share price, page-176

Karl doesn't quite get there with his explanation about sales and marketing and Xero

And then the second thing is on sales and marketing. The great thing about sales and marketing, yes if we wanted to at any point in time, and you've seen this just even the likes of Xero. You know Xero's gone through this in their lifespan, they've been listed on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges since birth like we have. I'd encourage anyone to go and look at how fast Atlassian and Xero grew in their first three years, but yeah,you're going to constantly get this. From our perspective, we're in a lucky position. We've got plenty of cash, we certainly can see cash flow neutral area and the purpose of Matt was to actually help us accelerate up to the next level to where we need to go to

I suspect he almost said


'yes if we wanted to at any point in time...'

...we could reduce our sales and marketing spend and turn cash flow positive and profitable like Xero could have done, but instead we (and they) are pouring our resources into building ARR because of the stickiness of our product, high gross margin and the compounding recurrent revenue we will see in 3 to 4 years time.

Nearmap clearly stated this is what they were going to do in Nov 2016, and are emerging from the other side into cash flow positive territory (I hope by the end of the quarter), and the compounding ARR emerges above the waterline into a high margin business with significant compounding growth.