You have this backwards.If you go back through 2016 - 2018...

You have this backwards.

If you go back through 2016 - 2018 period you'll see that every time they invest in growing the sales & marketing team the STCR drops then recovers over the next half or two. Basically you have to spend money to hire people and that is an immediate outlay but they don't get up to speed and add ACV as efficiently on day 0 as they do 3, 6 or 12 months in.

If your STCR is 100% each sales person is generating ACV equivalent to their cost per year - they're paying for themselves. What the hell, the sales team can only pay for itself? What the hell good is that? It sounds bad until you take into account that these are subscription contracts and churn is <10% so 90+% of the previous year's sales are still contributing in year 2, whilst your costs are fixed. Hence you can understand why if your STCR hovers around 100% you might be inclined to add sales cost - it lets you grow faster.

This is all difficult to follow because the business doesn't sit still so you never quite see the business reach steady state or profitability and only see expenses keep rising with ACV growth lagging behind. It's natural to think gee why are these idiots spending money so freely but there is method to the madness -- they spend to accelerate growth, at least until COVID-19 hit. They reset in April-June and are now matching expenditure to ACV growth, whereas previously they were letting expenditure run ahead of ACV growth. This is why the market invested $70m in September 2018, to provide them the cash buffer to do this.