MNDY: Reversing My Opinion

All,

Initially when monday (MNDY) was brought to the board a few weeks back by CloudL, I was not interested. I thought, “another project management software? I can easily name five other competitors and this can’t be that difficult to recreate.” While that all could be true, Saul then posted all of their numbers in a very concise way showing how impressive their business and growth are. This piqued my interest a bit. I was then discussing the company and my concerns with another investor on this board and he encouraged me enough to take a second look. Even though I was worried about the perceived lack of moat with this company, since it seems like there is such a greenfield opportunity before them, moat really doesn’t play much of a factor until that opportunity shrinks. My conclusion after my deep dive: this company is clearly doing something right and I want to be a part of it.

Instead of rehashing info that was already laid out well in previous posts, I figured I’d bring some new information here so that all of the posts can be viewed as a collective.

  1. I couldn’t find CloudL’s first post bringing the company to the board
  2. Saul’s post on the numbers: https://discussion.fool.com/why-i-invested-in-monday-34925522.as…
  3. FoolishJeff’s post with some good info on the company: https://discussion.fool.com/mondaycom-research-34920486.aspx

I wanted to lay out some pros and cons and then dive into the comparison with Asana as this has been brought up a lot.

PROS

Monday uses monday
I would highly recommend this interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_uUwAbjQsk) as it shows the two co-founders personalities well while still revealing a lot about the business. They mentioned how they use their own software in order to run their business. This was striking for me because I am not sure I can name another one of this board’s darlings that consistently uses their own software non-stop. I can’t express enough how advantageous this is for the company as it perpetually reveals weaknesses, bugs, issues, and areas for improvement to the team who builds the software itself. They gave an example that they have showers in the office and made a board which displayed who was using what shower by means of their automation.
Asana also said they use their software to run their business so even though I am not to the Asana comparison section yet, I figured I’d mention that.

Extreme transparency
Another tidbit from the interview was how the co-founders decided early on to make the company fully transparent. This means every metric, board presentation, etc would be available to the entire company. They told a story about how early on one employee took a picture of all their revenue metrics and posted it on social media. They got a call from an investor (pre-IPO) freaking out about their competitors seeing it. The two founders reaction was that if the revenue numbers are better than the competition, they will be scared to death. If it isn’t better, then monday has a problem and it isn’t the dashboard of metrics that was shared.
Applicable quote from the YouTube interview above: “The more you share, the more everyone feels empowered in the organization.”

They think they haven’t hit hypergrowth yet
During the earnings call, the CFO was asked a question about geographic trends. He had this to say:
"So as a reminder we enjoyed the hyper-growth before COVID and we expect to continue to grow to the type of scale also post-COVID. Hopefully, it will come soon."
My takeaway from this: they are thinking actual hyper-growth, similar to pre-COVID, has yet to return.

International prowess
I don’t know if this is a function of being an Israeli company versus an American company, but they seem to have the best international opportunity and are taking advantage of it. The best metric showing this is that they currently have their software offered in 14 languages while Asana has 6. This will be time consuming and expensive for Asana to catchup here. MNDY are certainly not only international as 48% of their revenue is in the USA, I just think they poised to capture the international greenfield more rapidly than someone like Asana.

Balance sheet
$875M in cash, $21M in debt…enough said there.

CONS

Principal shareholders
From their latest filing, Roy Mann (Co-CEO, Co-Founder) has 13.5%, Eran Zinman (Co-CEO, Co-Founder) has 5.2%, and Jeff Horing (outside investor) has 37.6%. I am not sure why or how this investor got such a large stake but I do not like that someone outside the company has 3x the ownership of one co-founder and 7x the other co-founder.

Co-CEOs
Although after the interview linked above, I do see a great camaraderie between the two co-founders, I don’t like that there are two CEOs. Their thought process is that they don’t want the business to be centralized so they share it between co-CEOs. Roy Mann was initially the sole CEO and then Eran Zinman moved from a CTO role to co-CEO in Nov 2020. I personally wish he had stayed as CTO but we shall see how this plays out.

Moat/Competition
I don’t like that there is a lot of competition and I also don’t like that there isn’t a clear leader in this space (more on that in the comparison section). Ideally I would invest in the company that is dominating its field, laughing at the so-called competition; that is not what is happening here. As stated above I see this as less of a concern only because the market is so wide open, competition plays less of a role.

ASANA COMPARISON

Let me start off this section with two tables below, directly comparing Asana and monday in revenue, S&M, and >$50K customers. S&M is all GAAP because there was more info than non-GAAP, it is easier to pull, and the SBC didn’t seem extreme in either company as to distort the results. Also I recognize that Asana’s quarters end a month after monday’s.


**MNDY**
	        **Q2-2021**	**Q1-2021**	**Q4-2020**	**Q3-2020**	**Q2-2020**	**Q1-2020**	**Q4-2019**	**Q3-2019**	**Q2-2019**
Revenue (M)	$70.6	$59.0	$50.1	$42.6	$36.5	$31.9	$26.6	$21.1	$17.0
Cust >$50K ARR	470	335	264	185	144	105	76	46	23
S&M (M)	$61.1	$63.0	$56.9	$57.9	$39.6	$36.9	$30.4	$33.3	$26.7
S&M Per Rev	86.5%	106.9%	113.5%	135.9%	108.7%	115.7%	114.2%	158.2%	157.0%
S&M Efficiency	1.35	1.61	1.92	1.62	2.04	1.43	1.50	1.65	
Revenue QoQ	19.7%	17.6%	17.7%	16.8%	14.2%	20.0%	26.4%	23.8%	
Revenue YoY	93.7%	84.7%	88.5%	102.3%	114.4%				
>$50K ARR QoQ	40.3%	26.9%	42.7%	28.5%	37.1%	38.2%	65.2%	100.0%	155.6%
>$50K ARR YoY	226.4%	219.0%	247.4%	302.2%	526.1%	1066.7%	1166.7%		
									
**ASAN**									
Revenue (M)	$89.5	$76.7	$68.4	$58.9	$52.0	$47.7	$43.5	$38.1	$33.1
Cust >$50K ARR	598	485	397	318	283	252	207	156	109
S&M (M)	$63.9	$56.8	$53.5	$48.0	$38.8	$36.1	$30.9	$35.9	$20.2
S&M Per Rev	71.4%	74.1%	78.3%	81.6%	74.6%	75.7%	71.1%	94.3%	60.9%
S&M Efficiency	1.11	1.61	1.27	1.41	2.09	1.82	1.66	1.01	0.92
Revenue QoQ	16.7%	12.1%	16.1%	13.2%	9.1%	9.7%	14.2%	15.1%	18.3%
Revenue YoY	72.0%	60.7%	57.3%	54.7%	57.2%	70.6%			
>$50K ARR QoQ	23.3%	22.2%	24.8%	12.4%	12.3%	21.7%	32.7%	43.3%	
>$50K ARR YoY	111.3%	92.5%	91.8%	103.8%	160.0%				

Two different go-to-market strategies
From Asana’s 2020 10-K:
A majority of our paying customers initially adopt our platform through self-service and free trials. Once adopted, customers can expand through self-service or with the assistance of our direct sales team, which is focused on promoting new use cases of Asana.”

From monday’s F-1:
“Historically, customers would adopt and expand on the platform on a self-serve basis, independent of any assistance. In addition to our self-serve funnel, as of 2018, we began to invest in our sales, customer success and partners teams to help our customers obtain more value out of the platform. As a result of the investments described above, we have seen significant growth in the customer spend from our cohorts during the first 12 months of their subscriptions to monday. For example, the new ARR generated from our 2018, 2019 and 2020 cohorts was higher than the new ARR generated by our 2016 cohort by 6.7x, 16.0x and 27.1x respectively.”

From monday’s Q2 earnings call when asked about profitability on the income statement:
“The improvement was driven primarily by lower marketing investment as we are becoming more efficient. Allocating our marketing spend to focus on customers with 10 plus users and enterprise customers. We continue to make a substantial investment in our sales organization and have significantly expanded our sales team over the last year.”

What I glean from all of this is that monday used to do a self-service funnel and it wasn’t working great so they shifted and started spending A LOT on S&M in order to go to the customers instead of letting them come to them. There is an image on the F-1 that shows the amount of spend per annual cohort over time. I encourage everyone to go look at that chart to understand the magnitude of the shift. Meanwhile Asana is still mainly going off of self-service and free trials. This is evidenced by comparing the two company’s S&M/Rev, which is a great segway to my next point.

MNDY’s S&M Blitzkrieg
Just look at the table above for a moment. Notice the difference in S&M Per Rev between the two companies. While there is a noticeable difference in the resulting revenue growth YoY, the most striking difference is the growth in customers spending >$50K in ARR. This tells me that MNDY is hammering the enterprise market (which they define an enterprise customer as one who spends >$50K per year) with outsized S&M spending while Asana is not. I also think this is why ASAN’s investor material shares customers who spend >$5K in ARR while MNDY does not.

We are currently at the point where the two curves cross. Over the next two quarters, if these rates persistent, MNDY will cross over ASAN and leave them in the dust. My theory is that since these numbers are all out in the open now, ASAN will up their S&M spend to keep up, otherwise I just don’t see how they can compete long-term. MNDY has no intention of slowing down either. In the earnings call they said S&M per Rev only looks better this quarter because “the pace of our revenue growth has outpaced the investment growth.”

One point for ASAN is that they spend less on S&M but are more efficient. I look at S&M Efficiency as previous quarter’s S&M spend divided by quarterly increase in revenue times 4 (annualized). I think of this as how many S&M dollars are needed in order to gain how much in ARR. I have seen other people calculate this differently but this makes the most sense to me. Overall MNDY spends more than ASAN to earn that extra ARR.

Product
I wish I had a definitive winner here. Typically I go to Reddit when I want to see reviews of the software that we follow. That community is knowledgeable and blunt. I had a hard time finding anything beneficial there between MNDY and ASAN. I ended up watching numerous comparison videos on YouTube and came away with the feeling that these two software packages are pretty equal. I actually watched one video that said Asana is easier to use while Monday is more powerful and then another video that said the exact opposite.

I am not a user by any means but my personal conclusion from all of the research was that monday seemed to be more optionable, more robust, more adaptable and ready to be expanded into new territories while Asana is purpose-built and would have a harder time expanding. Again, only conjecture, take it for what it is.

Leadership
I watched a few interviews with the Asana founders and the monday founders. I was much more impressed with the monday founders. Honestly, this is my personal opinion, but I fundamentally disagree with the worldview of the Asana leadership. This matters as an investor, and for me, it makes me walk the other way. I think BroadwayDan summed it up best (https://discussion.fool.com/broadway-dan39s-2020-annual-review-3…:slight_smile: “I just can’t stand billionaires crowing about their Buddhist enlightenment.”

On the other hand, the two co-founders from monday are relatable, have known each other since they were 18 when they met in military service, and seem less idealistic. On the flipside, Asana seems to be an amazing place to work based on all the awards they get and their Glassdoor ratings so clearly the leadership knows how to please employees.

Valuations
As some of you may know, I value a company relative to its growth (https://discussion.fool.com/valuing-growth-34768591.aspx). I look at EV/GP/%RevGrowth. Typically I look at something <0.75 as “reasonably priced,” the higher the number, the more “expensive.” This is not a strict rule, just a tool in the toolbox to compare one company to another. I am throwing in a few more companies as reference since this might be new to most.

MNDY: 0.68
ASAN: 0.77

DOCU: 0.69
CRWD: 0.85
DDOG: 0.89
SNOW: 1.32
NET: 1.58

CONCLUSION

Overall I have come to learn that this is a wide open market ripe for the taking. As they said on the monday earnings call: “On 70% of the deals we see literally no competition. Usually, customers use email, and spreadsheets, and PowerPoint, and email to communicate and collaborate. And it just seems that everybody are trying to improve update work and make it more efficient.”
I tend to think the MNDY is the better of the two and I believe the numbers will show their dominance within 1-2 quarters. Monday is hammering the enterprise market while it seems that Asana is a little more laissez faire in that arena, currently favoring profitability over scale (as compared to MNDY). It’ll be an interesting competition between these two over the years so grab some popcorn.

-Junomean2
Long MNDY ~3% and looking to add

139 Likes

From their latest filing, Roy Mann (Co-CEO, Co-Founder) has 13.5%, Eran Zinman (Co-CEO, Co-Founder) has 5.2%, and Jeff Horing (outside investor) has 37.6%. I am not sure why or how this investor got such a large stake but I do not like that someone outside the company has 3x the ownership of one co-founder and 7x the other co-founder.

Jeff Horing is a managing director at venture cap firm Insight Partners, and he’s managing the Monday.com investment. I think his name is just nominally on the share ownership form. He doesn’t own the shares, Insight Partners and their investors do.

https://www.insightpartners.com/portfolio/
https://www.insightpartners.com/portfolio/mondaycom

Mike

21 Likes

I like to test drive a company’s software if I’m looking at it as an investment. Some I can’t easily do that as a personal investor, such as CrowdStrike or Datadog. But I can test drive Cloudflare’s CDN services, look up company data on ZoomInfo (free version), create a small database on Snowflake, and use Monday.com’s project management software. If you have two or fewer people accessing your Monday.com boards, you can use most of Monday.com’s features for free.

After setting up an account and playing around with the software for a couple of days I’m going to try using it for my personal project planning going forward. It’s pretty slick. If you’re considering an investment I recommend test driving the software.

Monday.com has a good YouTube video tutorial series, but I found it was pretty easy to get up to speed just poking around with the software on my own:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD1GX_ZTokQ&ab_channel=m…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8gi0HDnBSA&ab_channel=m…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huhYou9mAz8&ab_channel=m…

Mike

37 Likes

I like to test drive a company’s software if I’m looking at it as an investment/i>

I get the idea of wanting to do a test drive, but it seems to me that most, if not all of the software we discuss here for investment purposes is something that can only be seriously evaluated in an enterprise context. Monday might be perfectly lovely for organizing individual workflow, but that is not what they are selling … how does it work in an enterprise context. Likewise, the virtue of Cloudflare is only seen over the long term and over a large number of endpoints. And, how good or not Zoominfo is, is actually measured by the sales one makes, not whether one can pull up one person’s info.

5 Likes

Asana’s CEO bought about $72 million worth of ASAN on Sept 8, 9 and 10. That’s 750000 shares, at prices ranging from $91 to $99.

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001477720/a4254d0…

I have no position in either MNDY or ASAN but that’s kind of interesting.

Earlier this year, it looks like the CEO also bought 3.5 million ASAN shares over many trading days throughout June, at prices ranging from $39 to $63.

22 Likes

Asana recently made a video investor prestation. Near the end of the presentation the analyst made a comment that might be relevant to monday:

“There are many browsers but only one Google.”

He apparently he expects a dominant company to emerge in the work management space as happened in the browser space.

I think it’s too early to call a winner, so I own both Asana and monday. But in a concentrated portfolio, I am unwillingly to own TEAM, SMAR, ADBE. MSFT, etc., etc., etc.

All I can really do is “follow the numbers” to see what happens. A fascinating contest.

Just my two cents as I wait for the Patriots to kick off.

wciii from Cape Cod

4 Likes

Very interesting post, Junomean2. Thank you for taking the time as I own a 4% position in ASAN that I acquired at $40 and am only recently assessing MNDY to ascertain if I buy it also, though I will likely be holding onto ASAN, also. And kudos for watching the videos of both software platforms…I did the same an also could not conclude which software was superior after watching three of them. Living in Silicon Valley, ASAN is much more well known and used by MANY people and companies I know…and raved about by all.

Couple of thoughts and one correction that occurred to me as I read your post that are relevant to this awesome analysis:

  1. ASAN actually has their software in 13 languages, not 6 as you had states above (Guessing you just had an old number) This was announced in their most recent earnings calls last week on 9/1. They added three new languages just over the past quarter including Korean, Swedish & Italian just in the last 3 months. If MNDY has 14 as you stated in your post, ASAN is only one behind with 13. I’ll call that roughly a tie.

  2. ASAN had about 28% higher revenue than MNDY last quarter. Typically, as a company continues to scale, one would expect a decrease in S&M as a percentage of revenues…stands to reason as revenues increase (hopefully) faster than S&M expense at scale. We see this with BOTH companies, as MNDY drops over the past 4 quarters from 135.9% down to 86.5% and ASAN drops from 81.6% down to 71.4% (for both I am using your table and numbers). It is very difficult to draw any concrete conclusions from this comparison (or trend) or to tip my hat to MNDY just yet simply because if MNDY were at ASAN’s run rate (MNDY $70m vs ASAN $90m), MNDYs S&M dollar spend would actually yield a lower percentage spend…i.e. In actual dollars (according to your table) ASAN spent more this quarter($63.9m vs $61.1m) on their S&M. Any way I look at it, both companies are growing very fast (though, yes, MNDY is faster, but smaller) and their marketing spend this quarter is virtually identical… and very large in both cases for their size. Both will continue to drop their S&M as a percentage of revenues as they continue to scale those revenues…I can’t call this one either and certainly wouldn’t give MNDY the TKO here…they added $11.6m on $61m S&M spend compared to ASAN adding about $13m on 63.9m in S&M? I’d call it a tie except for the fact that MNDY added slightly more larger $50k customers (135 vs 113).

  3. While I certainly give MDNY the nod for faster growth (though still at a slightly smaller scale) and may find myself investing in them also, and they may have a slight edge internationally by virtue of their geographic location and 1 single more language than ASAN; I would humbly point out that ASAN is not sitting on their haunches, having actually spent more in actual dollars on S&M and for a larger dollar gain, having announced an significant partnership with ZM, announced new product suites for large Enterprise customers, new very large customers including Viacom and CVS, hired a new extremely experienced COO (who already knows the company having sat on the board for the past 2 years), opened several new offices including Chicago, and announced they now have channel partners across 75 countries international. This doesn’t sound like a company sitting idol and waiting…though no doubt, MNDY is not either. And while I don’t care to comment on the philosophy or religion of either of their CEOs, Asana’s CEO, Dustin Moskovitz co-founded another little company called Facebook with some guy named Zuck that has done quite well, so I have to give him just a little credit for doing something right. Net, net, I remain rather hesitant to conclude that ASAN will be left in the “dust”. I agree wholeheartedly that it is going to be a fierce race and these two will keep each other in their cross hairs!

It might even be more exciting than the Italian Grand Prix today in which the Crowdstrike halo surrounding Lewis Hamilton’s head on his Grand Prix car barely saved him from being crushed (definitely check out that YouTube video online…cool pic which I wish I could post here with “Crowdstrike” right in the middle)!

Personally, I can’t yet make the call who will win this race and, gratefully, I’m not sure I need to just yet. I find myself liking aspects of BOTH of these companies…so sue me for not taking sides just yet. After ASAN’s earnings call last week and a blistering three day surge in stock price, the two are now neck and neck. Thank you to this amazing and resourceful board for the continued deep dive on these two companies. If you invested in either one, you’ve done extremely well over the last month! Cheers! - Poleeko

(Long ASAN 4%…strongly considering adding MNDY)

27 Likes

I think that MNDY is the better one of the two.

Two things bothered me, and continue to bother me about ASAN.

1) The huge costs (total - not just S&M) in the ASAN business and a lack of operating leverage kicking in. Comparing adj operating margin and free cash flow margin for the last 4 quarters between the two companies looks like this:

Adj Operating margin
ASAN: -63% -51% -43% -43%
MNDY: -91% -53% -40% -14%

Adj FCF margin
ASAN: -33% -26% -10% -10%
MNDY: -18% -24% -3% -2%

So there is a clear operating improvement visible at Monday as the company scales, whereas this is just not happening at Asana. The business model is better. And this improvement and improvement trend has happened while Monday is gaining on Asana.

2) The CEO - specifically his motivation. Clearly Asana’s Moskovitz was involved in a very successful company Facebook, yes. But his core interests seem very much philanthropic since then. And he’s bankrolling Asana; he owns a big chunk of the company and he apparently also funded all/the lion’s share of the recent convertible debt the company issued.

These two things together make Asana feel like the spendthrift rich kid brother of Monday to me…

15 Likes

Thanks for the great write up! I’d just add one point that I would not read too much from the difference of S&M or R&D expenses of the two companies, because Asana is a US company while Monday is in Israel - the compensation of employees may have huge difference.

In this website (https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Asana,Google,Facebook&tr…), you can find the compensation of software engineers in Asana. To just get an idea, a software engineer in Asana earns more than a software engineer in Google of similar level, and earns roughly same as those in Facebook. (This is about the top compensation level in Silicon Valley.) The S&M people in Asana may or may not earn as much as software engineers, but I believe they should get top compensation in the industry as well. This is probably also why Asana has a top rating in Glassdoor.

I doubt Monday pays employees as much in compensation. So I don’t think it’s a fair comparison of those expense numbers.

Luffy

2 Likes