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Sep 17, 2020Liked by Alpha Hunter

Hey Chris,

Great work on both the deep dive and summary!

1. Do you pay for the services which provided the charts in your deep dive? or are they free? ex. Prescient & Strategic Intelligence, Public Comps, MarketsandMarkets...

2. What services do you recommend using their paid version?

3. Any recommendations on the process of creating a deep dive?

Thank you.

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author

Hi Jacob,

I appreciate the kind words, my answers to your questions are as follows:

1. I don't pay for any market intelligence or charting services. They're all free online, just requires a lot of time and diligence. Although, it would make my life a lot easier to pay for a resource.

2. Depends on what you're looking for, so I would need a bit more clarity. MarketSmith is a great tool for stock charts. Public Comps has solid data especially in the SaaS space.

3. Create a repeatable process for yourself and stick to it. Be very structured and organized. Don't choose companies that don't produce a lot of information that is easy to find. Have the work ethic and perseverance to put in long hours. I could go on...

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Great write up Chris.

Do you have any thoughts on Snowflake's sales tactic, particularly the credit system they employ. For example, I know a customer of Snowflake who purchased $100K worth of credits thinking it would be sufficient for 2 years...but at the end of year 1, they had only used $30K of credits, so for the next 2years they're good assuming constant business activity...so no new sales from this customer

How does the credit sales number show up in GAAP financials and industry metrics as Net Revenue Retention?

Also, I've talked to few of Snowflake's customers and the common thing I hear is that they really only view BigQuery as a true competitor...AWS & Azure don't really have the computational capability...any thoughts on this?

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Revenue recognition under GAAP / ASC 606 dictates that companies only recognize revenue when or as the entity satisfies a performance obligation. In this case, the performance obligation is Snowflake providing credits for usage. They only recognize revenue upon the consumption of usage. So, in your example, $30K of revenue would be recognized in the year, with the remaining $70K being booked as Deferred Revenue ("Remaining Performance Obligation" or "RPO"). Seems like a small customer given their ACV of $160K.

For DBNER, the $30K gets recognized as base year revenue, the additional revenue or usage gets recognized in the second year. Hence the "expand".

Not sure if I agree based on my research, but I'm also not the tech expert. I'd have to circle back with my contacts.

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Thanks for the post. Exasol, listed in Europe, is Snowflake’s competitor. Have you checked them out?

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Hey Mike - thanks for the comment. I came across them in my research, but due to time constraints, decided to focus on the Big 3 major cloud providers. My superficial reaction was that I didn't like that it was founded as an on-prem solution, which tends to be less flexible even it is turned into a cloud product. What are your thoughts?

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Good morning, Just googled, they offer both cloud and on-premise. And say they have the fastest analytics software.

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