NinjaOne raises $400M at $12.3B valuation, serves ~1M businesses across 140 countries with unified IT management

Speaker 1: gets we got 66,000 with this, but that's because it's funny. Anyway, we can debate that more in the future. Let's bring in our next guest. We have Chris from Ninja One. He's the president and cofounder. He's in the waiting room and now he's in the TV panels from how are you doing, Chris? Good to meet you. Great. How are you? Nice to happen. It's massive news, but it is your first time on the show. So I'd love a little introduction on yourself and the company first, and then we can go into the news.

Speaker 8: Great. First, thanks for having me. I'm a big fan of the show. Thanks so much. It's an honor. And I'm a local in La Canada, so pretty close to No where you guys are. Pasadena. That's amazing. Yeah. I knew that. But I'm Chris Matarici, founder of NinjaOne. At Ninja, we believe the hardest problem in IT today is complexity and fragmentation at scale. Mhmm. As organizations are stitching together literally dozens of point solutions just to manage, protect, backup, and support their endpoints. You know, and that fragmentation costs it creates cost, risk, poor service, etcetera, and Ninja solves this challenge by bringing all of these operations into one unified modern cloud native platform. You know, in short, we really just help our customers reduce spend,

Speaker 1: unify IT, and simplify work. That's that's our thesis. Okay. That makes a ton of sense. And I think anyone who's been inside of a big organization has felt that. At the same time, point solutions point solutions are great sometimes. And I'm wondering about how you do the dance between, well, we're so baked into this, we're so locked into this or only this point solution does this particular strategy or technique for us or solves this problem for us. We just can't rip it out. How do you integrate different point solutions without having people actually need to pull back from the software or solutions that are providing real value?

Speaker 8: Yeah. I mean, well, first of all, we try to create our own solutions that are all unified together so we can place all of these point solutions. Wow. The average Ninja customer replaces seven point solutions. Wow. And I think our whole key, we're a product led company. Yeah. You know, our thesis is to build the best possible product. So we think we've built some of the best possible point solutions, and unifying them together not only saves, you know, IT teams, you know, hassle, complexity, to manage all these solutions, but the nature of having multiple point solutions is there are gaps between the solutions. Yeah. And those gaps, you know, not only are inefficient, but they create vectors of attack and risk. So by unifying those, we eliminate those gaps. Now if there are great point solutions that we feel like we don't have, you know, an answer to, we integrate them into our platform. So our IT teams that use Ninja have one pane of glass, you know, fully integrated. Hopefully, they've removed, you know, 10 solutions. They're using Ninja to take care of all of their problems. And if there are one or two point solutions they love that, you know, they can't replace a Ninja, you know, we have integrations for a lot of them.

Speaker 1: You have some huge customers, Deloitte, Porsche, Hyundai, Carnival Cruise, they're all companies that people know, Kawasaki, Birkenstock. But at the same time, have 40,000 organizations on board. So what does the long tail look like? What's the smallest customer you're working with? Like, how are you positioning yourself in the market and winning deals?

Speaker 8: Yeah. I mean, people ask me who is Ninja's customer, and I'd answer it's every business in the world literally is a potential customer. Wow. So for small companies, we sell through MSPs, are managed service providers. They may manage, you know, six local accounting firms and two law firms and a pizza shop. And you know, all the way up to the largest enterprise customers, you know, we've got some very large, you know, Fortune 10 customers we can't name. But so we can literally service everybody.

Speaker 2: Was Talk about the sword. Oh, yeah. The sword.

Speaker 8: Game of Thrones fans. So for those of you who watch Game of Thrones,

Speaker 2: that's a jump. Do they have do they have flash do they have flashbangs in Game of Thrones? I don't think so.

Speaker 1: We're doing flashbangs. We have flashbangs here on I'm the a big video gamer too, so they games? What games?

Speaker 8: Play everything. Okay. I actually started a couple companies that were video game companies. No way. My cofounders, they're really big into Call of Duty, so we've got Call flashbacks in Call of Duty. They also got smoke grenades in in Call of Duty. Are you a I have tomorrow at the strategy games.

Speaker 1: Are you? Are you a Counter Strike? Oh, you're oh, you're more strategy games. Okay. Wait. Wait. Four acts or or, like, Age of Empires, or are we doing Hearts of Iron?

Speaker 8: You know, we've done Age of Empires, you know, but even games like Hearthstone Hearthstone's great. Okay. Even my partner and I actually started playing Axis and Allies when we were kids. That's a great We always say Ninja is one big strategy game. You know? It's just a high stakes strategy game, but it's it's

Speaker 1: still fun. Love it. My business is so addicting. Is it getting more is it getting more high stakes in the age of AI? Is it because of security risk? Or is it a pure accelerant to your business? Like how have you been processing the last few years? It feels like it's a great place to be with 40,000 organizations, 140 countries, lots of opportunity. But what is the shape of the impact actually been?

Speaker 8: Yeah. One thing I'd say is the 40,000 that's 40,000 customers. I mentioned some of those customers are MSPs that service hundreds of Sure. Wow. So we might have close to a million businesses using Ninja. Woah. That's crazy. But as far as AI, we see AI as a real tailwind, you know, that's been accelerating our growth and it's going to continue to accelerate our growth, you know, for three reasons. First, we monitor devices, Mhmm. And we've seen over the last several years device proliferation, and I think we're gonna continue to see that. You know, it's it's laptops, computers, but it's smart watches. It's Microsoft launched some, like, smart badge and, like, Microsoft launched a desktop

Speaker 1: device and, like, it's clearly leaking into everything.

Speaker 8: Even fast food restaurants, you know, it's it's not only the computers in the restaurants, it's not only the point of service equipment, the order boards, but now that the fryers are endpoints, the grillers are endpoints, and we monitor all of those. IoT files With and and even more devices coming in. More devices, the better it is for us because that's more devices for us to manage. So, you know, that's one real tailwind. Secondly, we're incorporating AI into all of our products. So AI is making our product more efficient and more powerful and thus more valuable to our customers. And we're also coming up with a number of AI native products that we just released, the vulnerability product, we have a patch intelligence product. And then finally, and perhaps more importantly, and we've seen in the news even today, that AI is creating more vectors of attack. So, more vulnerabilities are exposed, more things are being need to be monitored and managed because of those vulnerabilities, and they need to be patched quickly,

Speaker 2: and that makes our product even more valuable. Very cool. Well What where where is the company based primarily? You said you said you're you're in LA, but is the company distributed?

Speaker 8: I'm in LA, but we're all over the world. Our largest offices, you know, are in Austin, Texas, Florida, and Berlin, Germany. But we've got offices in Australia, England, Singapore, Spain, Philippines, you know, I don't know, Indonesia, a bunch more. Global.

Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to come talk to Yeah. It's great meet you, Chris. Thanks thanks for coming on and congrats on a massive milestone. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. Yeah. I don't think we hit the gong. Tell us Yeah. About the got it. We much did you raise?

Speaker 8: So we raised 400,000,000 in certain constituents at a twelve point three billion company valuation.

Speaker 2: Fantastic. There we go.

Speaker 1: Doubling the valuation since February 2025. Thank you so much for taking the time to come not at all. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2: Great hanging out. Remarkable ability from Chris to be completely unfazed by the flash bang. And this He just didn't even and the smoke grenade. Just like I guess this is how it Just another day another day another day at work. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Where should we go next? Pat McAfee is negotiating a new deal that can pay him over $60,000,000 a year for from ESPN. This is in The Athletic. Big news for one of our biggest role models. ESPN and representatives for Pat McAfee are discussing an extension to his contract that would pay him more than 60,000,000 per year. Deal's not completed yet. And if an agreement can be reached, could be a sliding scale based on his new responsibilities. McAfee already omnipresent could be on the air even more with a bigger role in NFL coverage. I'd love that. And last night he had a like watch along like on actual TV for the the Knicks game. That's super cool. Yeah. And and he's been brought into the the college football ecosystem and been a really important voice there. He's 39, two years remaining on his current contract and he's a college game day panelist and has various appearances on other on other programs. The makeup of the new deal would be similar in structure. ESPN's view the arrangement as per a production contract and a separate talent agreement differentiating it from the deals with most of the on air personalities. Host three hour daily show with his crew, the Pat McAfee show. The first two hours are on ESPN of all three are on YouTube. Very interesting split there.

Speaker 2: Let's head over to Verizon CEO, Dan Schulman. Talk about some of the advantages he's getting, he and Verizon are getting out of AI. Okay. Let's see.

Speaker 9: In the last three months, we've been experimenting with agents that are replacing some of our customer service reps. And those agents, their customer satisfaction rate is 1,280 basis points better than than what we had before. 1,080.

Speaker 1: Basis point increase. That's a that's a thousand basis point lift. Think about that. 1,200 basis point lift. That's 12%. If you're putting it in normal terms It really does sound way more than 12 It sounds like a 100 times as much because the number's a 100 times bigger. But as a reminder, if you Dan Schulman, the CEO was in the Wall Street Journal recently for preaching straight talk about AI and job losses. This was in April 19. And he claimed that within the next two to five years unemployment in America would be 20 to 30%.

Speaker 5: So what is that? 2,000 or 3,000 basis point? Yeah. 3,000

Speaker 1: basis point unemployment rate. He warns that advancements in humanoid robots could upend the manual labor jobs still seen as safe today. It is notable that people

Speaker 2: outside of AI actually have the most aggressive

Speaker 1: near term predictions Yeah. Around employment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of that is that the the actual idea of job losses and whatnot, that came out of like the most insidery tech, like the less wrong, the the the Dwark Hesh Patel podcast where people were having very mature conversations with a lot of caveats. A lot of like, oh, here's my probability distribution for if this happens, then this happens. And if we don't do anything about it, then that will happen. And and in reality, a lot of things well, oh, okay. Well, if if the unemployment rate spikes we'd cut interest rates. Right? Or like we do like more federal jobs or you know there's a lot of things that could happen but those those quotes were taken out of context where it was like in isolation if only the bad stuff happens and none of the good stuff that would mitigate it happens, you could land at and then the original thing was Dario saying 50% of early stage white collar work which still puts you at less than 10% unemployment rate and then he revised that down to 10 unemployment more broadly which is still lower than this. And then people took it and were like, well, the smart guy who just put up a 10 x annual run rate year said that I should go a little bit further. I got a 10 x that again. I got a 10 x that again. And then and then you wind up with we saw that iced coffee hour clip of someone saying what was it 80% of jobs? I think is it 8080%? I've heard 50% multiple times. And then Luke Belmar that influencer said, oh, 100%

Speaker 2: of jobs. And so like you just It's notable though they never it's never their job.

Speaker 1: No. No. It's never their job. Never. It's always everyone else. Because you need to be scared and you need to come work for me. And get by the court. Quit your job now. Come work for me for half what you're making. One more post

Speaker 2: Meredith says it's so easy to spot AI writing because it always sounds like it was written by a fedora.