We are having a Board Emergency!

We are having a Board Emergency!

We are having a real Board Emergency which is threatening the life of our board! The board is drowning in an excess of non-essential posts. On Monday the first post was 79413. By Thursday, the final post was 79593. That was 180 posts in four days. Who can read 180 posts in four days? Who wants to read 180 posts in four days? And many of the posts were off-topic or by newcomers to the board, who didn’t understand the basics of what we are about, hadn’t read the Knowledgebase and the other articles on the side panel, and the important posts were being lost, drowned, in the flood of aimless Posts. If this continues, serious people will leave the board, and we will lose what we have here!

For example, one board newbie, who obviously hadn’t read the Knowledgebase and the other articles on the side panel, asked roughly “Oh my! Some of these companies aren’t profitable yet. How can we invest in them?” Unbelievably instead of directing her to the side panel and asking to “STOP THIS THREAD”, or explaining that these are SaaS companies with recurring revenue, this elementary question managed to engender an unbelievably long thread of answers, with so much wandering all over the place that when you got to the end you were just confused.

One simple single response would have sufficed, like this: “If a company sells $100 million worth of refrigerators it has to make a profit on each one, because it has no sure idea how many refrigerators it will sell next year, it could be $80 million or $100 million or $120 million. But our companies are mostly SaaS companies. A SaaS company sells a subscription to software that the customer will come to depend on. If our company spends $110 million to get customers who provide $100 in revenue, they aren’t just getting $100 in revenue this year, they are getting that revenue for next year too, and the year after, and the one after that, pretty much forever! But that’s not all! The the second year those same customers will probably even spend more as they will use our software for more employees or more departments. They will probably spend $125 the second year, and more the next. So you can see that it’s in the best interest of a SaaS company to hire more sales people to get as many customers as they can, while the getting is good. That’s why we don’t worry about small losses, as long as the company is moving towards profitability.” (Some responders did explain this, but their responses were lost in the flood).

What can you do to help?

Read the Knowledgebase and the side panel before posting if you are new to the board, and wait until you’ve had a chance to read one or two months of posts, so you understand what we are about.

Read and follow the Monday Morning Rules of the Board, which are published weekly. It tries to make clear what we do and don’t do.

Try to avoid one-line posts, that fill up the board.

Understand that the purpose of our board is to evaluate high-growth stocks (usually ones growing revenue at roughly 50% per year or more. Someone presented Kaleyra (KLR) which was growing at roughly 25% and apparently with 25% gross margins. A company like that shouldn’t even be mentioned on our board. It doesn’t belong).

We will continue to delete, usually without warning, posts which flagrantly break the rules.

Now let’s get back to serious work.

Saul

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You might also mention that there are specific boards set up on TMF for every one of these companies, and general chatting on these companies would generally be better approached there…

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