Why is $NBIS bothering with TripleTen?

From their presentation

They are claiming that TripleTen contributes ARR of 27 Million as of Q3 '24. They barely even mentioned TT in their most recent CC…literally ONE perfunctory sentence in their prepared remarks and a whopping THREE perfunctory sentences in response to a question.

Why don’t they just divest it?

Seems like a non-adjacent distraction that doesn’t contribute materially to their revenue.

As a side note, to investigate into TT, I ended up going down a “coding bootcamp” rathole; the TL;DR imo takeaways are:

  1. When entry-level tech talent is in short supply, Coding Bootcamps, and their students, do great
  2. When entry-level tech talent is NOT in short supply, Coding Bootcamps, and their students, do NOT do great, AT ALL.
  3. Right now, there is an OVER-supply of entry-level tech talent.
  4. With exceedingly few exceptions, the rule is that metrics reported by Coding Bootcamps (number of students, number of graduates, number of placed positions, salaries, time to placement) are WILDLY inaccurate and WILDLY inflated, and TT is no exception.

Anyhoo…I’m curious, any thoughts, data, opinions or wild speculations regarding TripleTen?

Is it a natural fit in a $NBIS ecosystem sonehow?

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No, I don’t think so. When I look at Nebius, I mostly focus on the core business, because that will be the dominant revenue stream in the foreseeable future. Nebius’s guidance of 2025 ARR is now $750M - $1B, while the guided 2025 revenue of core business is $500M-$700M, so you can see how dominant the core business will be.

In addition to core business, I think it’s also worth keeping an close eye on the Avride business, because self-driving projects can burn a lot of cash which will potentially impact their core business. So IMHO, it’ll be beneficial to spin off Avride if possible.

In terms of TripleTen, my understanding is that it has nothing to do with their core business but it could be a profitable business by its own, so there may be no harm to keep it. I work for a global tech giant company and my company once developed a Tele-education app as well. It was very profitable and could easily drive GAAP net-income by itself, though it had nothing to do with our core business.

Yandex used to be a tech giant, so I guess TripleTen was just one of their diverse projects that was kept when they divested Russian assets.

I could be wrong though. But I think TripleTen, no matter whether it does well or not, will not impact $NBIS’s share price much. If Nebius can deliver their promise on core business and can also maintain a reasonable capital expense, they will reward share holders, otherwise, they will fail.

Luffy

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It does feel like NBIS Is offering a suite of seemingly unrelated products — as if they asked AI which services offered the most potential for growth and high margin revenue over the next decade then created a business That touched Everything AI spit out.

It almost feels like each of these could be a successful spinoff on its own— However, I think this is actually a phenomenon we are seeing more and more in business as technology and compute power begin to overlap.

Visionary and innovative leadership want to get involved in anything and everything that is interesting and important to them— Take Tesla for example, they are an EV company right? The reality is they are a technology behemoth but the mix of revenues touching everything from Robo taxis to energy and humanoid robots— I don’t believe it will be long before consumer EV’s or Tesla’s smallest revenue source—

I believe something similar is happening with Nebius. Leadership has the vision, resources, and a chip on their shoulder rebooting a new company after geopolitical disruption.

As far as TripleTen goes— I have a slightly different outlook — I’m not overly interested in the current revenue stream from it at the moment— though I do believe this will become the fastest growing secondary education sector over the next 5 years—

Education boot camps are a sticky marketing tool. I have a friend who founded and runs several tech and services start-ups and he almost always incorporates education and bootcamps to generate customers loyal to his platform and products, AND generate high margin revenue.

Here’s a lay-persons example from my life— I’m building homes using ICF (insulated concrete forms) — there are dozens of ICF products on the market readily available to me.

I attended training offered by one particular manufacturer— I paid them a couple hundred dollars for the training— (I paid them, they didn’t pay me) — and guess what? The return on investment for them is hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales to me— as I only use their product now— not a bad investment, especially considering I, and all the 23 other people in the class paid them.

It doesn’t matter who’s training I attended— I use their product— not even because it’s the best product on the market, I think almost everything out there is comparable, I use them because they’re familiar and I have an established relationship. As they release new products I will continue to attend additional trainings and send my employees to do the same. It’s sticky.

Palantir used the same strategy aggressively after going public and pursuing commercial growth— I listened to earning call after earnings call with updates on boring bootcamps and education they were providing.

This isn’t apples to apples, but in my opinion it’s a very lucrative marketing and revenue generator. Most of the attendees will simply offer High margin revenue while some of them will become NBIS customers on much larger scales.

Just my two cents.

MillennialFalcon

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