How’d I do? What a cool experience! Just the start for us here at @AvoryCo

Team at $XYZ is 🧑‍🍳

EPISODE 85: Narratives, AI, and Durable Investment Bets youtu.be/uKrleelJPFQ?is=N6V1…

10 Charts: AI is killing software? Really? I don't see it. I see this. investingwithdata.substack.c… $IGV $XYZ

$ZM at $92 looks boring on the surface. The sum of the parts says otherwise. Market cap is $27.07B. Net out $8.33B in cash and short term investments and you're paying $18.7B for the operating business plus the Anthropic stake. The stake on Zoom's balance sheet is marked to Anthropic's Series G round at $380B (Feb 2026). Carry: $1.27B. Since that round, Anthropic has roughly 2.5x'd to a $965B Series H. If we assume Anthropic IPOs over the next quarter or two at a premium to Series H, scale Zoom's stake into that math and you get a range of about $5.5B at the low end up to $11B at the high end. Strip the cash, the carry, and the implied mark-up out of the market cap and the operating business is being valued at roughly $10.7B, or about 5.4x FY26 free cash flow on $2B FCF. The multiple matters more when the business is re-accelerating. Q1 FY27 came in at 5.5% YoY revenue growth (enterprise 7.2%), FY26 grew 4.4% which was 130 bps faster than FY25, and AI Companion paid users grew 184% YoY. This isn't 5x'ing a decelerator. It's 5x'ing a business going the other way. This is not a recommendation to purchase or sell a security.

Imagine thinking AI is hitting Adobe in a terminal way. ChatGPT was launched in 2022. The models have become brilliant but growth remains double digits. $ADBE

Whoa. $XYZ

This seems fair.

If you don’t have true innovators at the top of your org, you will be smushed. Companies like $XYZ $ZM $Z $ABNB $YOU $OKTA Yes speaking my book, but it’s part of thesis around AI.

Government suggesting that they will NOT build their own HR systems from AI. NARRATIVE VIOLATION $PAYC $ADP $ORCL

This is what I mean when I say companies can now expand into areas they never would have considered before. Zoom started as a meetings product. Today, Zoom is executing across meetings, phone systems, customer support, contact centers, AI agents, and workflow automation. Why is that important? Because meetings, phone calls, and customer support interactions all generate context. And context is the fuel for AI. Just as the internet became the training data that powered large language models, enterprise conversations are becoming the proprietary data layer that powers action. Every meeting transcript, customer interaction, support ticket, voicemail, and conversation summary creates a deeper understanding of what is happening inside an organization. That allows Zoom to move beyond communication and into execution. The opportunity is not simply summarizing conversations. The opportunity is directing workflows, automating follow-ups, routing tasks, answering questions, coordinating teams, and ultimately taking action based on what was discussed. What’s interesting is that very few companies have access to this breadth of contextual data across an organization. Zoom sits at the center of meetings, voice, and customer interactions. That creates a unique data advantage. The more surfaces Zoom touches, the more context it accumulates. The more context it accumulates, the better its AI becomes. And the better its AI becomes, the more valuable Zoom evolves from a communications tool into a platform for action. $ZM

Why do you think the consumer is still spending? Like it or not, real wages remain nicely positive. They have been all along. Truflation has the US running at 1.83% today. BLS just printed 4.2% on CPI. Energy did most of the work, gasoline 40% YoY. When you strip the energy whip, the cost-of-living signal looks closer to 2%. That's the number actual companies are seeing in their cost stacks too. Nominal wages: 3.5% Real wages (CPI-adj): -0.7% Real wages (Truflation-adj): 1.3% Pick your inflation series and you get a different story about the consumer. By Truflation, the worker has been winning for two straight years.

Anthropic well above OpenAI on run-rate. For now. How fast things can change when API calls are the product. Everyone is talking about model routing, and that's another way of saying no moat. The orchestrator is where the moat ends up. The models underneath are interchangeable.

Another narrative breaks.

Looks like some hiring.

Right on time. The insurance industry should be very nervous just like we pointed out in our article. This is already happening fast and expected to accelerate x.com/_seandavid/status/2046…

My quick take on Apple’s announcement: There is a clear issue developing here for $AAPL FIRST  they are late, and their product for Siri is pretty uninspiring. Second… The challenge is that much of the value appears tied to Apple’s ecosystem and cross-device integration. If I have an iPhone but don’t use a Mac, which many don’t , the incremental benefit feels pretty limited. For anything that drives meaningful productivity in my business or personal life, I’m still more likely to rely on dedicated AI tools and device-agnostic platforms that work across my entire workflow. That feels like a notable gap for Apple right now. The question isn’t whether Siri gets better. It’s whether it becomes valuable enough to replace the tools people are already using every day.