While I had to correct a bunch of misrepresentation attacks directed at Upstart, I want to be sure that those of you who are new to the board don’t get the idea that Upstart is omnipotent. Yes, it’s my largest position, and oversized, but it’s also potentially fragile compared to most of my other companies. What do I mean? Upstart is NOT a SaaS company. What’s the significance of that? Well Cloudflare, Datadog, Zscaler, Crowdstrike, etc ARE SaaS companies. That means their revenue mostly comes from subscriptions and thus is recurrent. They start the next year with this year’s revenue essentially as a starting point and build from there. Upstart is currently making great strides in taking over the field of unsecured lending, and is branching out into auto loans, but it only has a small proportion of “recurring” revenue from servicing already outstanding loans. For the rest, every quarter it starts over arranging new loans. It’s doing that very well and growing like mad, but we can’t be sure what the future will hold, especially if the economy goes into a tailspin. So be aware!
Best,
Saul
Thanks Saul.
I am a little bewildered why my post explaining my entry to this board and countering a short accusation has been removed.
I work in a bulge bracket firm and have had a say in onboarding vendors like Palantir, Crowdstrike, Sisense, Mapbox (public and private companies) among others. I get interesting information from the sales teams of vendors we think of onboarding. I was looking forward to sharing this information.
I agree with other posters who have defended the ideas of logical discourse, including things that can go potentially wrong.
Anyways, delete this if you wish, but some of the censorship on here has left a aour taste. Seems like anyone that joins the board new gets saddled with the “they only have one post!”
I agree with other posters who have defended the ideas of logical discourse, including things that can go potentially wrong.
Key words bolded. People throw that phrase around, but in most places it means a ceaseless cacophony where everyone gets their say. Here that phrase actually means something, and there are standards. Nobody here actually cares if you agree or disagree with any “current narrative” you think might be going on, only whether the information is thoughtful, accurate, and ideally well-presented. If you’ve been here long enough you would know this.
Please try to discern the difference between this and the usual unruly mob.
Reminder to all that you can check the box “E-mail this Reply to the Author” and uncheck the box “Post this Reply to the Boards” when you wish to carry on a conversation which is no longer on topic.
Saul started this thread discussing a particular risk for a particular company. Please either comment on that or keep replies off the board.