Hi Stocknovice,
I really value your opinions but I have to say that I’m afraid that you are taking guidance misses by Cloudflare, Snowflake, Sentinel, etc as personal affronts, as if you feel the CEO had lied to you… Or on the other hand, as signs of incompetence by the CEO and CFO to miss their guidance, as if they don’t know how to predict their own businesses… when all these guys made what they felt to be conservative guidance only to be blindsided by the rapid and even sudden further deterioration of the B2B atmosphere, as things changed rapidly AFTER they had given their guidance…
It’s not a sign that the CEO’s have been negligent when a guidance miss has hit so many of them who have rarely or never been hit like this before in years of giving guidance, even who have never missed guidance before.
You wrote:
That led to management restating its initial FY23 guide down to $1.284B from $1.342B. That’s a huge no-no in any market, and the stock has been hammered accordingly. That’s also a humongous credibility loss for a management team that was supposed to be one of NET’s selling points… It was all based on the belief and trust that management knew what it was talking about when stating the initial figure. That trust is now gone as far as I’m concerned.
Moo had a different way of presenting it:
I have been following Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, for a long time now. He is a trustworthy and respectable CEO who cares deeply about his company. If I were in Matthew Prince’s position, I would issue a very conservative, sandbagged guidance to avoid missing it ever again. Doing so would make it possible for the company to beat and raise expectations…
In addition, management emphasized the 100 quota sales reps who underperformed and only generated 4% of annualized new business last year, compared to the top 15% of reps who hit 129% of their quotas. I understand that Matthew Prince was trying to emphasize the discovery of areas for improvement, which provides upside…
Anyway, that’s just the way I see it. I don’t think these people who we’ve respected for so long have lost all credibility and trust because they all got blindsided by a rapid worsening of the B2B environment, but who knows, you may be right. I just don’t see it.
Saul