Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…It's totally wild. All of that is bad enough. Let's make it even worse. If you are trying to create as beautiful and amazing an income statement as possible, obviously, mark-to-market accounting is great for all the reasons we just discussed. Investors will love it. You can inflate your revenues hugely, et cetera. There's one problem, and that problem is that it's all one time. This is the opposite of ARR. There is no recurring revenue here. You are taking all the future income, revenue, cash flow, you're collapsing it to a single moment in time. Whatever deals you do in one year, you're starting from zero the next year, you get no future benefit on your income statement from those deals. You're squeezing every amount of possible upside out of the future and into today. You're just constantly making it harder on yourself to achieve anything in the future because you've already recognized it all. Basically, if you don't do more different deals next year, it doesn't matter how good every contract you've already signed is and how amazing all those projects are doing. You have an actual zero in your revenue category without doing more deals. Totally. Like any house of cards here, this all looks great, but there's literally no way that this doesn't all blow up. It's all just completely inflated. Once they start down this path, there's no scenario where this ends well. It's just a question of how long the fuse is until the bomb blows up.…

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