Leigh Drogen, Estimize CEO, joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss his outlook for tech in 2021 and which companies will keep up the momentum they saw in 2020.
Video Transcript
– We talk a lot about tech because it is so crucial to our lives, so much so during this pandemic. But the future, let’s take a look at the tech outlook with Leigh Drogen, Estimize CEO, joining us right now. And the focus on 2021, Leigh– The companies that brought us to this point that we’ve been celebrating this year, will we be cheering next year, or is there growth trajectory done as we get out of the pandemic?
LEIGH DROGEN: Well, we’re looking in a couple of different groups there. The first group are those SaaS service companies that we’ve relied on so much this year. And some of them kind of operate in the background. But if you think about the growth in Shopify and Twilio and these companies that drive all of the internet products that we use and get us the physical products that we’ve bought this year, we don’t see the growth in those companies taking a step back.
And when we look at the estimates on the Estimize platform out, you know, three, four quarters, if there was going to be a big shift in the growth of those companies or consumer spend significantly impacting the companies that those companies provide services to, you would see the estimate growth kind of stalling out. But we’re actually seeing those estimates grow significantly. Over the last two months, we’ve seen Shopify estimates go up 15% on the revenue side. So we continue to believe that we’re going to see a lot of growth next year in those companies.
Now the other interesting set are the social media companies. And that’s where you may see some significant reversion in the revenue growth of those platforms as everybody gets out of their houses this summer with the vaccine. You may see less time spent on those platforms. And the comps for those companies are going to be really tough because we were all basically sitting inside our homes last spring into last summer. And so as we come around the turn here, those stocks may have a difficult time dealing with earnings reports that aren’t as good respectively relative to last year.
– And to get into more specifics about what you’re talking about there, with consumer behavior pretty much getting back to normal with hopefully tens of millions of Americans, you know, getting vaccinated into the spring and into the summer, what do you think that means for stocks such as Uber, Zoom, and DoorDash?
LEIGH DROGEN: Yeah, those are also companies that may have a hard time next year as consumer behavior normalizes. In terms of DoorDash, we’ve already seen the stock get sold off the IPO. And that’s again because the comps are going to be really tough as everybody goes back to traveling this summer, that we all go back to restaurants, so that’s not a name that I would be heavily invested in here.
Zoom is an interesting one, where you’re in more of a super secular growth in remote work. Now, I think what’s happening here is there’s some of the stock was definitely very richly valued as well as traders investors getting ahead of, potentially, people taking a little bit of a step back off those platforms this summer.
I think the other reason that it may have, may be a little weak here over the last couple of months and going forward is because 2021 is going to be the year when we probably see augmented reality start to take over from staring at 2D screens. It’s really tough to stare at a 2D screen all day when you’re doing call, after call, after call.
And remote work is only going to accelerate here as companies realize that this hasn’t hurt them. In fact, for many companies, they’re going to benefit physically. We’re going to get new products, and those products may disrupt something like Zoom.
– What’s going to happen to Twitter? Forgive me for going old school here, but we’re going to have a change in administration. We’re not going to have the president, perhaps, you know, screeching as much. He might even get kicked off the platform, some people speculate. So what’s the future for that social media and the Facebooks of the world as well?
LEIGH DROGEN: You know, and it’s funny. The regime change concept gets brought up with Twitter a lot. And year after year, it just doesn’t seem to matter in one direction or the other. Now, Twitter definitely benefited, like other social media companies, from the pandemic, in a sense. But really what investors are looking at Twitter for are can they develop ancillary and secondary, kind of, lines of what people are interested in on the platform.
And those really revolve around, and the sentiment for the stock revolves a lot around specific events. Are there a ton of people paying attention to the Super Bowl? Are they commenting on it? Because these things happen every single year, and so investors want to see that they’re constantly building momentum around those conversations. And I don’t see the end to the pandemic necessarily impacting that.
And Twitter has been able to increase kind of its mindshare around those events over time. Obviously, it’s been rocky. It’s been up and down for them. But overall, over the long term, it has been up. So I don’t see the Trump Administration going away as being such a severe issue for Twitter.
– All right. Leigh Drogen is the CEO from Estimize. We appreciate your being here, and we want to wish you a happy, healthy, and safe new year.
