Yet Another Value Podcast - Adam Buckstein's Stride Thesis $LRN

Episode Date: January 18, 2026

Adam Buckstein from ASB partners explores Stride Inc. (formerly K12), the largest provider of virtual public schools in the U.S. Adam dives deep into the company's business model, regulatory framework, and competitive position, as well as the company's unique funding structure, post-COVID enrollment growth, market misconceptions, and the complex compliance challenges it faces. The conversation also dives into Stride’s outcomes, criticisms, AI’s future role in education, and the stock’s dramatic drop following an LMS implementation misstep. _____________________________________________________________[00:00:00] Podcast and guest introduction[00:03:30] Stride’s virtual school structure[00:05:34] Funding model vs. for-profit colleges[00:07:16] Why parents choose virtual schools[00:09:19] Learning coach growth post-COVID[00:10:16] Payment structure for Stride[00:12:22] Outcome debates and challenges[00:17:38] Competitive landscape with Pearson[00:21:07] Stickiness of Stride contracts[00:23:22] Curriculum costs and customization[00:25:10] Economic sensitivity discussion[00:28:43] Student acquisition and marketing[00:32:44] October enrollment drop explained[00:35:42] LMS transition and enrollment loss[00:38:22] New Mexico lawsuit context[00:43:26] Outcome data interpretation issues[00:45:27] AI impact on Stride’s model[00:47:17] Financials and cash flow strength[00:51:10] Market overreaction to issues[00:54:09] Risks if outcomes lag in-person[00:56:33] Teachers union and school choiceLinks:Yet Another Value Blog - https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com See our legal disclaimer here: https://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/p/legal-and-disclaimerProduction and editing by The Podcast Consultant - https://thepodcastconsultant.com/

You're about to listen to the yet another value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today we are, well, before we get there, a reminder, if you like this podcast, please, rate, subscribe, review, really high stars, really high ratings, really high reviews. Wherever you're watching, you're listening, it helps this podcast grow, spread word of mouth, get more podcasts, all that sort of stuff. That out the way, let's turn to today's podcast. I've got Adam Buxing on. Adam is going to talk about, it's called Stride.

It used to be called K-12. It trades under LRN, Learn. That's the ticker there. You can see a full disclaimer at the end. Remember this not investing advice, but Adam has done great work on this. This is a really interesting idea. It's actually, you know, sometimes I have companies on the podcast because I want to learn more about them. The guest says they're interesting.

And then sometimes there's companies in situations and setups that I could see, hey, I can see myself buying and investing in this one day. And learn LRN falls squarely, squarely into that category. You know, they're training cheap. There's the stress. There's a lot of, I don't know if there's a lot of questions. There are a lot of questions about the business. but I think if you're willing to do enough kind of gumshoe work, you can hopefully start to get answers to that questions.

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slash yavp. That's alpha dash sense.com slash yavp. All right. Hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Walker. With me today, I'm excited to have on for the first time, Adam, how's it going? Great. How you doing, Andrew? I'm doing great. I'm actually, as I was telling you before we started, I'm really excited for this one, because, you know, sometimes I'll do ones on stocks I'm looking to learn and sometimes like, this is up my alley. This is up my alley. Get there in a second. Before we get started, quick disclaimer, remind everyone, nothing on this podcast, investing device. You can see the full disclaimer at the end of the podcast. So keep that in mind.

Adam, the company we're going to talk about today, is it Stride or K-12? I never know, but I believe it's Stride. They changed the name. So it was K-12, and it changed the name to Stride that we branded a few years ago. And the ticker remained the same, so it's always been L-R-N. The ticker is L-R-N. Obviously, they're trying to convey learn that might give you an idea of what they're doing.

But, Adam, I'll stop rambling there and turn it over to you. What is Stride slash K-12-Learn and Why, Are they so interesting? Yeah, so basically, Stride is the largest provider of virtual public schools in the U.S. They have about 100 schools in 30 different states. And I think it's important to start with how it's structured because a lot of people lump them into the for-profit education category. And it's like a totally different business model.

So basically the way it works is Stride contracts with independent boards on behalf of school districts in charter school. So it's about 50-50. And those boards decide, for whatever reason, they want to have a virtual public school, you know, in place of like the brick and mortar school in that state. And they will, you know, they'll send out an RFP and Stride will bid on the contract. And they'll run the entire school soup to nuts. And, you know, everything from teachers, administrations, guidance counselors, you know, laptops. And they'll get the contract. It's usually like three to five years in length, and they get paid by the state. And that's the business model. It's really, you know, K through 12. So like it's a totally different product, as you can imagine,

that like, you know, at the younger grades, you need a learning coach. High school is very focused on like career readiness. So they have like the leading career kind of like Votech type of, you know, online program, kind of like very timely, like right in the right space, the right time. and they've been doing this for 25 years. They're the category leader. They're two times bigger than their nearest competitor, which is a division of Pearson. And no, that's a great overview.

And I'm really glad I just want to focus on one thing you said there. You know, a lot of investors with as many gray hairs on their head as I'm starting to get are going to remember the for-profit education things. These are the University of Phoenix's, but there were some bad actors. These were for-profit colleges that back in, you know, 2008 to 2012 were all the rage, just tons and tons of issues with them. So I'm just glad you addressed that first thing. Like this is a different business.

One of the distinction, too, and along those lines is like funding. I didn't talk about funding, but I said it's provided by the states. So at the post-secondary level, it's Title IV funding. That's a totally different risk dynamic. It's you have a lot of stroke with the Penn risk, which would happen during the Obama administration, because you're taking Title IV funding. it's all, you know, student loans. There's no student loans here.

This is, again, like tuition-free public school. It's, you know, you're right, you know, in the, you know, as a citizen in the United States of America, your local municipality provides education. So instead of going to the brick and mortar school down the blocker within, like, you know, 20-mile radius, you're instead, the state is providing you an option, but there's no, like, financing here. And the big implication is, like, there's a lot less fraud. I'm not saying there's no fraud, but, like, it's just a totally different risk

dynamic. Yeah, for the for profits, I mean, people remember they were going to literally food courts and they were getting people to sign up these documents and everything. Like, this is, hey, you've got a seven-year-old, an 11-year-old, whatever it is. You're sending them to public school. The numbers are interesting, and I want to get to the numbers, but I want to dive a little bit further into the business because I do think that that's critical. You know, tell me why during the COVID era, everyone, you know why people are choosing to send their school, kids to school virtually. But I think one thing as a parent and stuff that pops to my mind. You say, hey, these guys are going to run the virtual school. And I'd say, oh, well, I don't know if I'd want my kids to go to virtual school.

You know, I have to stay home and make sure my kids safe at home. They're not going to be the social interaction. So let's walk through why are districts choosing to offer a virtual public school? Why are parents choosing to send their kids to virtual public school? And I'm driving to a few different things, but I'll pause there. Yeah, so pre-COVID, this was like a very niche business. I mean, I was an investor before COVID, and I always saw the potential because there's a certain subset of students that would prefer to go, you know, basically do school from home. And, you know, there's probably, there's a ton of different reasons why that would work for a student. And again, it depends on the age, whether they're elementary school or high school. But like, you know,

some of the biggest reasons that are cited are like bullying, you know, like, you know, I grew up going to public school. Like, there's some people who are just miserable. Um, health reasons. religious reasons, you know, people are concerned about school violence. There's also like practical, you know, let's say you live in, you know, rural New Mexico, right? There's no public school within 60 miles. So like this provides an option for you to, you know, so you don't have to do the big commute. Now, like, post-COVID, what happened is, you know, kind of growing by word of mouth. A lot of people figured out that, like, they just prefer this for, you know, a lot of other reasons.

And like, it's kind of snowballed. and it's mostly grown through word of mouth. But as a percentage of overall student U.S. population, like the number, you know, I've heard cited is there's like 55 million students that are in the K-12 system. You know, K-12 is the largest with 250,000. You have Pearson with 120,000. You have some like mom and pops, like, but no one, they're much, much smaller.

Like no one is above 50,000 students. So you're talking about a population of like 1 to 2%, you know, probably a closer to 1% than 2% of the overall population. And when people are given this option and this choice, like for example, in Oklahoma, 5% of students are now like choosing the virtual public school option, which is fascinating. So I'm not saying we're going to get to that nationally, but it just feels like it's very underpenetrated at this point.

But 5% honestly kind of feels about right when you start throwing in like all the different factors, but I have no clue. I can't say that there's any statistics there. It's just kind of like there's 5% of the population will do anything, right? Well, there's also another thing, too, like at post-COVID, like, the big issue you're talking about your young kids, right? Like, it's kind of like inconceivable. Like, how could you have your, you know, second grader at home, like online?

But like a lot of parents are working from home. So, like, now that, you know, they can be the learning coaches. Some parents even prefer that. They want to be more hands-on and they want to be involved with their kids. So, like, that didn't exist pre-COVID. So, like, now you have this whole subset of people that can be their children's learning coaches. and that's opened up a huge, you know, another segment of the population that previously

wouldn't consider this. Let me ask, you mentioned Oklahoma and they've got contracts, you know, throughout the nation, but let's just use a random Oklahoma. You know, let's say they've got 100,000 students in the overall school system, and they hire, they hire stride, they hire K-12 to run their virtual school. How does the payment kind of work? You know, is it, hey, every head that goes into the virtual school is what we pay you? Is it a fixed payment, whether it's one or two,

thousand kids go in, how does that kind of work? Yeah, so it's the same like funding formula as the brick and mortar schools. Every single state is going to be different. So like the money falls, the student, so to speak. So on average, like it's about $9 to $10,000 per student per year. And then the question becomes, so like what if a student starts the school year and then they go back, you know, or they change their mind or whatever happened. So there is like very strict compliance around like it called withdrawal criteria that like if a student is absent for a certain amount of time.

So then they're taking off the rolls. Strides obligate, you know, needs to report it back to the district. Like how they true up at the end, you know, just it depends on the state. But that's part of the complexity and difficulty of executing this business because the student population is, you know, they're leaving the brick and mortar school. So they're by definition already more mobile. they're running away from something. Some of them might even be homeless, you know? So that's part of the challenge is, you know,

ensuring that like there's compliance and like there's not truancy. Perfect. Let's go to, you know, this is where I think the debate, one of the debates have had, but the big debate I heard when I talk to smarter investors here, right? It's the ultimate outcomes, right? They say, hey, this is a business. We can talk all sorts of things.

You know, I think once people get pretty quickly past the original for-profit parallels. I think people get past that. There are other questions around that. You mentioned enrollment and everything. But the big question I've had debates with is the outcomes, right? Hey, if you're having 100 people learn from home versus 100 people go in person, I think there's a lot of debate among investors of are the outcomes going to be the same

both socially and both, I mean, I can't say I've had teenage kids yet, but I've got cousins. you know, if I sat a teenager at the computer for eight hours or sent them in school, I'm pretty sure they're going to learn more at school. So a lot of people have said, hey, I just don't think the kids are going to learn, ignoring all the emotional components. So I want to ask that question to you, like, what are the results? What are the results of this program? And how do they measure that?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about this. And so, again, like, we have to take into consideration that, like, we're literally talking about 12 grades, right? So the outcomes for a senior, you know, how you're grading well to like someone in kindergarten is going to be like totally different, totally different metrics. You know, one thing, they're these are like compliant, you know, they have to abide by like, you know, the local state regulation. So like all the students are tested, right? So they all have to take standardized tests. And, you know, what you're referring to is that they don't necessarily test as well as, you know, the brick and mortar schools.

although I think it, you know, directionally, it's moving, it's getting better. And, you know, we speak to the company about it and it's very easy to, like, write a hit piece about it that, like, their outcomes are not as good. I think the one thing that makes the most sense, I think the, you know, is that students that leave, they're both mobile, they're going from one school to another, like, by definition, are some, you know, usually behind grade or underperforming. So the right way to look at it, if you don't want to get polemical, is to, like, you know, on a relative basis when a student goes, to, you know, he's probably already behind grade level. Like, is that student based on their own baseline? Like, how are they progressing? But, I mean, it's tough.

Like, you know, their populations, you know, I'm in a lot of these, after the blowup, I spend, you know, looking at these parent forums. And like, you see, like, there's a woman who's like, child, this is chemotherapy, you know. Like, and not saying that that's every case, but, like, you know, a lot of these children have ADHD. Some of them have, like, IEPs, which is a special designation that they have disabilities. they're running away from the public school for a reason because they haven't been successful.

So you're always going to be able to like, you know, it's kind of salacious, you know, show some like statistic that like they're underperforming the brick and mortar school. But it's not the right apples to apples comparison. And eventually like I think the demand from the parents and the students is going to like overcome, you know, the naysairs. I mean, it already is. No, that was great. But if I can just kind of press you on this point. By the way, it was fun to hear you say IEPs. because my wife is an occupational therapist.

So I hear IEPs throwing around all the time. But let me just, I have no disagreement, right? Like, it is tough if you've got, you mentioned some of these kids might be under-homed or 80-2, whatever it is. It is tough if you've got someone, let's say they're in fourth grade, but they're reading at a second-grade level and you're comparing them to the standard of assessing. Like, I have no doubt they're starting from kind of behind the curve. But if you took that fourth grader who's reading at a second-grade level and you put them into this program,

like, do they have statistics on how he's, outcomes would compare to if he had stayed in the same school? Does that make sense? Kind of like a like a like, hey, this guy was 60th percentile. You put him in our thing and he learned at a 65th percentile, or 55th percentile, whatever it is. No, I haven't seen that. And, you know, my suspicion is that, you know, it just really, it's very contextual, it depends on the student, depends on the school, depends on the age, right? Like we're talking about like kids literally from K all the way, through 12. I just think as a final point,

I don't know if this issue is ever going to go away, but I think what has changed has been kind of the C change is like the demand has increased. So like, and usually like, I feel like the regulation follows the demand. And, you know, parents want school choice. So they're going in with open eyes. And it's interesting too.

It's like, you know, like we grew up in an age where, you know, I went to the local public school and never thought twice about it. And like always, like people are increasingly talking about flexing back and forth. It's like, okay, one year I'm going to be like, you know, online, but next year I'll go back to the school. And like, it's kind of like a different paradigm in education. So I think that it's really like a nascent kind of like, you know, industry and like how in, you know, it has to be understood. I think eventually like I would hope that regulators would have more nuanced view of it. And I think they have like, you know, Texas recently passed a bill, which basically in May was like kind of like codifying and like, you know, virtual schools is like just really,

recognizing that they're going to be a part of the school system and like we have to find a way to work with them because, you know, maybe their outcomes aren't going to be as good as brick and mortar schools. Perfect. I forgot that question. What I was referring to there was, you know, the outcomes for online learning overall, just to be clear, it wasn't specifically straight. You mentioned Pearson is the big competitor, you know, 250,000 at stride, to 100,000.000. 25,000 at Pearson, how are these companies competing with each other? I'm the state of New Mexico. I'm putting up an online public system. How do they compete with each other? Because if you kind of think about it, if a state is spending $10,000 per student to go to public school, you put that

student online. I mean, there's a lot less overhead that comes with it online. So you could imagine this being like, if they're doing it on the same per head basis, there's a lot of margin there. And even if you're kind of taking it down, you know, this scales really well. You're having them learn on online courses, not always with an in-person teacher, all that sort of stuff. So I could imagine this being a, the numbers say this is a very good, very good business, by the way, but I want to talk about the competition between firms when they're competing for these projects because, you know, when states put up big RFPs, lots of people are going to come out for this kind of high margin revenue.

Yeah. So, you know, you always talk about like, what does the market not see, you know, that perhaps I'm seeing? And I think this would be a, this is like one of the areas where people don't appreciate how difficult this business is because it is highly regulated and you're taking taxpayer money. So whenever that comes into question, you have to be very compliant and you have to, you know, there's always going to be a lot of people who are going to be chasing, you know, those government contracts. So I think the bigger players and like this is an industry where like, you know, Stride and Pearson

are the biggest. The number three is like, you know, a fraction of the size of Pearson and then the third and fourth are like, you know, fractions of that size. So bottom line is once you contract with the school, I get the sense that it's very sticky. Not that stride has never lost to school. They have 100 in their portfolio and they'll probably, they're going to lose some schools every year in gain schools. But once you're already in there, the reason why it's sticky is like, you know, the whole nature of a school. This year they're already like planning the calendar for next year, right? and students want to have like continuity and you have teachers.

That's the other thing, too. It's not like people just, it needs to be emphasized. It's not a piece of software. Like they have 6,000 teachers that they've hired, you know? Like this is a combination of asynchronous and insynchronous learning. So when you're bidding on a contract, like you just have to be realistic like, you know, how are you going to staff up and how are you going to prove to the regulator that you have systems in place that are going to be able to track truancy, which, you know, I think is the

Achilles heel, like that's the biggest thing. Like, are these students engaged in the platform? And no one does a better job than Shrine. Of course, you know, when you have a big portfolio like that, there's always going to, you know, you can always shine a light on something. But so I get the sense that it's very sticky. They're not necessarily bidding, you know, contracts, taking contracts away from, you know, other ones. Like they're just growing within their own schools. Like the school, some of them are capped. Most of them, you know, increasing are not capped. So they don't need to like take away someone else's school that can just grow within their own No, look, I think the two things that really attracting this idea, three things.

We'll talk valuation a second. But again, I think discussing the business, particularly here, is more interesting than just, hey, it's really cheap, though it is really cheap. The two things are the stickiness, as you mentioned. Like, once you kind of get that contract, it feels like the outcomes would have to be really, really bad because it's hard for me to imagine in the district being like, hey, we're going to go virtual and then taking the virtual option away because, A, virtual is cheaper than having people go in person and you're taking an option way, like, it just seems really hard to go that route.

And as you're saying, I'm not seeing it's impossible, but it feels like that I shouldn't have to be pretty bad for a school to be like, hey, we've had you guys for three years. You know, the people are learning. The students are used to our curriculum. And we're just going to yank all that away for a new curriculum to save. I mean, I'm sure it's some money, but we're going to yank all that away. That feels really, really tough to me. You'd have a lot of upset parents, a lot of bad outcomes, a lot of upset children. again, not impossible, but it feels really sticky to me.

And because it's so much cheaper than in person, the way these schools districts looks, I'm sure it's like, hey, it's $10,000 a kid in person, it's $4,000 if it's online, why are we going to switch to go to $37.50 when it's going to be, like, devastating for the students? So I threw a lot out there. I'll just let you kind of respond to any point I just made. Yeah, I don't think the districts, you know, the money, you know, is clearly cheaper. And depending on the state, how much, you know, depends, like,

how much the brick and mortar school, like, you know, how, but in some states, it's the difference is maybe only like 30% cheaper, which is, you know, I was kind of surprised when I heard that. But I think the point is this business, you know, like I keep on going back to like executing in this business at scale is very difficult. So like I think the biggest risk to stride in terms of these partner, you know, these school boards that they're quote unquote independent boards. And like I've sat in, you know, doing primary research, you know, everything's online. So like every month or every quarter, these boards who just, you know, run the school, I have, like, you know, public sessions. One thing you see when you listen in is that there's just, like, so much complexity.

There's like so many, there's so many balls that they're juggling. And, like, one piece of it is like this IT, you know, and like the IT alone, just like, you know, having like an app and having an online thing. And, you know, it's just like beyond the scope of, you know, any school districts or even charter school. it's just like too hard for them, even to outsource it and buy everything off the shelf and then, like, cobble it together. They don't want to be dealing with that. They're just like trying to like, you know, they're just trying to figure out, like making sure everyone has, you know, all the disabled students are taking care. Like they have to, that's the thing. Like if you're a virtual school, you don't get a pass, you still have to, you have to take all comers. You know,

you can't say no to students that have disabilities. So like, they just have, they're just like frying bigger fish. And so as long as the provider is good enough. I mean, look, this whole thing with, you know, what happened with Strides, LMS was like, clearly like a huge whiff, but like, I think it's very likely that they recover from it. We'll talk about the LMS in a second, remind me, but I just want to hit on a few more points. The other interesting thing to stride to me is, as you mentioned, like individual schools, it's very tough. But you could have met, like, once you do the system, right, the app, all this sort of stuff, you record the classes and everything.

And yes, as you said, like, it's not all literally YouTube videos. like there are in person, not in person, there are like live teacher sessions as well, but a lot of this is fixed costs, right? Developing the app, developing the text app, getting the lesson. The curriculum especially, the curriculum is the most expensive part of it

because like the curriculum has to be custom built per grade for geography, you know, like the Texas standards are different than the Florida standards, you know, not dramatically, but like it has to be able to basically, you know, conform to like the standardized test that they're going to take to, you know, so that's part of the year.

And, you know, an interesting, not to bring politics too much into it, but you look at how you're seeing different states, like really regulate what can and can't be shown. Like, you can imagine that there's some legal liability and there's some real customization of the, uh, the platform's easy. But actually, the point I was driving to was, I'm not saying this is a monopoly winner take all and like no one else can run these, but you can imagine this probably trends. Right now, it's kind of dual-offly-ish-ish between Stride and Pearson, unless I'm mistaken anything. You can imagine how this tends to like two or three big players. It's like, hey, Andrew and Adam aren't exactly going to go do a startup because the tech

costs, the curriculum development, the schmoozing and boozing of the public officials to earn that, like, I can imagine how this tends towards, let's call it oligopoly. And that's kind of interesting there as well. Yeah, definitely. It's all about scale advantages and being able to spread that fixed overhead over as many students as possible. For example, Stride, you know, they offer free tutoring for like second and third graders. English language are in, like I was just thinking about that. Like,

if you're an upstart, like, you can't do that because like you can't afford it. But because Stride has like this huge network and like they can flex this, this staff of 6,000 students, that's like a goody that they can offer, you know, when they're bidding on a contract and say,

hey, we're going to offer this. No one else is going to offer that. And it's almost like, you know, Amazoning effect of the industry. And it becomes just like the biggest ones are able to offer the most and it's a virtuous circle.

I think that's definitely going on. To your tutoring, I mean, I could imagine also, if you look at the website, a chess club, right? That seems silly. But if you're doing an online chess club where there's one moderator or, you know, probably a few moderators, if you're a startup getting one school, that's a big expense, right? Especially if, let's say, 10 of 100 students signed up for it. I don't know. But if you're grabbing it from across the country, you know, you actually like, you can flex it

across a lot more students. So that's interesting. Last thing on the, two last things, actually. First, let's talk about economic sensitivity. Because I can imagine this going any which way. You could say there's no sensitivity. This is public school dependent. It's part of it.

You could say there is some sensitivity. Hey, times get tough and states start looking for budgets left and right, and they just unilateral level. Or you can tell me, hey, it's countercyclical. Times get tough. And states say, hey, let's try to nudge some more students of virtual learning where it's a little bit cheaper. So I'd love to just talk about economic sensitivity right now.

Yeah, so it's not, I don't think, I've never heard that it's countercyclical, but what I have heard is that like, I think almost every single year, like states, including like the great financial crisis, like there was like a bump up in, you know, what their states were willing to pay per pupil. So it just strikes me as like recession resistant. It's almost like, for lack of better word, it's almost like utility. Again, like that's the social contract that we have in the U.S. Is that like if your citizen, like the government provides K through 12 compulsory education. And in fact, if you don't send your kid, you could go to jail. Like in Missouri, there was a famous case for life. So it's like, it's a big deal. And that, you know, until that changes and I don't see that changing any time soon, like that, that's like a big, that's like a big deal. So like the states, again, like, I don't want to get, you know, you want to talk about it being cheaper than Brick and more schools because this kid's education, you know,

so like that's, I don't think you have to come on to that because it's not really about the fact that it's more efficient, although it is, of course, you know, you're scaling these things and it is a cheaper per student cost, especially in, you know, East Coast and West Coast. But again, it's not, yeah, this business is going to do fine in a recession. Look, agreed. I was just wondering, I was more just wondering, hey, am I missing something? And it's actually going to be a little bit more countercyclical. But I'm with you. You don't want to just only talk about costs. Because again, I think the key question that the smart guys I've talked here drive to is, hey, can we trust the outcomes here, right? If the outcomes are,

are just as good as in person, then this is a screaming by, right? If the outcomes, it turns out, you know, are 20% as good as person. I'm just choosing a number. Then this is probably a shorter of a long run because eventually schools are, systems are going to say we can't do this. And if the outcomes, as you said, are very hard to measure, but they're within the realm of reason. They're hard to measure because, you know, people are starting from different areas.

It's probably a good business. So that's last question I want to ask for the business. You know, one of the interesting things is if you live in, I lived in Kenner, Louisiana, right? You knew what school you were zoned for, and it was just kind of, hey, if you're going to public school, that's the public school you're going to. Here, they have a little bit of, you know, I don't think it nationally comes to people. I can sign it for the online school. So they have to do customer acquisition costs. They have to go good. So I just want to ask you, how do they acquire their customers, their students? How do they go about that? And then we can

get into the marketing because the other place, I don't think it's as strong as the outcomes case, but the other place I've heard, and this has reminiscent to the for-profit is, hey, aggressive marketing to people and maybe they don't know what they're signing up for. So through a lot out to you, I'll kind of pause there. Yeah, so, like, I think the funnel, you know, like they start marketing, like, you know, mid-summer, and, you know, I think there's no big secrets here. It's probably a lot of social media, a lot of Facebook, a lot of Instagram. they've gotten much better at, you know, in terms of, they're starting to get a lot more leverage on their SG&A and the top line, you know, which indicates that like a lot of, they, the company claims, you know, it's mostly sold through word of mouth, like one student finds out about it. Like, a lot of people still don't know that it exists. They think, like, they know about work from home, but like school from home, like, what? Like, it sounds like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Like, that really exists. But it's like, yeah, it does, you know. And increasingly, it

make sense for a lot more people. And 10 years from now, that's my bet. Like, I just feel like this is a business where I could see being much bigger 10 years from now, more accepted, you know, with the next generation, just like, and look, you brought this up at the beginning of the podcast. Like, what about social outcomes, which is, of course, is critical? So that piece has to be solved for. So, like, you know, there's different approaches.

So, like, these schools do have, like, some of them, again, depending on geography, we'll have, like, meetups, you know, they try to facilitate in-person interactions. but, you know, like, that's clearly something that needs, you know, parents need to, like, step in, and it's more important, you know, in the elementary, you know, high school people are more independent. They can probably figure out their own. But again, like, I feel like a lot of people who are choosing this option, like, this is like, like, they're getting bullied in school. Like, that is the number one reason that you hear. I mean, it maybe that was pre-pendemic, but now maybe there's, like, you know, different reasons. And it's like, socially, like, they're just, like,

grateful that they have this option because they're just, like, they're just, like, then I have to, like, you know, meet the high school bully in the hall again and, you know, get their lunch tolton, you know? You know, and it's funny you say this because, again, I do a half day of research, but I'm really interested in this one. So I've got some expert interviews. Bullying is the one that comes up so much. And I actually thought it would be the reverse. I thought it would be the reverse. I thought super rural would be the most likely one.

And then religious preferences, learning disabilities, I thought would be another big one. And then I actually thought instead of bullying, it would be like the bully, right? Somebody who's been expelled or somebody who's having a lot of behavioral issues. And they kind of at home might be a more structured environment. I don't know if that's true or not. But bullying came up a lot. Like how free? So I'm just a little surprised by that.

And maybe it's because I don't think I was that. Emily bullied in grammar school despite my nerdy taste. Like is it it's that common where somebody's getting bullied so badly? They're like, I don't want to be around anyone. I can't like transfer. I just want to do this from home. Yeah, so I'm in these like parent forms and it's just you see like my second grader, she's miserable, like she's getting every day, she's either getting physically assaulted or just like she can't take it anymore, we're going online. Like you do see a lot of that. And look, kids are cruel. You know, I have six kids. It makes, I'm not surprised by any of this. Like I just see like, you know, this sibling on sibling sibling crime and it's just like you can imagine what happened. I know, I went to public school.

It was like crazy stuff happened, but, you know. It makes me sad that kids are cruel and that it comes to that. But I just, as I've said on the pot, I just had my second, and she's just turned seven weeks old and it's been rough. And you said six, and my brain froze for a second. Like all the gears, if you think about the gears turning clocks out, all the gears stops, a little sand went in there, six of them, my Lord.

Andrew, you could do it. It's all about operating leverage, you know? You play zone and then. One of my friends texts him, he has four, and he was like, look, the hardest shift was from one to two. After you go from one's two, it's all downhill from there. So that made me feel a little bit better. But look, I think we've done, I want to go to the numbers in a second.

But I think we've actually done a really nice job talking through the different levers and everything. And again, I think this is one where people hear the numbers jump out at you. But I think you have to understand which good. Anything else do you think we should have mentioned or we gloss over? Anything we should be talking about more of the business stock? I'm shocked you haven't wanted to dig into the 60% drop in the stock. I mean, the market is like telling us something. Well, so I do have notes on that.

So what Adam is referring to is in October, they come out with earnings, and I'll let Adam give all the details and everything. They come out with earnings. The stock is, it drops 50, 60 percent overnight. A week or two later, this is a $3 billion company. A week or two later, they say, hey, we're coming out with a $500 million stock repurchase. And I think I was getting there when I kept saying, hey, this is cheap, this cheap. But before we even get to this cheap, why don't we talk about the big blowup in October? or what drove that why a lot of people think this is an overreaction, all that.

Yeah. So like they're on a, their fiscal year ends in June because they want to have their fiscal first quarter correspond to like the September quarter because that's when the academic calendar is. So they never. One of the only good reasons to have an off cycle fiscal year, by the way. I know. It's so annoying.

So they just, so they reported their fiscal first quarter in October because that was a September quarter. And that's where they come out, they never give guidance before. And they come out with like, you know, they figure out like how many kids signed up for school. And then it's like a very transparent, predictable business because like it's a fixed price. And then you have like your census and there's some attrition. And you basically know what you're going to earn the rest of the year. So they had given back in August when they reported their fiscal fourth quarter, like even though their policy is like never, never going to give guidance because like it's still fluid.

And, you know, over the summer they're aggressively recruiting for the first time since I've been following. the company, it's been a long time, they kind of said, like, demand is so unprecedented that, like, we're going to do at least 10 to 15 percent enrollment growth, which was, you know, pretty out of character. And I think the market, the market understandably got very excited, but, like, wasn't guidance. It was just like, you know, when the count date comes in September, that's what they expected to have. And incidentally, they did, they came at the lower end of the guidance.

They printed 11% enrollment growth when they reported in September. But what happened is the CEO said they lost 10 to 15,000 enrollments because of problems with a new IT system, which they had implemented over the summer. And so basically there's two pieces of software. Before that, you know, they've been doing this for 25 years. They had, they've been using kind of custom build stuff. They decided to upgrade. This is like an upgrade to an off-the-shelf learning management.

system called Canvas, which is like the best in North America. It wasn't like they were going El Chippo. They also like upgraded their, it's called the student information system, which is basically the onboarding. It's a program called Power School. You know, they ran pilots, but whatever, it was disaster. Like they, look, everybody says short somebody with an SAP implementation. This is, this is an SAP implementation on the school side, right? It was so bad that like they totally, you know, like all this momentum that they had. experience. I mean, I was just looking back last year, like, I kind of forgot about it. Like, this was literally, they were a rule of 40 company. Like last year, they printed 24% adjusted

even in margins and 18% top line growth. And it was like, it was like a breakout year last year. So you kind of, you have a breakout year and you give the soft guidance. You know, you got a lot of momentum coming into the stock. And then you have a misstep. It's like, watch out below, you know. And so like, you know, we can speculate about, it felt very overdone. Like this wasn't like a balance sheet issue. This wasn't like, you know, allegations of fraud. This wasn't like something existential. So it felt very overdone.

Maybe it was tax loss selling. Who knows, right? Like it's very hard to know why it was so bad. My personal theory is that the market, you know, going back to the for profit education, you know, people kind of like in this industry, you're guilty until proven innocent. And so there, you know, I've been looking around like Bleaker Street came out with a, with a pretty decent short report on Prodocio, tickers PRDO, talking about, like, they have a real problem with something called Go Students. And it's like kind of what we were talking about before,

like the post-secondary community schools, community colleges, they get Title IV funding from the government, which basically means the government, and part of the little quirk of title for funding is the government pays for the tuition, but they also give you like a $2,000 stipend on top of like the $10,000 tuition. So there's literally crime syndicants that. that have popped up that enroll fall students in these schools. And it's rampant at community colleges. Like, I've seen reports. There's a crazy amount of, you know, where they're just,

and they're called stipend skimmers. So they're skimming this stipend, enrolling these students and trying to, but like that doesn't exist in K through 12. There's no stipend, you know? So it's a totally different funding mechanism. So when I see, you know, I see the stock selling off by 60%, like you have to respect the market. And like, I feel like that panic and fear was probably,

people think that this is another one of those shady, like, for-profit education companies that's going to go out of business. And it just, like, feeds on itself. And like, but it's still, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Like, that's my best explanation. No, I think you're right, though. I'd love to get your thoughts on. So around the same time, they lose the New Mexico, there's a New Mexico contract they lose, right? Which is, I think it's only 4,000 students. But I'm looking right now, you know, NBC, the news on this, like bleeds out over the year, so it's hard to say exactly when all the different pieces come. But, you know, I'm looking right now, mid-October, there's an NBC peak. No, no, so by the way, the timing is critical because the New Mexico thing I was going to get to

that. And like you said, it kind of bleeds out over the year. So this whole New Mexico thing, I think the timing, it's important to understand the timing. So there was, there's a school in, sorry about that. I hit my video. There's a school that they had in Western New Mexico and rural New Mexico called the Gallup from the Kimley School. They had 4,000 students. And there was a contract, this goes back to April of 25. So there was a contract dispute with the superintendent of that school. There's a

whole story. He actually applied for a job at Stride. And then he didn't get the job. And then he followed the lawsuit. So like that's, you know, Stride's claiming there was an ethics violation. But he, whatever, like he followed a lawsuit. They lost that school. Now, this is very interesting. Stride was able to stand up another school in the state of New Mexico and literally took all those students. So it just shows you how this business works. Is that they have multiple schools in each state? So like in the census, like in the October, the quote unquote missed had nothing to do with the Gallup and Kinley School. And okay, so that's ongoing litigation and it's serious.

You know, like we can talk about it and go in, you know, what I think, why I'm not so concerned about it. But I just feel like that was in the back of people's heads along with. with like, you know, the short sellers that have come after other for-profit schools. There's also been other short, you know, fuzzy panic came out with a short report in 2024, which was about like this COVID funding that they claimed was like representing 30% of strides, you know, even died. It was just like totally wrong. It was just like, it was like 1%, you know? So like I feel like it feeds on itself. When you have a stock and it's down not much and it's just like, people are just going to like, yeah, forget about it. I don't want to deal with it.

No, look, again, I think a real, both the real opportunity, the real reason this could be an opportunity and some of the risk is exactly what you're saying. Like, this is, it is not the for-profit community college schools that were, you know, just rife with all the sort of stuff. But it's very close, right? It's online schooling. You're getting it from public schools. Like, I can see how people are, I ask you a question on marketing, right? I can see how people say, oh, it gets very close to that. But, you know, I did not know that all the New Mexico students enrolled. But also along the lines of the for-profit risk, like you look at the NBC article that I talked about, the headline is, a virtual education company was a lifeline to our rural district. Now they're at war, dueling lawsuits, drawn government scrutiny. Like, you see all that, and you do see the rhymes, and I think there is, like, perhaps rightly, investors are scared of their own shadow here.

Like, you hear government suing learning company for outcomes, and you say, oh, my God, I was right. It was for profit all over again, right? But let's start with our downside, right? Again, like, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but like, this is actually a very interesting test case in terms of like understanding the durability and anti-fragility of the business model. Like in the worst case, like let's say like this, this, they lose this lawsuit, which, you know, I don't think it's going to happen. If you actually read the lawsuit, there's literally like, I think they have very, you know, they have very strong defense against most of their, you know, most of the claims. But like, it's not, you know, they have multiple schools. in each state. And so, like, that's an issue with one school. Like, I don't see, like,

contagion that, like, you know, people who are happy in Oklahoma, like, they're going to, you know, I just don't see that happening that, like, the boards are going to suddenly say, hey, you know, like, what would happen in New Mexico? And just one other thing, it's important, like, where there's so much fear, like, you know, if you read the actual lawsuit, like, it was like 21 students, they claim that were, you know, the head. And it wasn't that, like, you know, Stride was hiding, like, these students had like, there's like a certain withdrawal criteria, like once you're absent for 10 days, you have to report. And it's like these students withdrew like in October, November and like Stride told the district

in December, you know, it wasn't like they were hiding. They, you know, but whatever. It's like, it seems to be more nuanced than like, you know, existential. One more question on the New Mexico lawsuit. You know, New Mexico, again, one of the top things with these is everything is not just going to play out along the, as you know I said, The data can be cut up a lot of different ways. It's not going to be played out and draw.

If you get into a fight here, it's going to be a fight at the public school boards. And anybody who's watching one of those YouTube videos knows, like these public schools, it's passionate, it can get heated, all that sort of stuff. The New Mexico, when they break the Stride contract, they publish a debt that says, hey, you know, we gave Shride the contract, we gave them every chance. The outcomes were terrible, all this sort of stuff. How do you or how a Stride kind of responded to the New Mexico? Like, I'm looking at one deck that says, hey, you know,

you know, reading proficiency went from state average, like, 27% or something for the stride students in 2021 to 22%. Like, it's just like falls up cliff. How have they kind of responded to that allegation in Mexico? I think it goes back to what we said before that you have to use the proper baseline. I mean, this argument is almost like, you know, imagine like, you know, a person, you know, a CEO of a hospital system and he's like evaluating the different, you know, divisions. And he's like, oh my gosh, look how bad the outcomes are in the ER and intensive care. Like they had like, look at the morbidity and like look at orthopedic. Well, no, like there's just like a different people who are coming to like the emergency

room that are getting like plastic surgery. So like the students that are coming to a virtual public school, like they're not like, they're running away from the public school and they're usually like, you know, if not one grade behind, multiple grade levels behind and they have other trauma and learning disabilities and everything. So it's like, show me an apples to apples comparison. and, you know, and then, like, we can have something to talk about. But until I see that, it just seems like polemics.

That analogy was so good. Did you come up with that off the top of your head? That's what happens when you have a big position go against you and you think about it all the time. You know, so it's just trying to like. If I take nothing away from this podcast, and I'm taking quite a bit away, but I'm stealing that analogy. It was so good. Like, yeah, the outcomes up the ER if you compare them to the pediatrician. Oh, so, so, so good.

One more thing. I had one bull talk to me, and he said, hey, one thing I'm concerned about here is AI risk, right? Like, right now it looks great, but if you run AI for three years, say, could you have AI custom generating people programs and like running this for a fraction of the price? I will bias the witness a little bit and say I think they're living in a science fiction world. But I do think it's worth asking the question. You know, you could imagine maybe AI is not writing all of it, but we mentioned, hey, going from Texas to Florida, you need to customize the curriculum. Maybe you get the standard curriculum and AI is really good at customizing it, so it brings the moat down. But I'd love to just ask about AI risk or AI opportunity here.

Yeah, I heard a line from the economist Tyler Cowan recently. He said, AI isn't going to take your job. It's the human that knows how do you use AI better than you that's going to take your job. So I think it's more of that. Like, the AI is just going to make this offering better, but like, I don't see how you get around having, first of all, it's regulated. It's a teacher. So, like, anything that's regulated is going to, like, adopt AI, you know, the last, you know, because they're, and it's taxpayer funded. And, yeah.

So, like, I think it's going to be on a lad. But, like, there's just so many pieces here that, you know, like, you literally, it's an entire school, you know, like, it has the logo. And they have, you know, cap and gowns, you know, they have graduation. So, and they have guidance counselors. So, you know, and then a big piece of it is the curriculum. Like, Stride pays, like, you know, $60,70 million a year of curriculum costs where, like, they're constantly upgrading the curriculum and making it better. So, you know, who knows, but, like, I feel like it will be a net beneficiary.

I think it could probably help them on their cogs. And I think they're going to be able to incorporate it. But, like, you're never going to get around having a physical teacher. Like parents, like, you go on these, you know, parent forums. Like, they're calling their teachers. You know, you want to speak to your teacher, your kid's teacher. Like, you know, like the kids, it's just like, that's what we're used to. So, you know, right now we're still trying to simulate the school that we grew up with.

And like, I think that's what, you know, certainly this generation of parents feel most comfortable with. They want like a throat to choke, you know? And, you know, AI is just going to, you know, probably make the curriculum side of it, like, better. Who knows? Perfect. We mentioned alluded to the numbers here. And as I said, look, we're almost up our mark. I think this is one of the case where I think understanding the business and the talks is much more important.

I think that's probably always more important, but here particularly, because let's just jump into the numbers. I think it'll hit people over the head really quickly with the numbers. I mean, where do you want to start? Like, I mean, it just. You pick. I mean, look, I think what's most, you know, most interesting, it's just like it gushes free cash flow. I would point to two things. Number one, like free cash flow, you could just look, you know, I just use like TTF.

like free cash flow to EV and it's like, you know, it's solid, you know, solid double digit. But again, remember, this was like a rural 40 company last year. So that screams way too cheap for me. The other thing I would point out is in terms of, you know, operating leverage, I feel like, you know, they've done an amazing job on the gross margin. You've gotten really good, you know, like five years ago, like gross margin was like in the low 30s. Now it's in the high 30s. Adjusted even a margin has like almost double, you know, in the last five years.

So basically what you're seeing and like just to like, you know, what's going on there? So like in 2018, someone just showed this to me. They had 75, you know, they roughly had call it, yeah, 2018. They basically went from 75 schools in 30 states. They really haven't expanded the states. It's basically red, blue states, except for California. So they had 75 schools in 30 states. And last year, they added 25 schools, you know, they so call it 100 schools in 30 states.

But like they've 2x the amount of students, more than 2x the amount of students that are enrolled. So basically what you're seeing is that they're just getting a lot more efficiency. Now they are constrained by, you know, there's certain like student teacher ratios that like each state has its own. It's obviously going to be higher than a brick and motor school. But the point is, they're showing you that, like, you know, the flywheel is working. They're able to spread the fixed costs against a larger and larger base of students and generate, you know, better economic returns for shareholders. No, that's great. I mean, that's great.

But the numbers I was really hitting to is, look, this is a $3 billion market cap company right now. You know, the stock price is approaching $70 per share, so roughly a $3 billion stock price. if you go to 2000, the most recent completed fiscal year, 425 million in CFO cash flow from operations, about 50 million in mainly capitalized offer expense, right? So that's 375 million, and that is free cash flow to equity, right? Distribute free cash. That's what I was, that's what I use. Yeah. So you're buying it for nine-ish times free cash flow to equity. They have about as much cash as debt on their balance sheet, maybe a little more cash than debt. So nine-ish-time- -rich-touch-free cash with equity, probably cheaper than that once you do the cash flow.

I mentioned $3 billion market cap. They're buying back $500 million per November after the big stock drop. And as you've said, until very recently, this was a business, you know, they have a slide in their debt from before. This was growing 18% per year over the past five years, right? So not only is it trading sub 10x free cash flow of equity, it's growing. So you can, so you get like the double, if this returns to growth, especially, you get the double whammy of great business, growing crazy quickly, trading at a 10% free cash flow yield, buying back stock. I mean, that's like, that's what you dream of as an investor, right? That sounds like a green, black, special situation. Yeah, that's exactly right. I could

have said it better. What, we've covered a lot here. Let me end with this question. Every business has risks. We've talked about a lot of them. You know, what risk do you think the market is overestimating here? And what risk do you think the market is kind of underestimating that keeps you up maybe a little bit more at night than the average person who's looking at the stop? So I think overestimating that like kind of the growth algorithm has been broken. I think that, you know, now this year, you know, I'm not making a call like on next Porter's earnings, you know, like, you know, could be we're going to have to wait until the

next school year because there really was an issue. Like they, like you said, you should always short the SMP and what. And that's exactly what happened here. But I feel like, you know, I just don't buy it. I'm seeing so many other data points that point to like the health of the underlying market and demand. And so like to think because, you know, they missed, you know, one school. It was just a quarter of the whole year.

Like, you know, that would call into question the entire opportunity just seems like overdone. On the other side, like the risk that keeps me up at night. I think there's always, you know, like, look, it's always, I think it's execution, you know, like, again, this is like a regulated business. And I feel like ultimately it benefits those who are bigger and stronger because it just becomes a game of regulatory capture. But like, you know, stride will only survive, you know, I want to invest in something that's high quality and durable. And like this goes back to the point about, you know, like your friends that you're speaking to about the outcomes. the outcomes and mostly like it's compliance because like kids have to be in school but like you know if you're if you're straight you know legislate you want to make sure like are these kids actually

logging in are they participating are they being tracked and so I feel like stride is doing a better job of tracking them than anyone else is but like that doesn't mean that like you know it's it's it's tough you know like that's like the dynamic in school like everyone's trying to like you know um cheat the system right like that's the nature of it but like I think they're doing a better job than anyone, they're certainly spending more money on it, right? Like, no one else is coming close to their level of, like, you know, reporting and systems and compliance. I don't think this is the case at all, but one risk that does, like, keep me up a little bit

is, you know, when Carvana, when it looked like they were going to fail, right? It was like, hey, every online seller of use cars has failed. And when it looked like Carvana was going to fail, I think the answer would have been, hey, you just can't make online selling of used cars work for X, Y, Z reason. I don't know why that was. Like, maybe Carbonin should have failed, maybe it's in, but I don't know why you couldn't, but there are some businesses where like, hey, you just can't do these economically. And I think one risk that would keep me up at, I think they've disproven it at this point,

but would just be, hey, Adam Andrews talks about all these reasons why virtual is important, doing online, all this sort of stuff. But maybe you just can't make the outcomes resemble anything close to what in person is. And even if that's the case, you know, as we talked about for the bullying, for the rural purpose, for the religion, maybe there's still reasons to do it. But that would be the one thing if somebody came out with like a definitive study that said, hey, unless you have such overwhelming health concerns, you have to. The outcomes are just so much better in person. You just need to send your kids in person. That would be kind of the one thing I would worry about.

Yeah. No, I hear that. I mean, I think at the end of the day, I heard another blogger, just to bring a reference from a totally different industry. He was talking about like cannabis reform. And they made the point, which I thought was, you know, very insightful that like demand drives regulation. And so he was talking about like, you know, Trump rescheduling marijuana to, you know. And so I say, you know, as long as the demand is there, so then I feel like the regulation will catch up with it. And so, you know, if I can leave you with anything from my primary research is that like there's just a ton of demand.

Like there was a bill in May that Governor Abbott signed in Texas and like the lead. sponsor, he basically said that he thinks that virtual public education is going to, like, double in Texas to, you know, from like 52,000 to 100,000, you know, from now until 2028. Like, that's just like one data point in a very important state. That's, like, I think, one of strides most important states. But, like, I just feel like as long as the demand is there and, like, parents are going in with open eyes and students are and, like, you know, like, that will eventually win out

over, you know, this legitimate argument. but like it's kind of not a legitimate argument because it's it's like it's somewhat polemical it's trying to you know stick it to the virtual public schools you know they're enrolling weaker students it's not fair i like that and the other thing that strikes me is here like look it's passionate voter groups is what you want to worry for and let's hypothetically say i'm sending my kids in person no matter what right i don't care if you have a virtual policy or not but if you want to send your kids virtually and the district is not allowing you, or they're not funding it, you're basically a one-issue voter, right?

So you've got a small, let's say we use 5% way early in the country. Even if it's 5% of population, if you've got 5% that is voting almost as this is a one-issue voter, like what politician in their right mind isn't going to do the calculus to say, oh, my God, we need to make this an offering, you know? So I think you've got that. Oh, one last question. Sorry to spring this one on you, but it was something I thought of,

But teachers unions are very, very powerful, right? And one area I could see pushback is a teacher union saying, hey, you're basically going to, I don't know if they're unionizing to draw jobs at learn or not, but there's going to be less teachers per student online. Like there has to be. Is there any union pushback to doing this? So two points. Like since I've been following, that used to be a huge issue. Like that, you know, the unions were very against this and very against school choice.

in general. I think that like totally changed after COVID. You know, it's like, it's almost like this was, you know, a must have. Like, you have to have like a reasonable virtual online public school option, you know, God forbid that COVID happens, it got, whatever it is. So like, I think the teacher, that kind of like quieted the teacher unions, but they're still lurking there, you know, like, it's, they're very political, they're well funded and, you know, they're very against school choice. The second, the second point I would make is, you know, Stride actually does have some unionized teachers, I think in California. So it's not like it's totally not unionized.

But, you know, that's a real concern. You know, who wants to have enemies? But, like, it's just a reality. This is controversial. Perfect. Adam, hey, you've done great work. I don't know if we mentioned earlier or not the finalist for the sum zero idea of the year award with this very pitch.

So if people are listening to that, they'll get a preview. But congrats on that, man. That's awesome. I think you should win. I don't know anything about the other two, but I think you should win. Thank you. Thank you. But we've covered all.

a lot here. Just last thing. Anything we didn't hit? Anything you think we should hit harder? Anything else? No, I think that was right. This was really good. Again, you did a great job with this idea.

Super well thought out. If nothing else, I'm stealing the outcomes in the ER office are worse than the pediatricians. But this was awesome. Thanks for coming on for the first time and looking forward to having you get in the near future. Great. Thanks. A quick disclaimer. Nothing on this podcast should be considered an investment advice.

Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.