Sailpoint’s lonely IPO accelerates

• 📈 Trending Up: Woke Pope … Consumer AI revenue … tariffs … counter-tariffs … record AI funding … eVTOLs …banned words … staying pat … common sense …

  • The Musk-Altman feud: Musk put up an offer to buy OpenAI’s non-profit arm for a high price ($97.4 billion). Some folks think that Musk is somewhat trolling with the offer, working to make it harder for OpenAI to reform its corporate structure so that it can keep doing OpenAI things. Altman responded that the offer was not welcome, but did offer a counter-pitch: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

    • Musk responded by calling Sam a swindler. Again.

• 📉 Trending Down: Having values … medical imaging jobs … climate science … expensive self-driving … jobs, generally … higher education affordability …

• A little constitutional crisis, as a treat: The Trump admin is currently pushing the limits of executive power. Depending on your politics, this is either a good thing or a bad thing. As someone in favor of distributed Federal authority, it worries me. The good news is that it appears we’re still (mostly) fighting in courts over matters. What worries me is that should the current administration keep losing, that it will do more of this and less of this.

• The Cornflakes-Excrement Theory of losing your morals: There’s a famous old riff about Nazis and bars. The gist is that if you serve a Nazi, they’ll bring their friends to your establishment, and, before you know it, you are the owner of a Nazi bar. It’s an analogous tale for certain types of bad; some bad multiplies, so you want to stamp it out from the get.

  • My version of this is shit and cereal. Even a little excrement ruins your breakfast.

  • Enter JD Vance, the racist DOGE staffer, and the limits of obedience. The current vibe on Twitter is that DOGE staff are god-kings, and anyone trying to slow them down is a degrowth, decel, doomer, dweeb. Thus, when one of the young adults currently monkeying their way through the Federal apparatus wrote that the country should “normalize Indian hate,” that they were “racist before it was cool,” and that they “would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth,” JD Vance got into a scrap arguing that the staffer should get grace. And keep their job.

  • Anyway, if you are going to excuse all of that, you will find yourself out of ammunition — and self-respect — when this pile of human garbage virtue signals his way into a big government job on account of his ability to kiss ass.

Faster than ever

Back at TechCrunch I ran a series called the $100 million ARR Club for a while. The gist was that while covering funding rounds was fun, it didn’t highlight the right facet of startup success. Fundraising is a signal that a company may be adding mountains of revenue and quickly scaling towards an IPO. But not necessarily.

Reaching $100 million worth of annual recurring revenue or similar, however, is.

The project sputtered over time, as the interviews I held with companies that had reached the $100 million ARR mark started to blend into one another. Companies that reach that scale, at the time, had enough shared characteristics that it felt like I was constantly retreading the same ground.

• Who built ARR.Club? I want to buy you lunch.

Not anymore. If I was still at TC, I’d resurrect the series because companies are reaching the $100 million mark faster than ever:

• Cursor reached $100 million ARR in less than two years.

• ElevenLabs reached $100 million ARR in less than two years.

• Glean reached $100 million ARR in less than three years.

And as Footwork investor Nikhil Basu Trivedi pointed out a few days ago, companies like Bolt, Loveable, and Harvey are scaling to tens of millions worth of ARR at incredible speed.

• Sourcery has more on the subject here

The gist is that the old IPO threshold of reaching nine-figure revenue is now more passé than ever. The real breakout startups of today aren’t going to list until they are five times that size. Because they can stay private longer, sure, but also because the old-school IPO minimums are now en route startup milestones, not launch points for public listings.

Selling AI tooling has saved product-led growth for startups. And shown that you can get from zero to inevitable faster than ever before. (The AI-Web3 revenue ∆ for each marginal venture dollar invested has never been higher, right?)

Sailpoint’s lonely IPO accelerates

While we await more companies launching their own IPO journey, Sailpoint is showing that the market is warm for technology offerings. The company raised its IPO price range estimate from $19 to $21 per share to $21 to $23 per share in a new SEC filing, bolstering its midpoint valuation and raise by 10%.

That’s not an insane repricing, but it does imply that we’re going to see a comfortable decacorn list at a greater than 10x ARR multiple. And Sailpoint has loads of debt!

I think it’s time to stop handicapping the IPO market, as the reticence of tech companies to list — see ever-more aggressive secondaries — seems infinite. At least Sailpoint is having fun. Even if it is forced to play alone, for now.

Via Andrea Zignin

Dispatches from France

The French AI summit CO discussed yesterday is in full swing. And while this publication’s T&E budget did not allow us to attend, the more established press did have sufficient coin. So, from the sidelines:

• Kevin Roose, NYT: “Europe — which passed tough laws on data privacy and social media over the last decade, and had a head start on regulating A.I. with the European Union’s A.I. Act — appears to be having second thoughts.”

• Cat Zakrzewski, WaPo: “As European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sat behind him onstage, Vance cautioned that the Trump administration will not accept foreign governments ‘tightening the screws’ on American tech companies. He warned that a ‘risk averse’ approach to AI regulation could paralyze the emerging technology.”

• Jeffrey Dastin and Elizabeth Howcroft, Reuters: “Macron highlighted one difference [between France and the United States] on Monday night. When it comes to electricity, France would not adopt a ‘drill, baby, drill’ approach, like U.S. oil production policy, but instead tap its clean power so companies could ‘plug, baby, plug’ to meet AI's voracious power needs, he said.”

• Liv McMahon, BBC: “The UK and US have not signed an international agreement on artificial intelligence (AI) at a global summit in Paris. The statement, signed by France, China and India among other countries, pledges an ‘open’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘ethical’ approach to the technology's development.”

France is taking a more American approach to AI, while other European nations are bit a more cautious. But it does seem that the climate is shifting in the EU as it relates to either regulating first or building first. Macron wants the latter. Let’s see how far his enthusiasm takes him and his nation.

Shopify earnings

After Monday.com blew the doors off its earnings report, with rapturous investors sending its shares up 26% yesterday, Shopify dropped its own earnings this morning.

The headline numbers:

• Q4 revenue of $2.81 billion, up 31% from $2.14 in the year-ago quarter, and ahead of expectations of $2.73 billion.

• Q4 non-GAAP EPS of $0.44, up from $0.34 in the year-ago quarter, and ahead of expectations of $0.43 per share.

• Q4 GMV of $94.5 billion, up from $75.1 billion in the year-ago quarter, and ahead of expectations.

Shopify shares initially sold off sharply, but have recovered to breakeven in pre-market trading. Why? Because the company’s profit guidance for the first quarter came in under expectations. Yes, it is a very tough market out there.

Don’t worry about Shopify, however. The company is more profitable than ever, and has rallied by more than a third in the last trading year. Not that it’s having a great PR time of it, at the moment.