Aswath Damodaran

I'm going to come up with nicknames for your prison name and just make fun of you.

White bread.

Tasty Ed.

Tasty Ed.

So Aswath, let's double-click on that.

You've seen some of the most iconic software firms off 30%, 40%, and as a multiple on free cash flow, they're trading at, some of them at all-time lows.

And Ed's thesis, and I think I agree with him, is that it might be a buying opportunity.

Because when I look at the, if I think of their integration into businesses, there's

The tip of the iceberg is, all right, what can be done using AI now?

But below the surface is they have billing set up, they have UI, they have relationships with the company.

I can't even imagine, even my last company, L2, we used Salesforce to track our leads.

The idea of getting just a sales team of five or six people

to retrain them on another product, I don't care if it was 50% less expensive, we wouldn't have done it.

So is this an opportunity?

Have these companies been oversold, the Adobe's, the ServiceNow's, the Salesforce's?

It strikes me that they're just going to come under pricing pressure.

And if you think of 10% or 20% of their expenses are related to people who have a CS degree from Carnegie Mellon actually building the product with software, what's to say that they won't be able to reduce that expense internally, pass on the savings to their clients while protecting their margins?

Because as someone who's sat on boards of software companies—and software has been the gift that keeps on giving—

We're going to grow our revenues 11%, and we're going to grow our employment 8%, and our EBITDA 12% to 15%.

That's generally the story of software for the last 30 years.