Rapid Blogging with datadolph.in

2.2 millions minutes were lost waiting to board flights from SF in 2008, is not this is a huge sunk of productivity?



The Master Blaster - Sachin Tendulkar had a fabulous run in IPL season 3 but unfortunately his performance has started to suffer in recent seasons. Ricky Ponting to blame? #Cricket




Years - when education used to be a priority:
what happened in 1993 !? ~8% of GDP spent on education!.

Democratization of Business Analytics Dashboards

I am super impressed with the following visual dashboard from IPL T20 tournament - IPL 2013 in Numbers.  For those of you not so familiar with cricket or IPL, IPL is the biggest, the most extravagant and the most lucrative cricket tournament in the world.  I like the way IPL is bringing sports analytics to the common masses.

What is impressive is that each metric (runs, wickets, or tweets) is live so these numbers get updated automatically, pretty cool for IPL and cricket fans.  Also, each metric is clickable so one can drill down to his or her heart's content.  This is a common roll-up analysis but the visualization and the real time updates make this dashboard pretty appealing.  IPL team, thanks for not putting any dials on this dashboard (LOL).

I have been influencing and now building analytics products that power these sports and various other dashboards/reports for many years.  The most fascinating thing is that these dashboards (or lets call it analytics in general) are reaching the masses like never before.  Everyone has heard of terms like democratization of data and humanization of analytics.  This is it!  The data revolution is underway.  

Now, there are many new frontiers to go after and the existing ones need to be reinvented.  Yes, the analytics market is ready for massive disruption.  This is what keeps me excited about Business Analytics space.

Happy Analyzing and Happy Friday!

Tableau IPO: Let The Gold Rush Begin For Enterprise Software IPOs!

The year 2013 is going to be the year of enterprise software IPOs.  That is not a prediction but well discussed point in Silicon Valley.  Everybody believes that there is a pent-up demand from return hungry investors for the enterprise software IPOs.  Consumer software IPOs have failed to live up to their promise in the last couple of years but the enterprise software IPOs have continued to deliver (examples: WDAY, NOW, SPLK), case-in-point.   

In the last couple of days, two of my favorite companies, Marketo and Tableau have announced plans to go public.  Here are the links to Marketo's S1 and Tableau's S1.  I have had the good fortune to study, evaluate and follow both companies since 2010.  Both the companies have done very well in their respective segments, SaaS marketing automation and on-premise self-serve BI.  They have both exceeded expectations on all fronts (employees, customers, analyst  markets, competitors) after a long hard slog.  

To all my friends, colleagues, investors and readers of this blog, enterprise software is a hard slog, you are in it for a long-haul.  Tableau is a 10-year old company and Marketo is 7 years old (Source:  SEC Filings).

Valuation

Since Tableau ("DATA") has announced its plan to go IPO this year, I decided to put the striped-down version of my due-diligence, performed in early 2011, on my slide-share account.  Back then, I used relative valuation using QlikView ("QLIK") as a close proxy to put a number on Tableau.  I used PE (earnings multiple) and PS (revenue multiple) of QLIK and assessed a market value of $380million based on Tableau's 2010 revenues of $40 million (from their press release in 2011, this number has been revised down to $34million in S1, huh, strange!)

Now, if one were to use QLIK's current revenue multiple of 5.5 (Source: Yahoo Finance), Tableau could be valued between $700million (based on trailing revenue of $128million) and 1.4billion (based on  $256million in expected revenue for 2013 assuming that they grow their revenue YET AGAIN by 100% in 2013.)

I personally don't think that the street should use QLIK as a proxy instead apply Splunk's ("SPLK") lens to value Tableau.  So using SPLK's multiple of ~19.7 (Source: Yahoo Finance), Tableau will be valued at $2.5billion based on their 2012 revenues.  ServiceNow ("NOW") also has a PS multiple of ~19. 

I have strong reasons to believe that street will be valuing Tableau in this range based on a great growth story till this point and amazing opportunities ahead as we are just starting to drill the BigData mountain.  I will not be surprised to see the valuation range from $2.5billion to $5billion. Amazing!

Tableau's S1

I studied Tableau's S1 filing briefly looking for information on valuation and offering on number of shares.  Not much is disclosed there just yet.  It will likely be disclosed in the subsequent filings as they hit the roadshow to assess the demand from the institutional investors.  Just like Workday, Tableau will also have dual class shares (Class A and Class B) with different voting rights.  The Class A will be offered to investors by converting the Class B shares. 

The last internal valuation of employee options priced the stock at ~$15.  To raise $150million, Tableau will at least be putting 10 million shares of Class A on the block.  Now of course, this will change as the demand starts to build up following their road-show.  One thing is certain that the stock will be definitely priced above $15.  Now, how many points above $15, we will find out in the next few months.  

Let the mad rush begin!!!

Financial Markets and President Elect: Do Financial Markets Favor A Republican Over A Democrat?

US financial markets favor a republican president over a democratic president. Has this sentiment stood the test of time?  Do financial markets care whether the president elect is a democrat or a republican?  How have financial markets behaved in the past after the announcement of next US president?  And finally, can one spot a pattern in the performance of financial markets based on the president's party affiliation?  More specifically, did financial markets fare better under a republican president or under a democratic president?

To answer all these questions, I turned to history and generated the historical performance of S&P 500 since 1952.  I also had to turn to Wikipedia to get a list of presidents and their party affiliation.  Between 1952 and 2012, US has elected 16 presidents with republican presidents outnumbering their democratic counterparts by 2 in occupying the white house (see table below):

To understand whether financial markets favored a republican president over a democratic president, I generated 1-day, 1-week, 4-week, 12-week, 52-week and the presidency term ("term") returns since the election date (see table above.)  Looking at the one day return, there was no clear indication whether markets favored one party or the other.  Financial markets welcomed Ronald Reagan, a republican, by sending the S&P 500 up 1.77% which is the highest one-day return among all the 16 presidential events.  Markets also cheered the reelection of Bill Clinton with a one-day return of 1.46% after the announcement of president elect.

Source: AllThingsAnalytics

With one-day returns of -5.27% and -2.37% in 2008 and 2012 respectively, President Obama is not much favored by financial markets.  Now, one can argue that October 2008 was a terrible period for anyone to be elected as the president because of the ongoing crash in financial markets that led to the great recession (see side chart.)  Nonetheless, markets also didn't like Obama's reelection (S&P 500 was down 2.37% following the election day) which leads to a status quo in Washington.  Combine that with all the ongoing macro concerns including the Euro debt crisis and already unraveling fiscal cliff, investors have become very jittery in the past couple of days.

Now, to overcome the short-term bias in financial market's reaction, let's review other period's returns (see table above.)  There are plenty of interesting observations one can make.  For example, under both of Clinton's (Democrat) presidencies, financial markets boomed with returns of 56% and 111% over the next 200 weeks since the election day.  Eisenhower's (Republican) presidency came second with returns of 95% and 19%.  Reagan era followed by Bush Sr's term also produced hefty gains for investors with returns of 28%, 56% and 49% under their terms.  Again, there is no clear indication whether financial markets favored one party over the other during a president's term in the office but financial markets definitely fared well under a republican president prior to 2000.

Bush Jr. (Republican) inherited dot-com crash, oversaw the biggest expansion in US public debt (see chart below) and observed the epic housing crisis of 2007-2008.  Financial markets yielded returns of -22% and 13% during Bush's two terms presidency, pretty poor for a republican president who unleashed all the expansionary polices on US economy.  Under Bush's 8 year presidency, US public debt doubled from $5.6 trillion to $10 trillion.  Obama added almost the same level of debt in just 4 years and took US public debt from $10 trillion to $14.2 trillion by the end of 2011.

Source: AllThingsAnalytics

From Wikipedia, click to expand

Are we living in times which have no historical precedence?  It took 20 years for US public debt to rise from $1 trillion level to $5.5 trillion level (see side chart).  It then just took 11 short years for US public debt to rise to $14 trillion level.  From year 1980 to 2000, S&P 500 appreciated by 1276% (from 105 at the start of 1980 to 1455 at the start of 2000). Astonishing rise!!!   Also astonishing is the fact that since 2000 till date, S&P 500 has been down -5%.  Has the mammoth economic expansion of 1980s and 1990s run its course and now debt is the only route left to sustain US economy.  Let's leave this discussion for another blog.


Financial markets care less which party's candidate is elected for the white house and focus more on the economic policies that president will enact.  All the rhetoric and party ideology does take a toll on financial markets though as evident in financial markets' immediate reaction similar to the one we are observing right now.  Hopefully, the congress and the president will put the rhetoric aside and break the impasse on the already unraveling fiscal cliff.

This blog has benefited from discussions with Jens Doerpmund, Ryan Leask and Rajani Aswani on this topic.

Disclaimer:  All numbers are approximate and the underlying analysis is preliminary.  This blog is not intended for offering any investment advice.