Let’s talk about ARR

It’s likely safe to say—creative accounting’s been around for as long as accounting itself.

In 1494, for example, mathematician and ‘father of modern accounting’ Luca Pacioli wrote of Venetian merchants willfully rendering their ledgers illegible. In the Gilded Age, inflating assets and understating liabilities was standard practice across a booming system. And who can forget the “channel stuffing” of the 2000s?

And, because some things are eternal, this era naturally has its own creative accounting practices, which I published a feature on this past weekend. Right now, some of the most clear shenanigans are going on around ARR, or “annual recurring revenue.”

“The problem is that so much of this is essentially vibe revenue,” one VC told me. “It’s not Google signing a data center contr