Hey,

This is the fourth installment of The Financial Report, a newsletter to share weekly insights on Finance and Tech. This week has articles with contrarian market takes, upcoming earnings from software bellwethers, and a well-named sales pipeline metric that can be your new northstar. Enjoy!

Market moves

• Market opinions and data are so inconsistent it’s hard to make sense of everything. Consensus often turns out to be wrong so James Mackintosh with the WSJ shares five things the contrarian market believes. 1. Inflation is transitory. 2. The Fed realizes this in time. 3. The jobs market cools enough to slow wage rises. 4. But not so much it means falling household spending. 5. So consumer spending rises in real terms. Read more here. 
• Tomasz Tunguz presented the state of the fundraising market at the Traction Conference. I continue to see investors saying that public comps are down 70%, so startups should be down 70%. I’m not a venture capitalist, but understand that public markets are volatile and may not reflect fundamentals. Moreover, the horizons for early-stage investments are different.  
• In the public markets, there are a handful of earnings reports I’m looking forward to next week, including Salesforce, Workday, Intuit, and Nvidia. The first 3 are bellwethers in cloud software, and Nvidia now sets the tone for the chip sector. Here’s a complete list of earnings for the coming week.

Reads of the week

• Constellation Software is a fascinating modern conglomerate that acquires and integrates vertical software companies. Today, Constellation is worth $45B and has acquired more than 500 companies in 75 verticals. The business has an acquisition flywheel that fuels its growth. Their culture allows them to succeed through the challenging acquisition integration process. The Generalist has a fantastic deep dive. You can also read a more financially technical source from The 10th Man.

• Lenny recently interviewed Marty Cagan to talk about product innovation, building teams, and trends in product management. Marty is the author of Inspired and Empowered. Marty’s first book, Inspired, is excellent and a staple on every product leader's bookshelf. It’s the first book you should read to understand the art of product management.
• The Mojo Metric was introduced by Bill Binch (former CRO at Pendo, EVP Worldwide Sales at Marketo & operating partner at Battery) in his recent chat with Tomasz Tunguz. The Mojo metrics was used by Bill as his northstart. Here’s how you calculate it:

Mojo = new pipeline + new_pipeline_expanded + deals_pulled_forward - deals_killed - deals_shrunk - deals_pushed

• The Dodge Charger EV is a new electronic concept muscle car. It will outperform all previous Dodge sports cars and have an exhaust sound system that rivals the gas-powered equivalent. I’m pumped to see these on the road!

Startups to know

Omni is building a next-generation BI tool with a very experienced team. They frame the problem well – most solutions are too rigid when data is centrally managed or a nightmare to maintain when decentralized and self-serve for users. Omni promises to balance freedom and control, which is an exciting vision of the future.

From Mike

The Outsiders provides 8 case studies on applied corporate finance at its finest. Read the stories of 8 executive teams that turned resource allocation, discipline, and autonomous decision-making into a competitive advantage. The results are radical outperformance against their peers and the S&P.

Quote of the week

"Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge" – Bill Campbell

Mike

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