ARR

| startups | biz | bullshit |

*raspy old man voice*

Back in my day ARR used to mean something.

Three key components:

I have no idea what ARR means now.

First we saw usage-based-pricing models touting eARR where the e = expected (I always joke that the e stands for Enron). Now we have all these AI companies changing the A from annual to annualized which is not the same thing.

This is how the market collapses because we’re making decisions based on revenue multiples but the formula for ARR has reached its peak bullshit level and is only rising up from here.

Modern Definition of ARR

Annual12 Recurring3 Revenue4


  1. expected ↩︎

  2. annualized ↩︎

  3. we expect some people to stick around for longer than a month ↩︎

  4. we’ve sent an invoice to our customers finance team with net 90 terms and they assure us they’ll pay us soon ↩︎

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Hacking Workshop for September 2026

I'm pleased to announce that David Rowley will be joining us in September to discuss his talk Optimizing code in the hot path; with examples from tuple deformation. If you're interesting in joining us, please sign up using this form and I will send you an...

via Robert Haas July 31, 2026

One and one thing only

I wanted to show you a year’s worth of messages from my barber’s software, because this is what software should be. No spam, no upsells, no growth hacks, no unwelcome cuteness or puzzling verbosity. It’s so curt and straight to the point it should be set i...

via Unsung July 31, 2026

Pluralistic: Better to beg forgiveness (31 Jul 2026)

Today's links Better to beg forgiveness: Don't ring the doorbell at the house of no unless you absolutely must. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Poul Anderson; P2P at PC Forum; Waitress handed her own stolen ID by carded dine...

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow July 31, 2026

Generated by openring