The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Singh: Software Has Been a Horrible Investment Category Since 2018
“Software has actually been a really horrible category to invest in for the last five, six, seven years.”
Singh: Buying lowest-NPS stocks outperforms high-NPS companies over time
“I've always told investors just, you know, you'd be better off buying a basket of stocks that have the lowest NPS of all, and they'll outperform the companies that have the best NPS. And you'll be like, well, it doesn't make sense, but think about the companie…”
Singh: Median Public Software Stock Down 21% Since 2018
“The median software company that's public is down 21% over the last six years, from 2018 to now.”
Singh: Diluting Equity for Marginal Growth Rates Destroys Shareholder Value
“A way to think about it is if, let's just pretend you're growing a hundred percent a year, and then you raise a growth round for twenty-five million dollars, you sell a third of your company, and now your share count is a third bigger. But if your growth rate …”
Singh: Startups should generate $1 of ARR for every $1 raised
“My view is, you know, if you raise a hundred million dollars, you should be able to generate a hundred million dollars of error off of that platform over time to pay back for the time that it takes to get to that hundred million dollars.”
Singh: Platform software products are vastly more durable than single vertical solutions
“Because the platform product is way more durable than the single vertical product. And the single biggest problem people make in investing and starting companies is they think they, because they get a lot of great feedback from their customers because they're …”
Singh: No company deserves to trade at 30x revenue long-term
“There's no company that deserves to be trading at 30 times revenue for a long period of time.”
Singh: Sensor data underwrites restaurants better than bank tax returns
“I always said, I could underwrite a restaurant better than a bank. I don't need your tax returns. Just put a sensor in your restaurant, and I'll track the traffic and be able to lend you better than any bank could, and a bank can't do that, and in a similar se…”
Singh: PAR Is Second-Best Performing Sub-$10B Public Software Stock
“In that sort of sub-ten billion dollar software, we're the best performer sans one company over the last one, three, five years.”
Singh: Most Software Models Are Too Small for Public Scale or VC
“Getting in software sounds like a better business model, but more often than not, it is not big enough to be a scalable public company or to be a venture-backed business”
Singh: PAR Software Had -60 NPS and -99 CSAT Upon His Takeover
“They're gonna see that our software business is on fire, and that our customer NPS is -60. Our CSAT was -99. We didn't have one customer that was green on our CSM scores, right?”
Singh: PAR Technology founders invented the point-of-sale terminal in 1978
“In 1978, our founders invented the point of sale terminal.”
Singh: PAR Acquired Punchh for $500M Using Overvalued Stock
“We went out, we bought a half a billion dollar business called Punch, that's based here in Austin now, and we started using our stock because we thought it was very inflated, and so it was the greatest we ever did, because it built, it gave us tremendous scale…”
Singh: Functional Org Charts Mistakenly Distance Enterprise Software Leaders from Customers
“In enterprise software, I think, you know, one of the biggest mistakes CEOs do is you get really big, you get farther and farther from your customers. You create org charts that are completely functional, where you have one CRO, one CPO, so on and so forth. An…”
Singh: US restaurant unit growth now comes from stadiums and EV stations
“Restaurants are no longer growing in the United States, right? It's like we're over retail, we're over restaurant. And so the growth of the units of restaurants is now in stadiums. It's in convenience stores. EV charging stations. It's not going to be the net …”
Singh: Software Companies with Identical Metrics Should Not Trade at Identical Multiples
“You can have two different companies with the exact same metrics, and they shouldn't trade the same. You know, and so you've got to be very specific about what you're acquiring and what you're buying. You know, you can see software companies growing at a hundr…”
Singh: Product-led founders excel at building products but fail at rationalization
“Product-led founders are amazing at building product, but they're very bad at rationalizing product.”
Singh: Beloved point products trade at lower multiples than platforms like ADP and SAP
“Whether it's, like, a DocuSign or a Zoom or all the ones I just talked about, like, and look at what they trade at. They trade at, like, three times revenue. You know, these are, DocuSigns are great products. Zoom is a great product, but they trade at the shit…”
Singh: FinTech mostly puts acquisition engines on legacy financial products
“The problem with FinTech is that it's just taking all the stuff we do now and putting a consumer acquisition engine on it.”
Singh: PAR Turnaround Would Not Have Been Easier Taking Company Private
“So I thought about that a lot, and I actually think the answer would be no, and I'll tell you why. The operational changes were extreme. We replaced almost the entire management team, you know, we shipped a bunch of jobs offshore, did a lot of crazy stuff, but…”
Singh: The Average Restaurant Runs on 20 to 40 Software Products
“If you go into the average restaurant, you'll be shocked how many individual products run that restaurant. It's upwards of 20, 30, 40 sometimes.”
Singh: PAR Grew Software Revenue from $5M to Over $250M
“When we took over the company, the revenues were about one 71 80, and they were five million dollars of software revenue, 165 of hardware and services. Where today will be, you know, whatever, four 50 of revenue, but two 52 60 will be software. The software's …”
Singh: One Salesperson Closed a 10-Year, $230M Deal With Burger King
“We signed a deal in December of last year, that was a two hundred thirty million dollar 10 year deal, twenty three million dollars a year. That took one salesperson, right?”
Singh: Average Age of GMs Running $100M P&Ls at PAR Is 30
“The average age of the GMs who run a hundred million dollar P&Ls at our company is like 30. You know, we've got somebody that's 26 or 27, we've got somebody that's like 35.”
Singh: Selling Founders Should Assume Median Valuation Multiples at Best
“If you're building your company to be sold you should go in assuming that you're going to get the median multiple at best. You don't go in assuming you're getting a 10, or 20, or 30.”
Singh: 20-Year Public SaaS Median Multiple is 5.5x to 6x NTM Revenue
“The long-term SaaS index for literally 20 years, since SAP and Oracle started disclosing their recurring revenues, has always been around five and a half to six times the XTM revenue. That is the median of the public companies.”
Singh: Investors Underwrite Future Free Cash Flow, Not ARR
“ARR is not a tool for fundraising. ARR is a tool because it's a future proxy of cash flow. The reason why ARR became a metric in software is that in hypergrowth for software, investors back in the day didn't understand that when you signed a deal that revenue …”
Singh: Overestimating TAM and raising dilutive VC is founders' biggest mistake
“The single greatest mistake that founders make is TAM. They overestimate how big their opportunity is, and then they go raise super diluted venture capital money”
Singh: Market selection determines whether effort yields $10M or $100M
“Your careers are oftentimes built off of picking the right end market. You can spend, you can see really, really smart people banging their heads trying to build a ten million dollar revenue business, where if they put their efforts into, like, a different ind…”
Singh: PAR faced SEC probes and a jailed CFO in 2018
“I got on the board, I think February, March of 20,020 18, and then within two or three months of joining the board, we had our prior CFO literally got sentenced to jail for stealing money. We were under DOJ and SEC investigation for bribery and corruption. Our…”
Singh: Software Companies Cannot Outgrow End-Market Churn
“In the end, you can't outgrow the churn of your end market. So if you're selling to an end market that is churning, you can pretend you have high net retention, but in the end, your cost of capital will be very expensive because that end market is churning sup…”
Singh: PAR Won a Single Deal Worth $23M in Annual ARR
“When we started the company, our ARR, sorry, when we took over the company, our ARR was less than ten million bucks. You know, three months ago we won a deal that was twenty-three million dollars of ARR with one customer a year.”
Singh: PAR Bought Task for Under 4x ARR at 30% Annual Growth
“You know, we bought the business for, you know, less than you know, call it four times ARR for a business that's been growing 30% a year with a hundred percent, almost a hundred percent, well over a hundred percent net retention, gross retention at 96, 97.”
PAR Technology to Launch Financing and Payments Businesses Post-Acquisition
“The first thing we're going to do is build a financing business and a payments business out of this you know, once the transaction closes.”
Singh: PAR powers loyalty for 48 of the top 100 restaurants globally
“We have the largest loyalty product in restaurants. We're in 48 of the top hundred restaurants in the world. So if you have the Taco Bell app, that's us.”
Singh: PAR acquired Stuzo at $40M revenue and $17M cash flow for ~$190M
“Last year, you know, the business did forty million in revenue, seventeen million dollars of cash flow. We got it done at, you know, a 170, a hundred million bucks, or a hundred ninety million bucks.”
Singh: Acquired company Stuzo has never lost a customer
“The last best company, Suzo, has never ever lost a customer.”
Singh: Founders Must Model Debt Against Worst-Case Scenarios, Not Base Cases
“What I would encourage you to think about is, what is the worst case scenario for my business? The true worst case. And then model out, can you support the debt under that worst case, and then that's how you should figure out how you should take on debt. You s…”
Singh: CoVenture is world's largest financier of YouTube royalties
“Today we're the largest financier of YouTube royalties in the world”
Singh: Public CEOs spend at least 25% of time on compliance overhead
“You know, at least, 25% of your time at least is on stuff that you wouldn't have to do if you were private. At least 25%, sometimes more.”
Singh: PAR Had -60 NPS and 40% SaaS Gross Margins at Takeover
“The product we took over, you know, I mentioned that the customer NPS was -60, because there's a lot, there was a stability issue. We were a software company that had 40 versions, so it's like we were cloud, but we weren't really cloud. We, you know, our gross…”
Singh: Company Values Must Repel Mismatches Rather Than Fit Everyone
“When you have 10 values, I challenge you to find, you know, find a Silicon Valley company whose values you're like, I wouldn't fit. Like, you're gonna fit, because you're like, eight or 10 of those are like, sound like me. And we wanted to be, like, incredibly…”
Singh: PAR Stock Traded at 30x Revenue in 2021
“In 2021, our stock was trading at 30 times revenue.”
Singh: PAR Grew Revenue 25% Annually With Flat OpEx for Two Years
“We haven't grown our operating expenses in almost two years, yet we've grown our revenue, you know, 25% a year over those periods of time, so well over doubled”
Singh: PAR's 2018 Market Cap Was Lower Than Its 1982 IPO
“We were when we stepped in to run the company in 2018, the market cap of the company, which is the value of the company, was lower than when we went public in 1982. So for 40 years, we had no shareholder value creation.”
Singh: PAR Spends Just 14% of Revenue on Sales and Marketing
“Today at PAR, we spend around 14% of our revenues on sales and marketing.”