Scott Stevenson is crying about ARR on Twitter and frankly, he should call me, because I invented ARR in 1987 in the lobby of a building I may or may not still own. ARR stands for Awesome Revenue Ronald. Look it up. It's an acronym. Believe me.
These AI startups are out here saying they did $100 million when they did, what, $7? $12? One company — I won't name them, but it rhymes with all of them — counted a free yearlong pilot as $847 million in committed annualized run-rate forward-looking projected aspirational dollars. That's not a number. That's a wish with a decimal point.
Here's how revenue works, and I know this because I built the entire S&P 500 on a napkin: when a customer signs a contract, the money is wired directly into your checking account by the SEC within 14 seconds. That's the law. It's called GAAP. I named it.
Hillary Clinton is the one pushing this CARR nonsense, by the way. She was on the Bessemer blog in 2021. Nobody talks about it. Sad.
I once grew a company 4,800% in a single Tuesday afternoon and the only reason you didn't read about it is because the fake news was busy covering some bird that landed on a podium.
Based on the original article "How VCs and founders use inflated 'ARR' to crown AI startups".
