Comment by JumpCrisscross

9 hours ago

…why? What would the appropriate multiple between them be?

I can't answer that because it's irrational anyway. I don't know, how many millions of people work in support? Because the assumption that all those jobs will disappear is what is holding up the public valuations

  • > can't answer that because it's irrational anyway

    Not how a valuation argument works! If you’re claiming this shows those valuations are irrational, you should be able to point to why. Otherwise, it’s just a “my vibes are off” comment.

    • I am not going to do a DCF on this because the assumptions are all invented anyway. But back of the envelope:

      >> What's the TAM of AI replacing millions of knowledge workers in support? Let's conservatively assume a few hundred billion.

      >> How much market share does Fin capture? Let's conservatively assume 5%.

      >> What's the valuation on a reasonable multiple?

      5% of a few hundred billion is ~$15B of revenue. Let's assume deflated 6x revenue valiation, not the 15x these things were fetching two years ago, and you get a ~$90B company valuation (that it should grow into soon at least).

      And it sold for $3.5b

      So the price is telling you the real revenue is nearer 300m than $15b, which puts the actual AI-support software market in the low single-digit billions. Not hundreds of billions

      And if the TAM is real but just being captured by the incumbents: Salesforce's own Agentforce, the supposed winner, is at $1.2B ARR. The "someone else is eating it" defense still has to point at the someone, and no income statement anywhere shows hundreds of billions of revenue

      For Nvidia to be at $5T and the hundreds of billions a year of capex behind it only pencil out if that compute throws off a huge revenue stream downstream. Support is imo the cleanest test there is to demonstrate future value of AI in the real world (literally the first thing everyone said when ChatGPT 3.5 came out was that support will be eaten first). It's the most mature, most deployed, most automatable, and the exit price of its best player is...pretty small

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