Teardowns
How each business works, why customers adopt it, how hard it is to replace and how it is performing. Each teardown is dated and revised as the business changes.
Latest teardowns
- SnowflakeCloud & dataSnowflake runs a data platform on the major clouds where companies store, query and share data and build AI on it. Customers pay for what they use, and open table formats are making it easier to leave.
- DatadogDeveloper toolsDatadog shows engineers what their systems are doing (metrics, traces, logs) on one platform, grows about 28% a year on usage pricing, and pays much of its cash to staff in shares.
- CloudflareCloud & dataCloudflare runs one network in hundreds of cities that secures, speeds up and now runs code for its customers' sites and apps. It grows about 30% a year; its stock pay is larger than its free cash flow.
- CrowdStrikeSecurityCrowdStrike protects laptops, servers and cloud workloads with one agent and one data platform, and grows about 22% a year by adding modules to that agent. Stock pay still takes most of the cash it makes.
- AdobeDesign & creativeAdobe makes the professional tools for images, video and documents (Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat) and is building generative AI into them. The question is whether AI makes those tools more useful or less needed.
- ServiceNowBusiness softwareServiceNow turns a company's internal work (IT tickets, HR requests, customer cases) into workflows on one platform, still growing about 20% a year, and now sells AI agents that run those steps.
- AppleDevicesApple designs its own chips and operating systems so its devices work together, and sells services on top. Revenue grows slowly; the open question is what Apple builds for the AI era.
- NVIDIAAI & semiconductorsNVIDIA makes the computers AI runs on: GPUs, networking and CUDA, the software developers write for them. It is in the largest build-out in its history, while its biggest customers design chips of their own.
- AlphabetPlatformsSearch ads pay for Google's AI: its own chips, data centres and Gemini models. The open question is how search earns once AI answers the question first.
- MicrosoftPlatformsThe software most companies run on, from sign-in to spreadsheets to cloud servers, now rebuilding itself around AI and spending heavily on the data centres to run it.
