Interesting analysis. While it's incredibly difficult to place a monetary value on trust, the value is both very real and very large. Sooner or later, the tide always goes out and exposes the swimmers.
Great post! Can you go into this section in a little more detail and how that math works?
A basic control that would have caught this would be to flag any significant changes (e.g. anything above 30% change) in ARR by customer. All of these errors would cause the ARR per customer to change >100% because it was double counting the base renewal amount.
If you track ARR by customer you can review month over month changes in ARR —-specifically ARR changes that are large.
In this case, they were double counting the base ARR associated with the renewal when there was a simultaneous upsell. So the month over mo the change in ARR would have been >100%
Got it. So, for example, if a customer was doing $10m in ARR, and they added an upsell of $5m (total ARR of $15m), SentinelOne was actually saying they added $15m of new ARR for an (incorrect) total of $25m in ARR and a change of 150% instead of the correct change of +50%?
Interesting analysis. While it's incredibly difficult to place a monetary value on trust, the value is both very real and very large. Sooner or later, the tide always goes out and exposes the swimmers.
I feel like we’re the only people taking this seriously 😂
Wall Street trust is hard to measure it when you have it... but certainly easy to see when you lose it
Haha. It’s always takes a long time to earn that trust back too!
I have a good friend who works there, he is upset that none of the executives seem to be on the chopping block. Double dipping ARR...ouch
Great post! Can you go into this section in a little more detail and how that math works?
A basic control that would have caught this would be to flag any significant changes (e.g. anything above 30% change) in ARR by customer. All of these errors would cause the ARR per customer to change >100% because it was double counting the base renewal amount.
If you track ARR by customer you can review month over month changes in ARR —-specifically ARR changes that are large.
In this case, they were double counting the base ARR associated with the renewal when there was a simultaneous upsell. So the month over mo the change in ARR would have been >100%
Got it. So, for example, if a customer was doing $10m in ARR, and they added an upsell of $5m (total ARR of $15m), SentinelOne was actually saying they added $15m of new ARR for an (incorrect) total of $25m in ARR and a change of 150% instead of the correct change of +50%?
Yep
Thanks! (Also yikes)