I finally got access to Looker, which means that I can now use data to answer the eternal buyside question: what should I read this weekend?
What you should read depends on which data you trust. Below I will show you the top three expert call transcripts published on Stream by AlphaSense in July 2022, based on the following metrics:
- Number of unique users who read the transcript
- Average pages read per user (minimum 20 users)
- Engagement score per user (minimum 20 users)
I can’t disclose the values for these metrics, but you can trust I’m showing you the real transcripts based on the first ticker. You know how I feel about small cap stocks, and SKIN’s market cap is only ~$2B.
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Unique Users
This metric is something like “popularity,” which makes it very weird to me that the top transcript is about a $2B market cap company with the ticker SKIN. I am not going to make a joke here.
#1) SKIN (The Beauty Health Company) – Former HydraFacial Manager Thinks the Strongest Competitor Is at-Home Devices
“The facial itself I don’t think is powering people to come back [to a spa] as often as it was perhaps two or three years ago. I think this has to do with TheraFace coming out, specifically some new at-home facial devices that are really interesting and can accomplish some of the same things. HydraFacial ultimately is also ahead of that, trying to create Glow & Go which I believe they pilot tested last year and it hasn’t been released to general consumers. There’s certainly, I think, a major competition with what I can accomplish at home versus leaving my house and going to get a treatment. In terms of direct competition in spa, HydraFacial is a no-brainer as a better choice as well as definitely a more saturated experience across med spas and a little bit cheaper depending on the med spa that you go to.
I really think the biggest fear and the strongest competitor at this stage is at-home devices. Everything from DERMAFLASH, to Droplette, to TheraFace, to NuFACE, there’s so many interesting devices that you invest in once and then can use for years to come.
-Senior Experiential Marketing Manager, The HydraFacial Company (Prior)
#2) META (Meta Platforms Inc) – Former Partner Thinks META Will Lose Serious Ground Over the Next ~5 Years and Sees a Possible Comebacks for TWTR and PINS
“I think personalization is very important across the networks and continues to generate content and will also continue to dominate, I think, over the next few years. I’m now starting to work a lot more on the B2B side rather than B2C from the marketing standpoint. I’m spending a lot more time focused on LinkedIn, which is having a massive renaissance, really. I think Facebook will no longer have dominance over everything and will start to become niched down and channels will have clear niches.”
-Group Social Media Manager, Global University Systems (Prior)
#3) AMZN (Amazon.com) – Former Sr. Operations Manager Believes AMZN Still Has Room to Grow
“I think one of the things that Amazon does right is that, what’s the word here? They’re like a vulture. They’ll launch a new offering that directly competes with themselves because they’d rather be competing with themselves than their competitors. It was originally Prime now. We did one and two hour delivery, specializing in a subset of selection, a lot of chilled and frozen, and produce included.
Why the heck are we doing this? We’ve already got Amazon Fresh and we’re buying Whole Foods. We’re delivering out of there as well. Eventually, they end up starting to merge some of those businesses and taking best practices and combining them. With that being said, oftentimes they don’t make brand new tools for you as an operator. They’re going to take something that exists and band-aid it. That can be good or bad at times. You get a lot of speed in regards to the way that you’re rolling [features] out, but it’s not really tested very well and it’s tough on the operators….”
-Senior Operations Manager: Site Leader, Amazon – AMXL (Prior)
Average Pages Read per User
I think this metric is the purest measure of transcript quality. These three are worth the full read, objectively.
#1) BRZE (Braze Inc) – Former Head of Industry Solutions Believes BRZE Has a Strong Product and Invests Heavily in Customer Success
“One thing was that Salesforce was sticky taping a bunch of different capabilities together. They do obviously a lot of M&A. None of it was built unified from the get-go. In terms of the ease of use, with Salesforce, you needed massive engineering support to actually upload campaigns. There wasn’t the ability to optimize in real-time and do things like A/B testing.
The perfect opportunity [for Braze] was when a company was looking to be more mobile-focused and wanted not just email but the additional layers. Ease of use was very important. Not having to rely on product or engineering to get a campaign live was very important. That is where Braze shined versus Salesforce, was again, that usability and the intuitive nature of the tool.”
-Head of Industry Solutions, Braze (Prior)
#2) SE (Sea Ltd) – Competitor Believes Shopee Has a Seller Fraud Problem
“There’s a lot of fraud cases here in the [Shopee] platform, fraud deliveries, fraud sellers. There’s Lazada return service. If I’m the customer, I ordered yellow but they send me red, it’s easier for me to return the item if I order it in Lazada. If I ordered this in Shopee, I don’t know, but I had this test as well before. In Lazada, it will just take me about one, two days to get my items retrieved and have my compensation. With Shopee, again this is on a personal experience, it took about seven to eight days before I was compensated on the wrong delivery.
Again, I’m looking into same product that I bought in Shopee and Lazada. For Lazada, it’s way expensive compared to Shopee. Again, I’m talking into the same SKU, item. What’s good with Lazada as well, in terms of the seller acquisition, having someone to sell in the platform, Lazada has a thorough way of checking if the items are legit or what. With Shopee, you can easily sell anything.
I tried to sell as well with Shopee and Lazada, have my products, I sell it in Lazada and Shopee. On the shoe of the seller side, if I will be more on the revenue side, I’m getting it from Shopee. However, less customer complaints for the items that are being sold in Lazada. Again, there’s a lot of differences with the two platform side. From my end, what I’m doing is I’m selling products as well just to make sure that I have this personal experience with being the seller and being the customer from both platform.”
-Vice President of Transport Operations, Lazada (Prior)
#3) GTLB (Gitlab Inc) – Former Backend Engineer Believes GTLB’s Lead Is in CI/CD and It Must Maintain This to Differentiate Against MSFT
“[Integrating the CI/CD into the source code repository] is a big innovation because we’re in a world where we need features shipped at a minute’s time. That’s one thing and also the infrastructure on which these web applications are running is growing in complexity. I’ll give you an example. If you take a barebones e-commerce website, if you do it right, you’re going to have at least a good five or six up to 10 services that are running independently.
Now to deploy each one of those, you’re going to have to go into the command line, apply each one of those deployment files just so that Kubernetes or whatever it is the platform is deploying them on creates the deployment files. That becomes tedious when you’re scaling up. Imagine if you have 50 services they need to test, deploy or integrate with. The process just becomes a bit tedious. Also, it facilitates teams to grab data about their deployments really quickly. If you can deploy or shift two features, three features in production within 30 minutes and get to see how the users interact with it, collect data, there is really big value in that.
For some of the companies or most of the companies that are going to see growth, there is no way around that. You can’t keep up unless you have an army of DevOps engineers are going to do that. The CI/CD pipelines also keep the headcount of DevOps engineers low because you don’t need to do much. It’s a one-off thing that you’ll need one or two people to continuously maintain. From a business perspective, it’s a really good value proposition too.”
-Backend Engineer, GitLab (Prior)
Engagement Score per User
I don’t know exactly what engagement score means. Our analytics team told me it’s a blend of the engagement metrics that I know about (unique users, total doc reads, pages read, average duration) and other secret metrics. When I sort by total engagement score, I just get the biggest tech companies. Until I gain access to the details, I prefer engagement score per user.
#1) TEAM (Atlassian Corporation PLC) – Former Principal Engineer Believes the Cloud Transition Brings a Lot of Upsides for TEAM
“I think a company that requires ServiceNow will most likely take ServiceNow. For companies that are using ServiceNow but don’t need all of its capabilities,they might replace ServiceNow with Atlassian…
I don’t believe ServiceNow would go into the space of building a simpler product. They would be cannibalizing their own partner network in doing so. They would risk the larger market, which is an extremely lucrative one, to go after something that isn’t their core expertise. I don’t think ServiceNow would try to do that. Theoretically, it could, but I do not expect that they would do that.”
-Principal Engineer, Atlassian (Prior)
#2) SE (Sea Ltd) – Competitor Believes Shopee Has a Seller Fraud Problem
A repeat! This interview was also #2 in average pages read. I’m declaring this the best transcript in July, and the prize is another quote.
“Right now, what is interesting here in the Philippines is TikTok. Majority of Filipinos are in TikTok. Live selling is something that is really touching the consumer side. Last year, Lazada and Shopee already have the live selling, but it’s not that popular. Now TikTok opened the market for the sellers as well. That’s very interesting. Right now since it’s very new in TikTok, majority of the consumer wants to buy in TikTok because of the free shipping. Right now I’m also looking into that aspect in terms of selling my products…
You can set up your store in TikTok. Just the normal live selling, the host will then show their products. There’s a basket at the lower corner. That is where the viewers can then buy the items on the app itself. That’s popular now here in PH, even in other countries. Singapore as well is having that. The last time I was in Singapore, I was able to encounter that as well.
It’s not like Facebook, for example, wherein the consumer needs to then send a private message to the seller to then transact. With TikTok, it’s on the app itself. TikTok created that one. Maybe that’s something that you can explore as well because that’s very in demand here now.
-Vice President of Transport Operations, Lazada (Prior)
#3) SNOW (Snowflake Inc) – Former Competitor Sees Data Warehousing as the Largest Potential Data Market
This transcript is incredible. At least I think it’s incredible. It’s 16 pages long, covers the entire tech stack and how SNOW fits into it, and is mostly way over my head.
“What you get out of a Postgres database or an Oracle database as an online transactional database, it’s very different than the data warehouse. If you think of a data warehouse, the reads are substantially more than the writes. Therefore it is mostly read optimized. Now if you and I are running our own version of Amazon.com, those writes are coming fast and furious.
It’s a very, very, different world and different markets. Different technology altogether. There’s a bit of overlap for sure in the engine. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t take a Snowflake engine and plug it into or replace a Postgres workload with Snowflake database. They will have to come up with a completely new database.”
-Vice President of Engineering, Dremio (Prior)
Final Thoughts
The SKIN transcript remains an outlier here. It’s the only non-tech transcript, and it’s by far the smallest company. Poking around on Google, it appears that SKIN has a Short Interest Ratio / Days to Cover of 10, which I gather is not ideal. I think that solves the mystery, and that non-tech companies should be nervous about making this list in August.
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Austin’s primary experience is in consulting and private equity, though he’s also a published author.
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