Public Comps: How we get our SaaS data

A frequently asked question we get for Public Comps is: how do we get our data? How are we able to have companies like Datadog on our platform right when the company releases its S-1 or have an updated filing for Zoom the moment it comes out?

The short answer: my co-founder Howard and I scrape or manually enter data from the SEC filings.

We do not pay for or rely on any 3rd party vendor for financial data for Public Comps other than https://iexcloud.io/ for a company’s ticker price to calculate market cap.

On reason why we don’t rely on 3rd party data is that we cannot control data quality and sometimes the data is off by a lot. Here’s an example of Yahoo Finance classifying Slack as having an enterprise value of $4.93b (a quick scan on Google search shows that’s clearly not the case) in August 2019. Investors cannot tolerate inaccurate public company data especially when we’re making high-stakes buying/selling or valuation decisions on the data!

For our historical financials, we scrape the data directly from the SEC filings so a company’s S-1, 10-K, 10-Q or Press Release (8-K). We’re able to get non-GAAP metrics like net dollar retention, free cash flow, or ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) by reading a company’s investor presentation or 8-K.

Our data process is a combination of manual data entry and scrapping via our own internal algorithms. Howard & I manually check the data once we scrape the data to make sure the data we get is clean and accurate. Here’s how our data operations process works.

Since we only focus on the top 50 or so Public Software companies, Howard & I believe we can do what doesn’t scale: relying on good old fashioned hard work of manually reviewing fillings and putting in the data into our system.

We believe data quality and speed is one of our advantages and to achieve that, we just have to roll up our sleeves and invest the time each quarter to input data.

Questions? Feel free to reach out to team@publiccomps.com.