Jason Hall
π€ SpeakerVoice Profile Active
This person's voice can be automatically recognized across podcast episodes using AI voice matching.
Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
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.
For me, that generally means that I do start with a small starter position, and I can add to it over time.
You think about these two companies we've talked about, they're younger, newer, very volatile, very exposed to macro things that can make the stocks move a ton.
They're the kind of businesses that you want to
add to over time, generally.