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by thriftwy 702 days ago
These numbers sound like a complete out of world fantasy to me. CRWD has a product that the user is not going to notice, best case. Now you said Wiz doesn't even have that one (what does it have then?)

And their valuation is on par with the whole annually Western support of Ukraine. A country at war and with 30M people in it. That for some completely invisible product.

It is also 17 millions of these most expensive brand new 155m artillery shells.

3 comments

I think this is just a representation of where the money is in the world. Two things:

- stocks are called stocks for a reason, they're not flows. $60bn is effectively an estimate of all future profits of the company over its lifetime

- Crowdstrike generates a return by charging enterprises huge amounts of money to feel secure and tick security boxes (Actual security is questionable). Big enterprises have a lot of money to waste, but they feel they're getting a return on it

- hardly anyone outside Ukraine gets a specific return from backing Ukraine. The same goes for all sorts of other worthy projects of the "end world hunger" kind - there's huge benefits, but not to the people actually spending the money.

>stocks are called stocks for a reason, they're not flows

Indeed, and of course we have Kalecki's famous quip that economics is "the science of confusing stocks with flows"

Pretending that being geopolitical superpower has no direct economic benefits is just silly. If USD lost the status of world's reserve currency it would have pretty catastrophic consequences for US economy.
How do I, as an individual investor, capture the return of sending a shell to Ukraine?

> If USD lost the status of world's reserve currency it would have pretty catastrophic consequences for US economy

.. but for everyone at once. Collective action problem. You've argued why it's in the interest of the US government to tax people and send shells to Ukraine, but this is not an argument for Blackrock to divert VC funding to individual armored brigades.

Very true
It's hard to make a leap from war to company valuation. Also Ukraine support is highly inflated number. If say Ukraine gets supplied with an old design MLRS rockets from US that was slated to be replaced in a few years and had very limited shelf life remaining the number counted is not the market cost of that old rocket (which would be a few 100K) but the 3 mil new top of the line replacement thing that US is producing for itself and Ukraine will never see.
Crowdstrike does endpoint security (user's PCs and servers too for checkbox ticking reasons).

Wiz does cloud security. The same thing as Crowdstrike, but runs in your cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure) to detect issues there.

Different customers, different profiles, different costs and prices.

I just don't see why that should have $23B market cap as opposed to $230M. A small team can challenge them with similar product.
Because they're making 500mm arr

At the very least I would expect to see a 5 billion market cap, and if their growth rate is good (4 year old company, seems to be) it should be higher than that

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-startup-wiz-went-from-zero-to-a...

Throw ... CRWD into that pool of Cloud workload competitor...

https://www.crowdstrike.com/platform/cloud-security/cwpp/

That BSOD also impacting instances of Windows in AWS, Azure, and GCP.