Emily Flippen

But there's sometimes optionality and variability built into platforms that is simply unpredictable today.

And I think that's really where the rule-breaking traits and investing come into the equation.

Because what you're doing in that case is really investing in a management team, investing in a vision, in innovation, the things that you quite literally can't put into a spreadsheet.

And while maybe Spotify has a lot of challenges ahead of it, I don't want to say that this is a

the quintessential Netflix in the making, to your point, Jason.

I do think that it is a good example of the type of company that is hard to piece together as just the sum of its parts.

Up next, we'll be diving into Datadog, which is one of the most confounding players, in my opinion, in observability and what its fourth quarter earnings say about software stocks as a whole.

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Software stocks have been under massive pressure as concerns around AI disruption and poor earnings have led to Wall Street skepticism about their place in enterprise usage long-term.

Now, observability platform Datadog has not been able to avoid this scrutiny and prior to

reporting earnings, their shares were down 15% in 2026 alone.

But it seems like these wider concerns aren't showing up in their financials quite yet, in large part due to their strong enterprise customer growth.

They just posted eye-popping sales growth of nearly 30% year-over-year in their fourth quarter.

And management implied that AI-powered innovation would help them churn more customers with complex challenges and thus, in my opinion, extrapolating here, likely be able to charge them more over time too.

Toby,

What is it about Datadog that has allowed this business to kind of be the exception to the rule here this earnings season?

Because we've seen plenty of other software companies post these beaten race quarters, but not be rewarded by the market the way that Datadog has today.

Yeah, whenever I find that investors are trying to scratch their head understanding, why is my stock selling off after a great quarter?

Or why is my stock not down more after what I thought was a really bad quarter?