1. CrowdStrike (CRWD) — CEO George Kurtz Interviews with Deutsche Bank
a. Kurtz on the Competitive Landscape:
“When you compare like-for-like, the value we provide far exceeds anything that’s out there. We have the best prevention in the marketplace today and we actually test it and put it in writing.”
Kurtz highlighted the difference between stopping malware and preventing breaches. With half of breaches not using any malware today, that’s imperative.
Kurtz on SentinelOne:
“We see SentinelOne and a lot of competitors out there which is a symptom of legacy players not doing a good job. When you look at our success — and we’re only 1 year older than SentinelOne — I think what we’ve built is indicative of what customers are looking for.”
“If we get into a bake-off with SentinelOne we typically win. The reasons are centered around our true platform, our multi-module support and our service offerings built around it as well as the fact that people are looking for something that’s easy to use, easy to deploy and actually works. We’ve won several SentinelOne accounts in the past because of their scalability issues and false positives.”
“When we lose to SentinelOne it’s generally on price or personal relationships. But what we’ve found is that if we lose on price it generally boomerangs back to us because their technology struggled to be deployed. You can buy something that’s cheap, but odds are you’ll be back to us.”
“We are real-time and they’re batch mode. If you look at their system requirements, it’s 25 gigabytes all stored locally. We stream that data to the cloud with a 50 megabyte requirement. That’s the difference between marketing and actual technology.”
Batch mode defined: “Computer processing in which commands are input from a batch file and not interactively.” — Collins Dictionary
Kurtz on Microsoft:
“There is a bit of a crisis of trust for [Microsoft’s] customers. There was just another Azure vulnerability exposed today. Microsoft will always be successful in certain areas, but a lot of these ransomware outbreaks were being protected by Microsoft technology.”
Kurtz on where CrowdStrike is in replacing legacy solutions:
“There’s a massive amount of legacy displacement left. We have 13,000 customers and there are hundreds of thousands of customers that McAfee and Symantec have. Overall spend for cloud security is also around 1% and should be around 5%.”
b. Kurtz on the next 12 months for CrowdStrike:
“Two factors continue to be sustainable tailwinds. Number 1 is that the threat environment just continues to get worse making this a top 1 or 2 risk focused on for every board of directors. Number 2 is the digital transformation which comes with a security transformation. As companies look to re-tool their systems, they’re looking for more modern security technology like CrowdStrike to secure these systems.”
2. SoFi Technologies (SOFI) — Leadership Interviews with Goldman Sachs
a. On the impact of its banking license
“This license will increase our strategic flexibility. Today we finance our loans through warehouse facilities and our own equity capital. The warehouse facilities are not cheap — they’re significantly more expensive than the cost of funds if we had our own deposits. The bank license will allow us to use our deposits to fund our loans.” — CEO Anthony Noto
“Today, we are regulated today by 50 states for lending. We have to comply with 50 different state compliance rules. Once we have a bank license, we will be regulated by the FDIC the Fed and the OCC rather than 50 different states.” — Noto
“The mortgage business will no longer have to limit the number of mortgages we can authorize by state based on our licenses and the limit on what loans we can hold on our balance sheet will also go away with a national bank license.” — Noto
“The bank license will allow us to provide an interest rate on checking and savings that we determine. Interest rate is something we can differentiate on quite meaningfully. Today — because we are not a bank — we rely on a sweep partner that determines the interest rate… all of Galileo’s clients have these sweep partners and need sponsor banks — which SoFi bank will be able to provide.” — Noto
b. On how Global SoFi will be in the next 5 years
“We chose to go to Hong Kong with our SoFi Invest through a very small acquisition and we have increased AUM there by 5X since we bought it a year and a half ago. We will use this to land and expand throughout Asia with SoFi Invest and then other products.” — Noto
“Galileo gave us immediate access into LATAM. We power 4 of the largest fintech’s in Mexico today and will expand into more countries with Galileo in the coming months and years.” — Noto
“3 to 5 years from now, hopefully we are on 4 different continents not including North America.” — Noto
Click here for my broad overview of SoFi.
3. Upstart (UPST) — Another Win
In what is starting to become a wildly encouraging cliché, Upstart added another credit union to its partner network.
Water and Power Community Credit Union (WPCCU) has officially partnered with Upstart on its personal loan offerings. The organizations began working together in June of 2021 and this marks a significant deepening of that relationship with WPCCU being added to Upstart’s referral network.
At the time of Upstart’s IPO, it was working with 10 bank and credit union partners. Less than 1 year later and that number is now above 25 total partners. That rapid growth should greatly help Upstart continue to mitigate the concentration risk still prevalent in its business.
WPCCU and its sub-$1 billion AUM is not nearly as large of a win as Patelco was a few weeks ago — but it’s still good news. With Upstart now the preferred AI-lending partner of the National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions (NAFCU) these wins should just keep coming.
Click here for my broad overview of Upstart.
4. Penn National Gaming (Penn) — Barstool Dives Deeper into Television
Following the announcement that Barstool had acquired the naming, broadcasting and merchandise rights to College Football’s Arizona Bowl, Barstool and Penn have made another interesting move.