AI is everywhere—but is your team truly getting value? Planful’s 2025 Global Finance Survey uncovered that most teams are dabbling, not driving results. You’ve got a chance to lead smarter: automate what matters, tackle roadblocks like security and cost, and turn AI into ROI. The tools exist. The strategy? That’s where you come in.
Want to see what your peers are doing—and how to do it better?
There’s a quiet trend happening in public markets: saying less. A lot less.
Netflix no longer shares its subscriber number—which, aside from revenue, is like, the key metric. It’s like Delta not disclosing how many flights were taken. “Trust us, people traveled a bunch.”
They’re not alone. Many enterprise SaaS companies—Snowflake included—have stopped disclosing total customer counts. Instead, they serve up sanitized slices like “customers over $100K” or “$1M+ in ARR.”
Translation: the long tail doesn’t matter…
(or worse, isn’t growing fast enough to show off.)
I talked to Hamza Fodderwalla, formerly of Morgan Stanley, and he agreed—it’s a signal that you don’t need to know about the long tail to forecast the business. Or at least, that’s what the company wants you to believe.
Part of this is classic CYA. Companies fear you’ll misread a dip in total customers as a death knell, when really it might just be churn among the less profitable crowd.
The unspoken assumption? You, the public, can’t handle the truth. Cue Jack Nicholson.
As Martin Peers from The Information put it: “Imagine buying a house from someone who refused to show you the interior.” Maybe the plumbing is shot. Maybe there’s mold. But the listing price keeps going up, so who’s asking?
The bigger the company, the more they get away with. Netflix, Apple, Meta have all throttled back disclosures. Why? Because they can. If you’re a trillion-dollar juggernaut, you become a safe haven for institutional money. Index funds have to hold you. Analysts have to rate you. At some point, you don’t follow the market; you are the market.
There’s a Michael Lewis quote I love:
“If you owe the bank $5 million, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank $5 billion, you own the bank.”
Same goes for disclosures. If your market cap is $500B, maybe you get to decide what matters.
But the real danger is when smaller companies follow suit. Roku, with an $11B market cap, has stopped disclosing household counts and ARPU. That’s not being tight-lipped; that’s being unaccountable without the benefit of scale.
So what’s the point of being public if you act like a private company the second it suits you?
They should just hire Dave Chapelle to do the earnings calls:
TL;DR: Multiples are FLAT week-over-week.
Top 10 Medians:
EV / NTM Revenue = 16.2x (UP 0.1x w/w)
CAC Payback = 21 months
Rule of 40 = 50%
Revenue per Employee = $463k
Data source: Koyfin
Figures for each index are measured at the Median
Median and Top 10 Median are measured across the entire data set, where n = 140
Population Sizes:
Security & Identity = 17
Data Infrastructure & Dev Tools = 11
Cloud Platforms & Infra = 15
Horizontal SaaS & Back office = 19
GTM (MarTech & SalesTech) = 18
Marketplaces & Consumer Platforms = 18
FinTech & Payments = 24
Vertical SaaS = 18
Revenue Multiples
Revenue multiples are a shortcut to compare valuations across the technology landscape, where companies may not yet be profitable. The most standard timeframe for revenue multiple comparison is on a “Next Twelve Months” (NTM Revenue) basis.
NTM is a generous cut, as it gives a company “credit” for a full “rolling” future year. It also puts all companies on equal footing, regardless of their fiscal year end and quarterly seasonality.
However, not all technology sectors or monetization strategies receive the same “credit” on their forward revenue, which operators should be aware of when they create comp sets for their own companies. That is why I break them out as separate “indexes”.
Reasons may include:
Recurring mix of revenue
Stickiness of revenue
Average contract size
Cost of revenue delivery
Criticality of solution
Total Addressable Market potential
From a macro perspective, multiples trend higher in low interest environments, and vice versa.
Multiples shown are calculated by taking the Enterprise Value / NTM revenue.
Enterprise Value is calculated as: Market Capitalization + Total Debt - Cash
Market Cap fluctuates with share price day to day, while Total Debt and Cash are taken from the most recent quarterly financial statements available. That’s why we share this report each week - to keep up with changes in the stock market, and to update for quarterly earnings reports when they drop.
Historically, a 10x NTM Revenue multiple has been viewed as a “premium” valuation reserved for the best of the best companies.
Efficiency Benchmarks
Companies that can do more with less tend to earn higher valuations.
Three of the most common and consistently publicly available metrics to measure efficiency include:
CAC Payback Period: How many months does it take to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer?
CAC Payback Period is measured as Sales and Marketing costs divided by Revenue Additions, and adjusted by Gross Margin.
Here’s how I do it:
Sales and Marketing costs are measured on a TTM basis, but lagged by one quarter (so you skip a quarter, then sum the trailing four quarters of costs). This timeframe smooths for seasonality and recognizes the lead time required to generate pipeline.
Revenue is measured as the year-on-year change in the most recent quarter’s sales (so for Q2 of 2024 you’d subtract out Q2 of 2023’s revenue to get the increase), and then multiplied by four to arrive at an annualized revenue increase (e.g., ARR Additions).
Gross margin is taken as a % from the most recent quarter (e.g., 82%) to represent the current cost to serve a customer
Revenue per Employee: On a per head basis, how much in sales does the company generate each year? The rule of thumb is public companies should be doing north of $450k per employee at scale. This is simple division. And I believe it cuts through all the noise - there’s nowhere to hide.
Revenue per Employee is calculated as: (TTM Revenue / Total Current Employees)
Rule of 40: How does a company balance topline growth with bottom line efficiency? It’s the sum of the company’s revenue growth rate and EBITDA Margin. Netting the two should get you above 40 to pass the test.
Rule of 40 is calculated as: TTM Revenue Growth % + TTM Adjusted EBITDA Margin %
A few other notes on efficiency metrics:
Net Dollar Retention is another great measure of efficiency, but many companies have stopped quoting it as an exact number, choosing instead to disclose if it’s above or below a threshold once a year. It’s also uncommon for some types of companies, like marketplaces, to report it at all.
Most public companies don’t report net new ARR, and not all revenue is “recurring”, so I’m doing my best to approximate using changes in reported GAAP revenue. I admit this is a “stricter” view, as it is measuring change in net revenue.
Operating Expenditures
Decreasing your OPEX relative to revenue demonstrates Operating Leverage, and leaves more dollars to drop to the bottom line, as companies strive to achieve +25% profitability at scale.
The most common buckets companies put their operating costs into are:
Cost of Goods Sold: Customer Support employees, infrastructure to host your business in the cloud, API tolls, and banking fees if you are a FinTech.
Sales & Marketing: Sales and Marketing employees, advertising spend, demand gen spend, events, conferences, tools.
Research & Development: Product and Engineering employees, development expenses, tools.
General & Administrative: Finance, HR, and IT employees… and everything else. Or as I like to call myself “Strategic Backoffice Overhead.”
All of these are taken on a Gaap basis and therefore INCLUDE stock based comp, a non cash expense.