Extra Crunch Friday: Why I’m hitting pause on ARR-focused coverage

Welcome to Extra Crunch Friday

One of the first recurring features Alex Wilhelm established at Extra Crunch was the “$100M ARR Club,” ongoing coverage of startups that have reached scale.

“Forget a $1 billion valuation — $100 million in annual recurring revenue is the cool kids’ club,” he wrote in December 2019. Since then, he expanded it to cover companies that attained $50M ARR.

The concept is a useful lens for studying the market. I can say this with confidence because it’s been widely copied by other tech news outlets. But this morning, Alex surprised me — he’s shelving the ARR Club, at least for now.

“In the end it became a pre-IPO list that was fun but not entirely educational, by my reckoning,” he told me. “The $50M ARR club evolution was supposed to help shake loose more interesting operational details, but just didn’t.”

Before putting the format on hiatus, Alex’s last ARR Club roundup looks at in-office display and kiosk startup AppSpace, data backup unicorn Druva, and Synack, which makes security software.

Thanks very much to new Editor Annie Siebert for producing the summaries below! I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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