wide diversification of customers and geographies and industries that we serve. There’s certainly some industries that are harder hit and other industries that are actually benefiting. And that diverse portfolio is certainly working for us. But, we wanted to try and do our best to sort of call it out, recognizing how the situation continues to evolve.

FROM A Q&A:

Question:

  • Great. And let me add my congratulations to trying to estimate the COVID-19 impact. I think you’re the first ones to do it. Yes. So Dev, the – what sorts of tools – and I’ll give you an example in a second. But what sorts of tools do you have to manage the business maybe a little differently if we are heading into a real economic slowdown? And as an example, we hosted a call with Salesforce this morning and they talked about how. In the last downturn, one of the things that any office really focused was making sure they maintain the customer relationship even if it meant. So keep the contract even if it means it says lower pricing or significantly lower contract value, the theory being that when you come out the other side, it’s easier to expand in existing customers and to time up again. So just in any kind of tools like that, that you guys have, like what the other thing might be?

Answer:

  • Point number 2 is, we obviously spend or invest a lot of time with customers. And with Atlas, we got even higher levels of data and instrumentation of how customers are using our platform. And so that gives us a sense about like, are they using it properly? Are they running into any issues? Have they configured their database correctly? Are they seeing any performance degradation, et cetera. And again, the database is the heart of every application. And so people care very quickly if there’s any issues. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on making sure that we’re getting a lot of satisfaction and delight from both MongoDB and from Atlas.

And so I would say in general, we don’t see today any real impact on the business. But we do again, prudently think that there will be some impact, which is why we gave a guide that we did. And we’re obviously going to monitor this very, very carefully, both in terms of our pipeline – our sales pipeline. We’re also tracking obviously our self-service funnel, that funnel was also very, very strong. And – but if we see any changes, we can respond very, very quickly.

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