Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies have been breaking records recently. Some haven’t been shy about discussing it publicly. Stewart Butterfield, CEO at Slack, published a frantic set of tweets about what was going on at the company in late March.
My day job (also: night job) is CEO of Slack, a publicly traded company with investors to whom I am a fiduciary, 110k+ paying customers of all sizes, and thousands of employees I care about very, very much. The last few weeks have been 🤯😳😢 Here’s what it's been like. [Thread]
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) March 26, 2020
Quarterly results for Slack were disappointing for many, however. After all the records being broken for active users on Slack, analysts expected more Zoom-like results. Slack increased its revenue, just not by enough. Zoom has also been much-hyped, but delivered on that hype, reporting a revenue increase of 169% year-over-year.
Looking at all the earnings reports, this becomes a noticeable pattern. Crowdstrike up big! Salesforce has so-so results. Oh, look at Okta’s report! And so on.
The fact that the sector has so many success stories right now is impressive. Overall, the economy is still weak, even if some expect an accelerated online transformation of companies to mean faster growth for SaaS vendors.
The biggest takeaway from the latest earnings reports is that SaaS companies are in great shape. Now, the industry just has to convince CEOs to stop building up unrealistic expectations on Twitter.
My Twitter is pretty much complete nonsense at this point
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2019
