I really like Dropsuite's CEO Charif, who comes across as a very straight shooter.

He strikes me as very customer focused, with their solutions aiming to solve genuine issues for customers. There appear to be genuine tailwinds for the sector too, and he seems to be thinking well beyond the next reporting period.

A few comments underscored the discipline in capital allocation decisions. There's a big pile of cash that is there waiting to be deployed, but they have walked away from a few opportunities (usually a good sign of a discerning buyer) and it's very much about building complimentary offerings aligned with the core value prop.

As he emphasised last year when we spoke with him, they were focused on viability and cash flows "before it was in vogue" and plan to remain self funded going forward.

I thought his response to the potential threat of Microsoft's backup solution was sound, and pretty much matched with the observations made by other Strawman members. It certainly doesn't strike me as an existential threat in any way.

There is, or at least was, a lot of hype around SaaS and the associated economics on the ASX, but this is a genuine SaaS business with all the characteristics you like to see. Not just sticky, high margin revenue, but excellent cash conversion.

And, of course, he's very aligned, with over 33m shares he's easily one of the largest individual shareholders, and is very long standing having been in the role for over ten years.

At 6x ARR, or roughly 80x EV/EBITDA, shares are hardly cheap in any traditional sense. But the growth is strong and consistent, and there's a long runway ahead.

Disc. Held (but not as much as i'd like)

I have to say that I found the Dropsuite CEO -- Charif Elansari -- to be quite impressive.

He struck me as having a clear focus on what advantages the business has, and seems to be striking the right balance between sustainability/viability and investing for growth.

At a high level, I like:

• Strong industry tailwinds, with the industry set to grow at attractive double digit rates for many years. Dropsuite seems very well positioned in their chosen niche.
• Highly scalable, with the business leveraging the growth of their Managed Service Providers (MSPs) -- in both scale and number -- to drive revenue growth.
• Extremely low customer churn, and >120% revenue retention as clients add more modules.
• Expanding product set, with a resolute focus on making life as easy as possible for their MSPs
• Strong focus on retaining key engineering talent, and building long term incentives
• Chariff has been associated with the business from a very early stage, starting himself as an angel investor in 2011. His passion was pretty clear.
• Rock solid balance sheet (although expect some of this cash to be used for acquisitions)
• Unapologetic and consistent in investing for growth, but with a focus on return on invested capital.
• CEO is the 5th largest shareholder, with 4.3% ownership of the company.
• CEO has deep industry experience (was a founding member of Google Singapore)

Shares are presently on about 6x ARR, which isnt too excessive given the growth and runway (ARR was up 68% over the year and 13% from preceding quarter).