Jason Hall

Sales at existing stores are routinely growing in the high teens, even as it opens new stores at a breakneck pace.

The company over the past four quarters has opened 528 new locations, now has over 3,100 stores, has a goal to almost 5X that count in coming years.

I don't think so, but I'll say this.

That working capital deterioration is one of the things that I have noticed since the company went public a couple of years ago.

In a way, there's a little bit of a feature going on and less of a bug.

It has a negative working capital cycle, which means, in a lot of cases, it's actually selling goods and getting money from its customers before it has to pay its vendors.

Now, that's not going to last forever.

But because the business is in this phase where two things are happening, its comps are 16%, 17% comps growth, so it's having to bring a lot more inventory into its existing stores.

and it's opening new stores at a 15% to 16% rate, it's bringing a ton of inventory into its stores, but it's selling it out of the stores and collecting cash flow before it has to pay those vendors.

That's why you're seeing the money that it owes out growing at a faster rate than the inventory that's in.

It's not going to last forever, but in the current high-growth, high-comp stage, the mismatch you identify, like I said, is really more of a feature, especially when you combine it with

A lot of the cash outflows on the balance sheet are tied to assets that it now owns, that are tied to its store account growth.

It generates a lot of operating cash.

That operating cash is largely sufficient to support its growth, especially when you pair that with about $130 million in net cash, a really small debt position and a pretty decent amount of cash.

My question, Asit, is, how much of this is just the picks and shovels play on the continued proliferation and build-out for AI infrastructure that's happening now?

Is it mostly that, or is the cloud broadly and accelerated computing broadly enough to make this a winner if the current AI race doesn't lead to the monetization promised land that we're hoping for?

Well, FOMO is real, and the data does suggest that maybe thinking about FOMO and buying all of the stock you want to own up front is the best thing to do in the aggregate.

But we're not aggregates.

We're humans in the real world, and we have to find a strategy that we can stick with

that will work in our real life.