Private Revenue Disclosures Signal Scale, Not Boast
I rarely get into twitter (X) debates. As a founder I have always wondered how so many outsiders have opinions about a business. With the @emergentlabs revenue rate debate - here are a few points to consider 1. A private company does not need to disclose any numbers and nobody should care about those numbers except the founders, investors in the company and employees 2. The only time we disclosed revenue numbers for Freshworks as a private company was when we crossed 100M and 200M ARR - and we did that intentionally- not to boast about our revenue- but to inform the global investor community that it was possible to scale a global product company from India 3. I think the Emergent founder sharing numbers is a good thing for Indian startups as it validates AI startups from India can scale and that attracts more global investors to India 🇮🇳 4. There are nuances in metrics - actual revenue vs Annual Recurring Revenue(ARR like in Saas ARR) vs Annualized Revenue Rate (combining subscription plus usage plus deployment - modern AI companies) 5. The only people who should care about this are the investors in emergent and I can tell you that at Together fund as early investors in the company - we are aware of the revenue nuances and so are the other investors 6. For outsiders who don’t have all the details - we should assume that founders know the best about their business and let them execute