Great point, Smorg! At any rate, my read of Samsara’s allegations are that Motive did this more obsessively, brazenly, and stupidly than they should have. But did they do anything illegal? Doesn’t seem so easy to prove. As Ryan Gosling’s character says in The Big Short, if stupid = illegal “I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested.”
Uh…yeah. I really, really hate how Samsara is going about this. The press release and the CEO’s blog post seem mature enough. But this? » Motive Lawsuit
Seems childish. Samsara has reciprocated Motive’s obsessive tendencies. It reads like a short report. The dashcam photo…the repeated “Motive accessed our dashboard X times as of [whenever],” and junk like this:
Weak. I’m no attorney, but the case Samsara has built seems more quantitative than qualitative. Motive snooped many, many times. But was any of it illegal? Samsara might not be able to prove it, so they gave Motive a webpage to make them look bad. But I don’t think choosing this route makes Samsara look good. Samsara could have been classy about it…quietly sued them (to pile on after Omnitracs did in December https://www.ttnews.com/articles/omnitracs-lawsuit-motive) and put out a short press release and been done with it. But I feel this webpage cedes any high ground Samsara might have had…and now it feels more like the two companies are a couple of pigs wrestling in the mud.
Ok rant over. I don’t want to let my disgust carry me away. Maybe Samsara’s next couple quarters will be business as usual and we’ll forget all about this. But this dings my conviction a little bit. And I have to imagine it makes other investors wonder why they would spend so much energy attacking (ok counter-attacking) a competitor. Is Samsara losing business to them? Sure doesn’t seem like Samsara is hurting in any way – in fact their last several quarterly reports have been super strong…but then, again, why spotlight a competitor for investors to worry about?
Luckily valuation has kept my position a little smaller than my other high-conviction names (none of which had yellow flags until now). But it was creeping back up toward 7% as I’ve (net) added in January, and I would probably be adding at this price…but this news was enough for me to take my recent adds back off the table and cut it to just a 3% position. I very much plan to keep a position in Samsara. But my conviction is lower, at least for now. I just don’t like my companies to be in the news for things like this. Especially when they create the news (i.e. the webpage that, as you can see, frustrates me) themselves.
Bear