SentinelOne, Inc. (NYSE:S) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Henderson: Great. Thank you so much. You gave a guide — preliminary guide, I guess, is the right way to say it for FY 2024, 50% ARR growth. The question I have for you is really without giving a forecast, can you give us some sense of the way you are thinking about the OpEx spend in that environment, will you still produce at a 50% type growth rate, the same or a similar degree of leverage or do you think the leverage becomes a little bit more muted as a result of the slower growth before the reacceleration?

Dave Bernhardt: We think that the ARR, let’s call it, tentative guidance for next year is really a floor. When I think about it, we believe it’s conservative. We are looking at it as something we can build from. In terms of our OpEx spend, we have always said and you have definitely seen this over the past couple of quarters where we beat by 17% and 14% in terms of operating margins. A lot of our spend is highly elective and we will invest when it makes sense and we will pull back when it doesn’t. We are always going to map towards our long-term projections in terms of profitability. So if you look, we have made great strides in the years past. We basically cut down our losses by about half every year and I would anticipate that to continue into next year. Our long-term goals and our path to that is unchanged, no matter what the growth is.

Alex Henderson: The second question I’d like to ask is, can you talk a little bit about the linearity of demand over the course of the quarter? It seems like business is really decelerating very sharply from September to October and then October into November, broadly. Is that consistent with what you are seeing or is the resigning giving you some variance from that? Thanks.

Tomer Weingarten: What we are seeing is that a lot of the linearity — generally, linearity is something that is also under our control. So when we look at our deal inspections, when we dive deep into what we see in the pipeline, we reckon that at the end of the day, a lot of the ability to progress linearity lies within our hand. It’s something that we can, to an extent, mitigate by just performing better and it’s something that as we kind of enter Q4, we see it as something that is much healthier than what we have seen in previous quarters. Some of it is also our changes. What we are doing to actually make sure we can achieve linearity even under decelerating macro conditions. So to us right now, we feel pretty confident in the guide that we gave for Q4. To us it embodies every factor that we have seen in the past couple of quarters, and once again, we feel, given our seasonality, given our linearity is something that we can stand behind.

Alex Henderson: Great. Thanks so much for taking the question.

Operator: Our next question comes from Hamza Fodderwala with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hamza Fodderwala: Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. A couple of questions. Tomer, I think, you alluded to some deals that slipped out of Q3, but closed in fiscal Q4 and these were some pretty large deals. Can you help us quantify how much those deals contributed or would have contributed to Q3? And then secondly, for Dave, you mentioned, operating profitability in fiscal 2024. I just want to be clear, is that for the full year of fiscal 2024 and would you expect free cash flow breakeven to proceed that by about four quarters? Thank you very much.

Tomer Weingarten: When we look at the deals that slipped, several millions closed in the days that follow. To us we kind of saw two different dynamics. One are these deals that slip. They contribute somewhat to the next quarter. But I think what is safe to assume is that now we are seeing this as more of a part of our business and not just slip deals. The second one we are seeing and oddly enough, we have actually added more and more large deals this quarter than ever before, more large logos than ever before. But at the same time, deal sizes have changed in nature given to the pressures on budget. So, all in all, we kind of feel like we are recalibrating around the new realities in our market. But once, again, we feel highly confident that we can continue to operate in this environment.

Dave Bernhardt: And Hamza, to answer your second question, we have talked about timing of free cash flow, in creating free positive cash flow. We are still expecting that to happen at the end of next fiscal year and then what we are hoping for and really working to achieve is how to get breakeven in fiscal year 2025. So the following year. So we do expect free cash flow to hit before profitability and then those two will be much more mapped together.

Hamza Fodderwala: Thank you.

Tomer Weingarten: Okay.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Jonathan Ho: Hi. Good afternoon. Just wanted to start out with, maybe a little bit of additional color on how you think about driving more productivity out of your existing sales teams, while also driving this additional cost savings. I just want to understand how do you think about sort of balancing that effort and your confidence of all around being able to achieve both?