Phreesia, Inc. (NYSE:PHR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Chaim Indig: Look, I’ll talk about the first part, and then Balaji can talk about capitalized software because I don’t really know that much about it. So look, we invest in product. Products make huge gains for our clients. They drive significant value for all of our shareholders. And we see a lot of efficiency gains when we invest in product. And also, its new products to build and new markets to go after, and we’re pretty excited about some of the things that the team is doing. And we’ve always led as a product-first, product-driven organization, and I expect that to continue. Obviously, the growth in R&D will start to mitigate over time and we see that mitigating in the near term and as we start getting a lot of operating leverage off some of the newer investments and the people that we brought onboard who are just so impressive on our R&D team.

Balaji Gandhi: Yes. Daniel, are you trying to just look for like the trend on spend?

Daniel Grosslight: Yes. Exactly.

Balaji Gandhi: Yes. I mean you can see it’s sort of been growing proportionately with R&D expense on the P&L. So I think we’ve sort of found this more of this range that we’ve been at on a quarterly basis. I don’t think it will increase, to Chaim’s point, but it will increase probably at a similar rate to R&D expense. And that’s all in the context of still getting operating leverage on EBITDA, et cetera. But you could probably ratchet it up a little bit based on what your R&D expense is.

Daniel Grosslight: Yes. Make sense. Thanks guys.

Operator: We’ll hear now from Stephanie Davis with SVB.

Stephanie Davis: Yes, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Balaji, congratulations on the new seat. First one is for you. Phreesia is a very different organization from when you first joined. So when you look at your new title and this kind of next leg of growth, how would you think of your top priorities for this new role?

Balaji Gandhi: Well, I think I’ve had almost 4 years here, and I think part of it is, we’ve done a lot of things, obviously, in the last 4 years. We’ve raised a lot of capital and we’re trying to be opportunistic about that. Had to make a lot of decisions about how we put that money to work, what kind of returns we’d get. And I think that’s been a lot of different people at Phreesia have been involved in these things. So I think continuing to just make sure we’re focused on cost of capital, returns on capital. And I think we’ve talked about this on some of these calls, what we did was pretty controversial, but the reason we felt comfortable doing it is because we had a lot of rigor behind it. So I think, again, we’ve got a really good finance team that helps us make some of these decisions and still continuing. So it’s actually, in some ways, more of the same. Don’t mess with a good thing on that front.

Stephanie Davis: Understood. This is probably a little bit ironic given it comes from SVB Securities analyst, but with the world blowing up, you are seeing private market valuations rationalizing pretty quickly. With that in mind, how committed are you to organically developing some of these new platform solutions like rev cycle versus maybe looking at a buy in order to accelerate the expansion?

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