Tech Stocks Earnings Roundup

In this episode of Industry Focus: Tech, we've got explanations on how meal delivery saved Uber's (UBER 2.64%) bacon in 2020, what's behind Twitter's (TWTR) recent surge, and how a sleepy accounting software business keeps putting up great returns.

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This video was recorded on February 12, 2021.

Dylan Lewis: It's Friday, February 12th, and we are talking about tech stocks and their earnings. I'm your host, Dylan Lewis, and I'm joined by Fool.com's expert, early estimator of every enterprise's earnings evidenced, Brian Feroldi. Brian, how are you doing?

Brian Feroldi: Doing great, Dylan. Great to be back again.

Lewis: It's nice to be back in the swing of things. I think earnings season could be hectic sometimes. It's also really fun. Ultimately, when we're investing and we're looking at businesses, there are maybe four, possibly one or two more events every year that meaningfully change the direction of a business or your outlook on a business, or drive what your expected value of the business is going to be in the future. Four of them are going to be earnings releases. There might be some incredible event that happens related to progress, something like that. But these are really the moments where we get our check-in on our businesses and see how they're doing.

Feroldi: Yes. I would actually argue that the earnings season we're in right now is the most important one for the year because this is when companies set their agenda for the year ahead, they give investors expectations, they talk about trends. So, we were spoiled for choice this week for businesses to talk about.

Lewis: That's right. For the most part, we are talking businesses that have fiscal years that line up with the calendar year. Every now and then you get one of those oddball companies that winds up for whatever reason. They all have their own reasons deciding to align slightly differently because of how revenue winds up coming in and things like that. But yeah, we're going to be talking about businesses that have been affected, I would say, pretty traumatically by COVID in different ways and by recent events in different ways, and getting a sense of what's going on with them. We're going to be talking about BlackLine, we're going to be talking about Uber, and we're going to be talking about Twitter. I think two businesses, Brian, that people know very well, just as consumers and then one that I'm sure a lot of people have never heard of before.

Feroldi: That's a shame if they haven't, because we've talked of BlackLine several times on the Industry Focus podcast before. So yeah, it's probably the one company that we have to explain what it does ahead of time. BlackLine is a Software-as-a-Service company that is focused on continuous accounting. They basically take the archaic way that accounting is done today and turn it into a real-time automated process. This company was founded by an accountant and they have done a fabulous job at convincing enterprises across the globe to switch over to their automated accounting software.

Lewis: It sounds like a perfectly boring business. In a lot of ways, it is. The performance of the business, however, has been absolutely incredible. Brian, I look at this space and I say, this is a very focused company with a product that meets a very specific audience. They're very good at what they do. They don't have a lot of competition and they're harnessing the SaaS model in a way that has just provided excellent returns for shareholders.

Feroldi: You nailed it. Again, it sounds like a very boring business to get to know. This company came public in 2016 and it's up 468% as I type this. So, just a slow and steady compounding machine. I guess it should qualify as slow. They've been putting up 20%-ish revenue growth basically since they came public. We basically saw more of that in the most recent quarter. So BlackLine added 207 new customers in the fourth quarter. That brought their grand total to 3,433. A metric that we check with any SaaS company is dollar-based net for retention rate, the good one, and BlackLine reported 106% for the quarter. That figure was down pretty substantially. This company regularly reports between 110% and 120%. Not all that surprising given how hard it has been for them to get their foot in the door with new businesses. That will be a metric to watch going forward. I would say it was OK, not great, but the customer adds were pretty good. Boil that together though, and we saw 19% revenue growth to 96 million. That did beat Wall Street's expectations by quite a bit. Sticking point here that I love about this business, gross margin, 83%.

Lewis: That's darn high. That's going to leave a lot of money left over as you get down to those lower items on the income statement, Brian.

Feroldi: It certainly is, and the company is spending pretty aggressively to hire. They just actually acquired another business which we'll get to in a little bit. But even despite that spending, they are profitable on an adjusted basis to actually grow their net income by 50% year-over-year to $13 million or $0.21 a share. Wall Street was expecting much lower than that, it was a beat on both the top and bottom line. If you zoom out to the full year, the results were pretty good too. Revenue grew 22%, not bad for a pandemic year, non-GAAP net income came in at $46 million and they produced $35 million in free cash flow. As we teed up at the top of the show, a really sleepy undercover business that had just produced these great results.

Lewis: Outside of the numbers for this company, when you're looking at the earnings results, what else popped out to you?

Feroldi: The big news here was that 2020 was the year when the Founder and CEO, her name is Therese Tucker, she founded this business more than a decade ago, she decided to take a step back and become the Executive Chair, and she turned over the CEO role to one of her for long time lieutenants, that to me was the big news from 2020. I do like that it was a pretty smooth transition, again, she is heading this to somebody that's been at the company for over three years and she's staying on the board, so that was my take away from the year. However, on the more exciting news, the company acquired a business called Rimilia, which is an ''AI-powered accounts receivable platform." Basically, it helps companies to automate the accounts receivable aspect of their business, for businesses that have cash concerns, getting paid on your accounts receivable is an incredibly important thing. So BlackLine built in this new tool into its service that helps to automate that process. Exciting thing there for investors is that BlackLine believes that that more than doubles the company's addressable market opportunity, and in case you think accounting software is really niche, they see their worldwide opportunity at $28 billion, that is a huge number, that was an exciting development in 2020.

Lewis: For context, this is just about a $7 billion business, so you mentioned the incredible run that shares have gone on since going public, I think a five-bagger at least. Even with that, still in that sweet spot, Brian, that $2 billion to $10 billion figure where if things go right over the next five to 10 years it seems there's still plenty of growth ahead of them.

Feroldi: Yeah, I can see this company growing its top line at high teams, maybe low 20% this range off for a long, long time, and a big part of this company's growth strategy is actually to partner with other companies to help themselves, so they have a global distribution agreement with SAP and they have smaller deals that they've signed with companies like SolEx. They pointed out that in the quarter, 70% of their big deals that they signed with new customers came from leveraging these partnerships. I really like that strategy of partnering with these big companies that have relationships with lots of other customers to get their foot in the door because that lowers the burden on them and it gives them a big partner in the place. So that strategy is clearly paying off. Now for the year ahead, management tampered investors' expectations a little bit. They're calling for revenue growth of about 17% at the midpoint, and they said that they're going to start to spend pretty aggressively to build out their own infrastructure. Because of that, they're actually estimating that adjusted earnings are going to fall in half in 2021. I think because of that, we saw the stock slide off in response to the earnings, but that to me is OK spending if it sets them up for long-term success. To me, the big takeaway here is the company continues to execute and the thesis is on track.

Lewis: Yeah, I'm sure there are probably some people listening to this saying, well, OK, this company is up more than 100% over the past year. We're seeing its founder CEO step away. You mentioned that the DBNR number, that dollar-based net retention number is a little lower than it's been. There are possibly some question marks in what has been a pretty smooth performer for a while, Brian.

Feroldi: That's fair. If you want to take the skeptical view share, but to me I think that, I like that Therese Tucker is not stepping away completely, she's just focusing on the bigger decisions. So she still has her hands majorly in this company. That gives me comfort. It's not like the company is predicting that revenue growth is going to fall apart, 70% top-line growth is pretty consistent with what we've seen, and it also I think sets the company up to outperform expectations which is probably something that this new management team is looking to do. On the bottom line side, it's definitely a trade-off between profits now and profits later, but they're also still estimating to be profitable. So my view, and I've been a shareholder for this company for many years, and I'm still very interested in this company for a long time.

Lewis: Yeah, I think this is a watchlist stock, for me at least, and it should be I think for a lot of people. It reminds me of some other businesses that we've seen be wildly successful, operates maybe in a little bit of a smaller market, but in some ways, it reminds me a little bit of Twilio, where it's a product, it's a software service that people who need it, love it. It solves a very specific use case for people that are in the weeds, and I think what that does is it forces a lot of other people to underestimate the opportunity with what they're doing, and it also I think, to some extent, creates some insulation from competitive pressures.

Feroldi: I think so too. That would be the competitive pressure that you just mentioned was the reason that I got interested in this company many years ago when I was digging into their annual reports, I looked at the competition stage and they basically said we are the only ones doing what we're doing. They said that they compete with some smaller aspects of companies like Oracle, but they are the only pure-play focused company. I really like that, especially when the opportunity that they point out is so large.

Lewis: Yeah, it's nice when you don't have to compete against anybody, [laughs] and you're just playing a game of shoot and hoops, you're not playing basketball or one-on-one or anything like that. Brian, the second company that we're going to be checking on needs very little introduction, and that is Uber, ticker UBER. Well, it started as the mobility company and has quickly blossomed from transportation as a service into, "What do you want? We will get it to you." Also, "If you'd like to go somewhere, we can get you there as well." It's amazing to see the transformation that this business has gone through in the last year.

Feroldi: It really is, as we are going to break into the numbers, I was really impressed to see just how quickly they pivoted from a mobility company to a delivery company. That is the big benefit of the optionality embedded in this network. They were pretty well positioned to withstand an enormous decline in their immobility business. They didn't predict it necessarily but it's nice if they could shift because they needed to.

Lewis: Yeah. I mean, if you look just at the numbers, no context, it doesn't look great. Got Q4 revenues, $3.2 billion, which is up quarter-over-quarter, 13% but down 16% year-over-year. This was a business where growth is such a huge part of the story. You look at the dynamics within that, that revenue top-line, delivery revenue grew 19% quarter-over-quarter, 224% year-over-year, while mobility revenue grew 8% quarter-over-quarter and declined 52% year-over-year. What we're seeing is the massive rise in what they are able to do specifically in takeout delivery, getting food from restaurants to people and having that offset, a very large decline that we've seen with mobility for them because people are simply traveling less and they're out less due to COVID.

Feroldi: That's an incredible turnaround of events and you're actually digging into the number of bookings that they had, their delivery business is almost 80% bigger than their mobility business in 2020. That is an astounding change of events.

Lewis: It is. They actually put a pretty fine point on it, in their investor presentation. They put it in big letters, they said, "Delivery provided a natural hedge to mobility in 2020." I think they're probably pretty happy that they made the investments that they did. We're going to talk about it a little bit but this is not the end of these investments for them, they are only going to be focusing more and more in the space. I do want to touch on some of the specific numbers that we saw. The losses that have been there for this company in general and they are quite big, they continue to be quite big. The net loss attributable to Uber was $968 million for the quarter. Big, big figure, Brian, no surprise there, given where this company has been. Some of the key business metrics, just checking in on those, monthly active platform customers down 16% year-over-year. You can think of that in the same way you would monthly actives for a social media type business and for the full year just putting some more numbers to the decline in mobility trips overall down 27% year-over-year. Those are some trends that I have to imagine are going to reverse course as we start to get a clearer and clearer picture of a post-COVID world, more people get vaccinated and the return to normal is something that we start to see more and more of. Nice to see that they're able to weather things with the delivery business. We're really I think just in the beginning of this business segment for them becoming a much larger part of the thesis though.

Feroldi: That is, as you said, becoming a huge part of the thesis moving forward. I mean, just a year or two ago, it was a nice-to-have optionality. Now, it's become the main growth driver. To your point, the thing that is going to be most interesting for me to watch is, how quickly the mobility segment returns. Sure, we saw a little bit of quarter-over-quarter growth in 2020 but the thing I wonder about is, will people be willing to get into strangers' cars in 2021 and beyond, once we get the all clear. That I don't know right now.

Lewis: Yeah. I can see that being a hurdle for some people, maybe people who don't have cars, not as much of an option. You have to get from A to B and if you don't have a car, if you're like me you're going to be using ride-hailing but trying to be as careful as you can to put a number on it and I think this is absolutely astounding. You look at the revenue mix that they had in 2019. Delivery was just over $400 million, mobility was $3 billion. 2020, mobility, $1.4 billion, these are for the final three months, ending in December, delivery almost even $1.3 billion. It went from being a fraction of what was happening in the mobility segment to basically on par. I have to imagine as we return, mobility is going to ramp back up but the company is investing very heavily in delivery. What we've seen them do is go from focusing on the Uber Eats side to expanding that into grocery and now also expanding that into alcohol delivery. The company acquired Drizly and that was a $1.1 billion deal, majority of that going to be paid in stock. For anyone unfamiliar, I've used the service, it is an online alcohol marketplace. Basically, the same way you would order takeout from a restaurant, you can order takeout or delivery alcohol. If you're traveling, and in my case is when I used it, and I was quarantining after doing some traveling around the holidays, I was able to get a delivery nice and easy. What I see with this, Brian, in the building up portfolio is saying, we want anything that you are trying to get anywhere to funnel through us. That's basically the business model for Uber at this time.

Feroldi: I think that's a great acquisition and Uber today is a $110 billion company, so this only cost them $1 billion. I think that that is a great move and it should, as you pointed out, continue to build on the usefulness of their delivery services. So the goldilocks scenario for investors is the mobility businesses bounced back strongly in 2021 and beyond and all that momentum that they picked up with delivery just continues to shine through. If that's the case, there is a bull case for owning this stock.

Lewis: I think that's true. I think what we're going to see in the coming quarters is more and more emphasis from Uber on their subscription business. I think maybe this is the part that people have slipped on a little bit with them but it is very quickly becoming a pretty sizable number of people. Between Uber Pass, Eats Pass and Postmates Unlimited, the company has five million members and the membership program that they have is in 16 different countries. So with all these, people are paying a monthly fee. In the case of Uber Pass, $25 a month. In the case of Eats Pass and Postmates, I think it's about $10 a month. For that, they get these benefits. They range from discounted rides to free food delivery, free grocery delivery of certain amounts, all these different things. It isn't hard to squint, Brian, and we see the bundled approach, making the membership model incredibly attractive. Then the membership model being something that differentiates them from Lyft and creates demand within their services.

Feroldi: Totally. The membership and subscription model, I think could go a long way to engender brand loyalty, especially if they have roped in some rewards program into this. Right now, I don't honestly see much of a difference as from a consumer from using Uber and Lyft. So it's just going to be about costs. But if you can build in and convince people to pay a subscription fee like in Amazon Prime, that could be a major tailwind for the business long-term.

Lewis: Yeah, because getting things from A to B is a commodity, in a way. You don't care which ride-hailing service gets you from your house to the restaurant so long as you get there and it's uneventful. You don't want a story coming out of that. I think what this is, is an effort for them to build loyalty, build repeat business. What will be fascinating for me to see is, OK, you're getting $10 or in some cases $25 a month, how much does it cost for them to offer the benefits that come with that? Because you can do the back of the envelope math pretty quickly and say you do like a blended average of about $15 a month in terms of what people are paying, you get 5 million people paying that over the course of the year, Brian, that's $900 million. That's a pretty decent amount of money. But what does it cost for them to fulfill all of the things that are associated with that? It could be a loss leader for a while but at some point it could become something that is a little bit like Amazon Prime, a little bit like the Costco membership model where it's actually a source of revenue for them and one that does not wind up eating into their margins.

Feroldi: I think the bigger story for them is they should price it aggressively just to get people to use it because as we've seen with services like Netflix and Disney+, if people value a service, you can raise prices on them and they will not go anywhere. The same thing with Amazon Prime, the same thing with a Costco membership. The whole aim of the game early on is get people to sign up. Yes, I agree with you. We don't know what the unit economics of this business are like but the company has been posting losses, huge losses ever since it founded and investors have been willing to swallow those again and again and again. This is something that investors should definitely watch and I think it's a good move.

Lewis: Yeah, I think so. Obviously, the market has only been so phased by the decline in mobility because Uber shares are pretty much at all-time highs. I was surprised, Brian, in researching the show. Since IPO, Uber is narrowly a market beater. I didn't expect that. I don't know if you would have thought that. But it has proven to be a market beater. I think the way it's positioning itself is smart given where the industry is going. I think it creates a lot of problems for a company like Lyft because they also have their own membership model. I haven't seen nearly as much information about it. It seems to be very similar. They're doing a $20 a month model with Lyft pick but the offering does not cover as many use cases as much more mobility focused. Frankly, Lyft's portfolio isn't nearly as deep as Uber's. So that could be one of the things we've talked about so much, Uber being the bigger company. This could be what really separates Uber and Lyft long term.

Feroldi: I think so. Especially from the investment angle and yeah, you've pointed out. That's great that they are a market leader since comping public. Them and Snapchat, boy, have they had a turnaround in 2020.

Lewis: Yeah. It's fun to see it. I am happy to be wrong about something performing well because it means that people weren't left holding the bag on something that they bought. But this is something where it's nice to revisit the way we looked at a company originally and what it has turned into, Brian. It's always why it's important to check in on things.

Feroldi: Totally. Good for all the shareholders if you've held on this whole time.

Lewis: Yeah. You know, speaking of, with the third company I already talked about, Twitter. I will say I've been someone who has been happy to watch Twitter from the sidelines for a while. My concern has always been on their ad dynamics and the fact that prices just plummet, plummet, plummet. This has proven to be a pretty decent stock to own, Brian.

Feroldi: Yeah, we saw a lot of things happen in the world in 2020, and Twitter definitely took full advantage of that and we saw more strength out of the company in the fourth quarter. So the big metric track here is just, they call it monetizable daily active users. That figure grew 27% in the fourth quarter to 192 million. As usual, the split out there is very dominated by international. So 37 million in the U.S., 155 million international. What was exciting for investors, is that they were able to pump out, they grew their ad impressions by 35%. So while there was some decline in cost per ad, the company grew its top-line 28% during the quarter to $1.3 billion. For comparison, Wall Street was only expecting $1.2 billion. So the company really outperformed in the top-line.

Lewis: I think Twitter might be one of those businesses that doesn't need advertising. Brian, I don't know if you've ever seen a TV ad for Twitter? I don't think I have, because they managed to get so much free publicity, even for being as mature as they are, and for having the user base that is surprisingly as small as it actually is.

Feroldi: Yeah, they have an outsized influence on the media. There's no doubt. I think a big part of that is politicians are there, celebrities are there. You can go there and learn all kinds of information. I'm someone that uses Twitter daily, so I understand why it's done so well.

Lewis: You're not going to work a plug in there, come on. You got to plug the handle.

Feroldi: Follow me on @BrianFeroldi, and you are?

Lewis: @WilyLewis, but I am not nearly as active. Brian's the better follow. I'm totally comfortable saying that. I am much more of a lurker when it comes to Twitter. I've been a lurker in terms of the stock. It's been something that I've watched on the side, like I said. It's proven to be in some ways a great stock to own. I do look at some of these growth rates though, and I wonder Brian, these seem in a lot of ways like a mature business that really has the audience that it's going to have. For them, the trick is going to be how do we continue to monetize this in a way that's novel and produces growth.

Feroldi: That's always been my concern too. I've never been a shareholder of this company for exactly the reason you said. I've said, well, it seems to be much more of a niche product. I mean, people that are on Twitter tend to be very active on Twitter. It's not something that a lot of people are going to want to use the same way they want to use Instagram or Facebook or even Snapchat. So I also have had those questions about how monetizable is the platform? How much can it grow? But they continue to put up pretty impressive numbers. We just covered the topline. Again, the topline grew 28% last quarter to $1.3 billion. The rest of the income statement actually looked pretty good. Gross margin came in at 66%. That was down a little bit year-over-year, but still pretty strong overall. Cost only grew across the board about 21%. So when you factor those things together, the company had a lot of operating leverage built into it. Its adjusted earnings actually grew 52% last quarter to $0.38 per share. That beat estimates by $0.07. The full-year numbers were not quite as good, but they were OK overall. In 2020, revenue grew 7%, and it actually reported a non-GAAP net loss because its first and second quarters were so tough. But that shows that the company is building momentum right now and it's growth is accelerating. That gets investors excited.

Lewis: It does. I think outside of the numbers, there are some interesting things here going on with the business as well. When you have a more mature platform, you have to experiment a little bit more and try to bring different monetizable activity into the space. It's true of just being on social media in general because someone's going to roll out a feature, everyone's going to love it, and then other people are going to figure out how they can bring it on to their platform to remain competitive. But I think it's particularly important in Twitter's case where they need to make sure that they're maintaining loyalty with the real die-hard users that they have.

Feroldi: Totally. That is one complaint that I have heard about Twitter and a lot of users have heard about Twitter, is they have been really slow to innovate and roll out new and useful features. You still can't edit your post once you have on Twitter. You have to delete them if you made a mistake and repost it. They did call out in the call in the shareholder letter that they have launched some new ancillary products and services. One of the ones is called the Fleets, which they call a "low pressure way to easily join the conversation." They do point out that some of the users say they don't like that tweets last forever, and that they're always public, and they're out there forever. So Fleets is one of their answers to that, to give people a little pressure to participate in the platform.

They also launched a new newsletter feature. It's almost like a substack so that you can actually build a newsletter for your audience right through Twitter. That's a neat feature. They also pointed out that they're experimenting with something called Spaces, which allows you to use your voice to tweet, so that way, people, I think, can hear small soundbites. They are starting to innovate on the platform from the user side. Importantly, they actually rolled out some new innovations for advertisers too. They've relaunched this thing called Mobile Application Promotion or MAP, which basically inserts a whole range of product improvements for advertisers to make sure that their message gets out to the audience more effectively. They noted that advertisers are loving this and they saw enormous growth from advertisers in the fourth quarter because of this. That's good to see that there is some innovation happening behind the scenes.

Lewis: It's always good when you're talking social media, Brian, to remember who the true customer is. [laughs] We are the product and sometimes we need to remind ourselves that. That said, I do think the idea of newsletter functionality is a very interesting one with a place like Twitter, because if you spend any time on there and you follow people that spend a lot of time on there, you'll notice that people build followings, and increasingly, we're seeing a lot of people that were reporters or were insiders somewhere go from being part of a big outlet to going independent. They are doing things on Substack, like you mentioned. They're creating a newsletter experience and they're really playing on the loyalty that they have in an individual brand. There are so many businesses that operate in that space. There's Substack, there's Patreon where a lot of those individuals use to actually collect funds and get support from fans. It seems like there's something there for Twitter, if it's an audience and a market that they think is worth exploring.

Feroldi: It totally is. I think that that was a great move on their part to do so. One of the things that they noted on the call, they were asked about is, are you going to offer subscriptions in some way where either users have to pay or perhaps people will get paid to post content. They did say it is something that is on their to-do list and they are looking at it. They don't expect to launch anything in 2021, but they did say, keep an eye out for 2022. That could potentially be a business model-changing innovation, if they do launch some kind of subscription product on the platform.

Lewis: Yeah. It would be super high-margin. That's the nice thing about where they are in terms of flexibility is, if they're are allowing people to collect payments and that kind of thing, you could take a very small cut of that as a business and wind up with pretty happy creators, pretty happy followers, and some high-margin revenue coming in for you as well.

Feroldi: Yeah. Just more optionality for the platform. Twitter did give some guidance actually for 2021. They did note on the call that they were going up against some pretty tough comps from 2020. But they did say in the first quarter, they expect to actually grow their user base by another 20%. So it appears that the momentum that they built up in Q4 is carrying through, which is good to see considering that the fourth quarter had the election going forward. For the full-year, they're estimating that for the first quarter, revenue will be about $1 billion. That represents year-over-year growth of 25%. Pretty good numbers that they expect to happen right out of the gate.

Lewis: Yeah. Those are strong given the maturity of the platform. Like we said, where they've been as a company for so long.

Feroldi: That sounds correct. All right, Dylan. We talked about Twitter, we talked about Uber, we talked about BlackLine. Do any of these companies strike you as the best buy right now?

Lewis: Of the three, I'm taking BlackLine. I am not a shareholder of any of them, but I think BlackLine would be my preference out of the three. I see some interesting stuff going on under the hood at Uber, and I think there's some interesting potential there. I have not been a fan of the business in the past because of how they've handled certain things with drivers. I think they're getting better at it, but they still have some ways to go there. Twitter continues to strike me as a mature business that I have a hard time getting excited about. You throw in all of them, it wouldn't even really touch on it, Brian, but just all the platform issues and how they've been in the news for so many things outside of what they do at core as a business. I think that could be a headache that winds up getting pretty loud at some point for them. It's an existential risk for them. I think that's my order. We got BlackLine, we got Uber, and then we have Twitter in third. What about you?

Feroldi: For me, BlackLine is the No. 1 by far here. Like you, I have some big questions about Uber, although I am pretty impressed with the moves that they have made and considering what they did in 2020 compared to what I expected them to do. That is a better business than I think I assumed. I am still not that interested in becoming a shareholder given that they're allergic to profits and they haven't proven that their model can be profitable. I think the strong number two between these three is Twitter though, because the model is profitable. I'm fully addicted to Twitter or so I can't imagine myself leaving the platform. I do see some optionality for the company in the future. But from a dollar basis, there's no doubt that BlackLine is No. 1 by far, but I'm going to put Twitter at No. 2.

Lewis: I like that, Brian. I think it's good when we disagree with each other a little bit. Mix it up, give some different perspectives. That's what it's all about here at The Fool.

Feroldi: We need to timestamp this just like we did with DocuSign versus Upwork, and come back in a year, in three years, and see who is right.

Lewis: The best thing about that, Brian, is you were right, but I was still a shareholder. [laughs] So it worked out. Just goes to show, you don't have to have ego when it comes to investing. Your friend can be right then you can still make money along the way if you listen to them. [laughs]

Feroldi: That's right. As long as you buy good businesses.

Lewis: Brian, thanks for the suggestion on DocuSign, and also thank you for joining me on today's show.

Feroldi: Anytime. Have a great long weekend, Dylan.

Lewis: Yeah. You too. Listeners, that's going to do it for this episode of Industry Focus. If you have any questions you want to reach out and say "Hey," shoot us an email at [email protected], or tweet us @MFIndustryFocus. If you're looking for more of our stuff, subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. As always, people in the program may own companies discussed on the show, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against stocks mentioned, so don't buy or sell anything based solely on what you hear. Thanks to Tim Sparks for the work behind the glass today. Thank you for listening. Until next time, Fool on!