CRM
Salesforce, Inc.
stock NYSE

VIPZ update: I have been following VIP Play (VIPZ) for a few months now, so this is not a new discovery post. The latest news fits directly into the longer story that has been building rather than trying to distract from it. Please see my other posts over the last few months for continued detail.
Solid execution is showing up and the chart is finally reflecting it, up almost 400% from December Lowe’s from when the legacy seller pushed to get out. Since they’ve been gone, it’s been increasing steadily as everything‘s locked up between here and probably $.70 where most of the shares from the old reverse merger were bought. They are licensed in Tennessee currently and continue to work on new territories but Tennessee alone is a $5.7 billion gambling market as they add on more territories that’s gonna open up for even more total available market.
Price action: VIPZ bottomed around $0.09 in December after the last legacy seller exited. Since then, the stock has moved to roughly $0.34, which is close to 400 percent move in a month. Yes, it has happened on low volume. That is not a red flag by itself. It suggests that most of the forced selling is gone and the float is much more locked up than it was before. Shares appear to have moved from legacy holders into people who are willing to sit on them while the company executes.
What the company actually completed:
The recent press release confirms a full technology rebuild:
• New CRM using HubSpot to track users, retention, and reactivation
• Upgraded payment and data infrastructure
• Centralized marketing, influencer, and social media efforts
• Rebuilt website and user funnel
• Addition of Black Fire Innovation leadership with gaming and research backgrounds
This is the kind of groundwork that usually happens quietly before any meaningful scaling can occur.
The CEO matters: OTC companies fail most often because leadership chases headlines instead of structure. In this case, the CEO has put out a clear investor deck, laid out a plan, and is checking boxes in the order you would want to see. Uplisting, infrastructure changes, tech rebuild, and expansion into DFS and skill based gaming all fit together logically. CEO: Les Ottolenghi is not the typical OTC inexperienced CEO. A very successful 20 year veteran of the major casino, industry and ex executive of Ceasers and Las Vegas Sands. He has to know how, connections and is huge in the AI space where he keynotes AI conferences and has his own website dedicated to AI.
That consistency is not common in this space.
Bigger picture: Gambling and gaming are one of the fastest growing industries in the United States right now. Sports betting, DFS, and skill based gaming continue to expand state by state, and the total addressable market keeps growing.
That alone does not make a company investable, but it does make it reasonable to take a deeper look at companies that appear to be executing within that industry.
My view: VIPZ has already gone through the painful cleanup phase that kills most OTC names. What we are seeing now looks like a reset base, a tighter float, and execution that matches what management said they would do, I like the fact this is not hyped up. There’s no pumping dump happening just experienced management getting stuff done putting out investor decks making it happen.
Disclaimer: still the OTC, which means you should be only using discretionary money whatever that means to you not money that’s needed by a certain date or covering your rent or your college tuition or your kids future or retirement, etc.. I am not your keeper so be an adult and be responsible with your money. That should remain a fun speculative play about looking around corners at what technology is bringing to the industry not some stressed out emotional play where if you don’t get it, you’re gonna go homeless.

CRM is strong and in my portfolio but I don’t see much with Adobe in 2026.

CRM 10 years ago was an overvalued hype stock. I guess it's getting its reality check now.

I work in software engineering and use Adobe, so I know the product well. Go ahead and explain why Adobe and CRM are bad investments.

With how much salesforce is increasing their contract prices… and all the companies that continue to renewal at the higher price? CRM isnt going anywhere

Over the next 2–3 months, I’ll keep DCAing Adobe, CRM, and Uber as long as they stay around current prices.

Adobe, TTD, CRM

Have you used Jira or Confluence? IMO the moat is quite small for a software company compared to the likes of CRM and ADBE

Software stocks aren’t doomed, but the “easy money for any SaaS with a slide deck” era is. Your point about code being a commodity is right, but that mostly hits thin wrappers and point tools, not platforms with entrenched workflows, integrations, and compliance muscle.
What I’m watching is who actually owns a mission‑critical workflow plus proprietary data. Adobe with creative assets, Salesforce with CRM + ecosystem, CSU with vertical software and switching costs – that stuff doesn’t get blown up by a cheaper AI clone overnight. The compression in EV/FCF for those names looks more like a regime shift in expectations than a broken business.
The real risk is incumbents under‑monetizing AI while newer players use it to eat the low end (think how HubSpot keeps pushing upmarket, or how tools like Zapier and Pulse for Reddit quietly become infrastructure for GTM teams). So the main point is: separate durable workflow/data moats from generic SaaS, then lean into the former while sentiment is this bad.

Each SaaS has a different battle ahead of them.  You capture what I see for CRM well, thanks to the anecdote.
It might be an exercise worth taking to break down each SaaS moat and find ones that have a solid one.  Even stuff like tax prep software is less a moat than people realize, in theory the ability to switch providers is just a matter of control over your tax data.  Race to the bottom.

Amzn, AMD, ELF I think are going to have really good growth over next couple years. CRM & Microsoft I would buy the dip (if you can afford Microsoft stock prices that is).
MU has climbed so high, so fast that I could see it going to 500, but I don't think it has staying power near that figure and the stock price has skyrocketed so fast already.

That’s just not true. ADBE has been quiet on both fronts. CRM has a lot of routine sales. Insider moves are not also the be-all end-all of price direction.

Why tf would you build your own in house CRM??

agree to disagree.

I don't believe the moat of SaaS like ADBE or CRM comes from how hard their software is to replicate, but its how specialized and entrenched they are in that area of customer need.
Take ADBE's photoshop for example. We know digital medial consumption is on the rise, and AI is getting better and better at generating media. But if you were a direct to consumer media company, COULD you cancel your enterprise ADBE subscription and just rely on generic AI tools to product reliable production grade content consistently?
I think the answer is no.
Even if each worker is 10x more productive, and 90% of the work is done by AI. You still need photoshop for the finished product. And ADBE, being the dominant industry player, knows what customers want, and will likely improve their own software / AI tools to meet those needs. This isn't something generic AI like Gemini or SORA can do or compete with. So you are still stuck with ADBE.
Say you want to build an in-house product to replace photoshop. You put it into chatgpt and it spits out an exact product. This might be okay if you are a small company with very specific needs. But good luck in a larger corporation where you don't even know what the other departments do.
Then comes the issue of keeping up with top of the line SaaS. If ADBE photoshop release a new feature that will give competitors an edge over you, you're gonna have to keep up with that. Soon enough, you're going to need a team of engineers to keep your in-house product up to snuff, a team to test the new features to make sure they work as intended, and a team that answers questions and troubleshoots problems cause users are stupid. That defeats the whole point of getting rid of ADBE in the first place doesn't it? Instead of a subscription fee, your paying whole team of engineers.
The value of SaaS comes from allowing companies to outsource very technical software development to a team of industry experts. And never having to worry that they are falling behind industry standards.
I think that value proposition is huge. But I do believe the current head count based subscription pricing model, might come to an end. In reality, head count was a good approximation for customer size currently. But just like how software companies moved away from outright ownership model, they can definitely come up with new pricing models to better capture value when customer size isn't correlated with headcount.

Ahh honestly I think Adobe and others are pretty fairly valued based on what we know today.  CRM maybe a bit overvalued.  
Shorting Oracle at 300 was brilliant.  I wish I had the guts, it was the news on blue owl not wanting to finance their debt that triggered the fall

CRM and service center.

I hate CRM at my job, therefore puts

do you think CRM will climb back up soon

The main point: AI hurts bloated, undifferentiated SaaS economics long before it topples the logos themselves.
You’re right that CRM/ADBE/SNOW are entrenched and can bolt on AI. The risk isn’t “some rando vibes a better CRM in a weekend” – it’s:
1) Scope compression: AI lets customers do the same work with fewer seats, fewer adjacent tools, and more in-house glue. Over 5–10 years, that squeezes net expansion and weakens “must-have” status.
2) Modularization: AI + good APIs makes it easier to replace narrow slices of a suite (reporting, workflow, analytics) with best-of-breed pieces. You don’t rip out Salesforce, you gradually shrink its footprint.
3) Margin pressure: if everyone has strong AI assistants, the perceived gap between “premium” and “good enough” narrows. That caps pricing power, even if AI adds features.
Slackbot is a good example: powerful, but also a wedge for competitors to say “we do 80% of that for less.” I’ve seen teams use Notion AI, Linear, and Pulse for Reddit in combo to sidestep bigger suites for specific jobs (docs, issue tracking, demand gen). Incumbents survive, but their economic moats get thinner.

But isn’t the whole seats based subscription model being questioned for SaaS businesses with the basis that agents would be doing the work not humans. Hence the top SaaS firms like CRM and NOW have taken a beating.