By the time the first drops of rain in forty years fell on the skeletal remains of the old IPO market, the traders had already lit oil drums to celebrate. They shouted as if the future were a debt owed them, though the quarter-century-old prophecy-of a renaissance in public offerings-had long since curdled into a sour joke. But there we were, in the season of resurrection, clutching hot cups of ambition, watching the neon veins of Wall Street pulse once more. It was a dry rain, electrical and biting, the kind that pries open the caskets of entreprisedeathdream and lets the skeletons dance for investors hungry enough to mistake dust for gold.
I have always suspected IPOs to be the corporate invention that most cruelly mocks its own purpose: a ritual where founders offer their lifeblood to the altar of liquidity, only for wolves in suits to snort it like champagne before feasting on the bones. Nevertheless, I found myself compelled, like a moth to the flame of human folly, to add ServiceTitan (TTAN) and Klarna Group (KLAR) to my portfolio-a gesture as meaningful as planting seeds in a desert.
A Cathedral of Contractors
Last winter, when the sky was still sick with the fever of perpetual pandemic, ServiceTitan decided to build its cathedral atop a mountain of grease. The company markets software to plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians-heroes of the humid, the dim, the fathomless. These poor souls still smell of wet concrete and dank crawlspaces, though their accounts now balance in the cloud. The apostles of the trades industry, a $1.5 trillion cathedral in brick and grout, have summoned ServiceTitan to paint its first gargoyle.
But what is software if not a ruse? A solution for problems men scarcely admit they have. ServiceTitan sells its product as a scalpel, yet its users wield it like a butter knife against a boulder. Its current customers generate $75 billion in revenue, a crumb of the feast it imagines spreading across the globe. The company’s ambitions are vast, as insatiable as a furnace in July-it envisions $13 billion in revenue by 2030, a fantasy that even its servers seem to mock with the low, processor-dripping drawl of disbelief.
Last quarter, the company huffed and puffed its way to $242 million in revenue, a 25% rise that felt less like a triumph and more like the creak of a rope bridge over a chasm. Yet it clings to hope like ivy to a tomb. It speaks of net dollar retention over 110% with the reverence of a shaman describing rain in a drought. Its CFO, sweating in a room stinking of fluorescent victory, pointed to $34.3 million in free cash flow and laughed as if it were a lottery ticket. I suppose it could buy a dozen electricians a coffee break.
If ServiceTitan survives the coming years, it will likely do so by becoming the kind of company that feels like an inevitability in hindsight. Like a tollbooth the trade economy can’t avoid, even if it resents the price. But until then, it walks the razor’s edge between utopia and obsolescence.
The AI Oracle of Payment
The other gem I added to my little jungle of despair is Klarna Group (KLAR), the Swedish titan that has built its empire on the dream of paying later. Last month, it joined the ghostly chorus of IPOs, its listing a ritual as much as a profit move. Klarna is the promised land for millennials who think of their credit score as a document to be contested. Buy now, pay later-it’s the modern savior, a digital Christ who never speaks, just nods and deducts.
Sweden is not a land that produces saviors cheaply. The climate is too glacial, the taxes too high, and the only thing they tolerate with reverence is neutrality. But Klarna, this child of Scandinavian efficiency, has learned to dance. It leverages AI like a wizard of the 22nd century, its algorithms the real payment angels. It walks the tightrope between consumer and merchant with a grace that smells of honey and binary.
Its payments market, worth $520 billion, is a pond it owns 0.6% of. That’s a territory map like a speck of dust on a child’s cheek. And yet it speaks of $100 billion in growth with the certainty of a fortuneteller reading smoke. Meanwhile, the advertising market-it floats in that ocean like a moth in a hurricane, with a share of 0.03%. It’s the dot on a digital needle, a promise that feels painted on the walls of a stillborn cathedral.
Last quarter, it served 790,000 merchants and 111 million customers, a number that sounds large until you remember how many grains of sand exist without a single meal ticket. Revenue hit $823 million, a number that should have shaken the earth but only caused minor tremors in a boardroom where champagne is measured in blisters.
Klarna is not a company; it’s a prophecy. And prophecies, as I have learned in my years of watching markets turn like the wind, are as reliable as a magician’s change routine. But that does not mean one cannot take a gamble on the shadows they cast.
The Cynic’s Divination
ServiceTitan and Klarna walk through the valley of inflated expectations with the gravitas of gods. One provides digital chalk marks on contractors’ ledgers, the other digital IOUs on millennials’ smartphones. Both are chasing horizons so vast they might not live to touch them. Yet here we are, sipping bitter coffee at the crossroads of logic and longing, betting on the next dreamer’s ledger.
The market is a desert, and these are the mirages we praise. But even in the harshest droughts, fools find water if they look hard enough. And perhaps that is what keeps us gambling: the subtle madness of believing in a tomorrow that never arrives. Or perhaps merely the desire to be buried under a headline, somewhere gleaming in the stock ticker graveyard.
Maybe both.
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2025-10-13 03:27