Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2030
Sacerdote: Cloud Computing Has Another 5 to 10 Years of Growth
“We have another five Maybe even 10 years to go on this, and it's still growing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sacerdote: AI infrastructure is only 14% penetrated on the S-curve
“We're only about 14% penetrated on the AIS curve for infrastructure. Within the cloud, it's only three or four percent.”
Prediction Held up
Sacerdote: Inference-time reasoning will be adopted by all AI models
“And now deep seek is basically solidifying this inference time reasoning is going to be adopted by all the models.”
Opinion
Sacerdote: Tesla S-Curve Collapsed to Zero as US Adoption Matured
“Tesla and the EVS curve was amazing, and they had a great competitive advantage, and they had underappreciated earnings power. But then that S curve went from being a 10 out of 10 to a zero out of 10 because it was mature in the USA. And the underappreciated e…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sacerdote: AI Adoption Has Driven $50B to $70B in Extra Sales for Meta
“And we think that's driven fifties to seventy billion of extra sales to Meta by adopting AI.”
Opinion
Sacerdote: Blockchain is a technology looking for a problem and a false S-curve
“It was always a technology looking for a problem. The use cases were few and far between. Also, there was an element of it where there were all these meme coins, and it wasn't solving any true productivity gains. We thought that was somewhat of a false S curve…”
Disclosure
Sacerdote: Whale Rock bought Nvidia in January 2023 at 4x forward earnings
“And similarly, we loaded up on NVIDIA right after ChatGPT in January, 20, 23. We were buying NVIDIA at four times the earnings they're going to do this year.”
Insight
Sacerdote: S-Curve Exponential Growth Turns Linear at 30% to 40% Penetration
“Generally, once you get to 30 to 40% penetrated on the S curve, That's usually when that exponential growth becomes linear”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sacerdote: Most EV startups chasing Tesla and BYD will fail
“And there are a lot of electric vehicle companies that tried to be Tesla or BYD, and they're all very likely to Either fail or not generate any profits.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sacerdote: Complex humanoid robotics adoption will take longer than expected
“I think it will take longer before we can have a humanoid robot doing anything too complicated, but we'll see what the world holds there.”
Opinion
Sacerdote: Stablecoins are a true S-curve technology for moving money
“Stablecoin, that's a true S-curve. It's so efficient way to move money around, so that's actually one that we're very much focused on now.”
Disclosure
Sacerdote: Whale Rock bought Tesla at 4x three-year forward earnings
“When we first bought Tesla at the end of 2019 and 20 20, when the EV S curve really took off because Elon got the price Of the model three down to 40,000. And then we saw they had very good competitive advantages. We said, wow, they can do two million cars at …”
Assertion Supported
Sacerdote: AWS Targeted the Largest Business IT Market in History
“In the traditional world, that was six hundred billion dollars of spend, and AWS was going after all of it. This was the biggest market in business IT ever, because previous markets were just the server market, or just Cisco was good in networking, EMC was goo…”
Assertion Supported
Sacerdote: EV Adoption Reached 50-60% in China but Stalled at 10% in US
“The idea was that 50, 60% of cars were going to be electric. And that's happened in China. But when we hit about 10% in the US, it hit a wall.”
Opinion
Sacerdote: Apple's post-iPhone product categories failed to move the needle
“Apple had one that was just so big with the smartphone, The challenge for them was they did well with tablets and they did well with earbuds. They're doing well with the watch, but those weren't big enough to move the needle.”
Assertion Supported
Sacerdote: Amazon Trades at 25x Forward GAAP EPS, Cheaper Than Walmart and Costco
“You've got Amazon now, which is 25 times next year's street EPS, which, that's GAAP EPS, cheaper than Walmart, cheaper than Costco.”
Prediction Held up
Sacerdote: Driverless vehicles have hit mainstream takeoff and will expand
“Driverless did hit the mainstream takeoff. We are taking driverless taxis, one basis point of miles driven, and they're going to be rolling out cities, and it's just going to get bigger and bigger. So that is one that's definitely going to be hitting.”
Opinion
Sacerdote: Stripe and Adyen Are the Coke and Pepsi of Cloud Payments
“There's two payment companies, which are next-gen, cloud-based,
Leading payments companies, and those two are like Coke and Pepsi.
They're a little bit different in different ways, but in order to invest in Audion, you better know what's going on at Stripe.”
Disclosure
Sacerdote: Whale Rock Concentrates 55% of Private Book in Four Companies
“We're fortunate in that it's about 10% of our capital and 55% of that capital is in four iconic leaders that really fit this framework well.
Stripe, which is dominating digital cloud-based payments.
Canva, which is next-gen cloud-based Adobe.
Databricks, which…”
Assertion Supported
Sacerdote: Peter Lynch Timed Fidelity Analysts' Stock Pitches with Egg Timer
“Peter Lynch, he wasn't active when I was there, but he would meet with the analysts individually three or four times a year, and he always had his thing, the egg timer, where you go into his office and he turns the egg timer.”
Disclosure
Sacerdote: Whale Rock's 10-person team conducts 2,500 management meetings annually
“We've got a team of 10 of us, and we're doing 2500 face to face meetings with management teams a year using our S curve competitive advantage underappreciated earnings power framework to guide where we look.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sacerdote: Tencent achieved an unprecedented sequence of dominant S-curves
“Tencent was a beauty in that, where they started literally with AOL instant messenger that they hacked, and then turned it into a payment system. A social networking system, a mobile video game, and they dominated each of these, and they did one after the next…”
Disclosure
Sacerdote: Whale Rock holds 60% of portfolio in its top 10 positions
“We will buy something up to 10% at cost, and then we'll let it get up to 15%, and usually it's reserved for larger companies... Usually we'll have one name at 10, and then we'll have a handful at seven or five and The top 10 will be 60%.”
Assertion Supported
Sacerdote: Amazon had 2M users when 90M people were online
“At that point, even if the internet did not grow, they only had two million customers, and there were ninety million internet users at that point.”
