Category: Business

Inspirato By Numbers – Revenue, Members, Vacation Homes, Locations, Prices

Inspirato is a luxury vacation home rental startup that simply just lets you pay a subscription to access unlimited rentals for $2500/month or on-demand rates with a $600/month subscription.

Its 18,000 members can book 1,200 vacation homes in 395 locations.

My Thoughts:

Somehow Inspirato is going public at what looks like might be a $1 billion valuation. Based on the numbers there is potential the company has a $45 million revenue. We have to be in a bubble for anyone to consider this type of business thats growing at 30% year on a year – to be valued anywhere near $1 billion.

Coinbase Goes Public – I Expect it to Drop to $30 billion Valuation then Rise Again!

Coinbase went public the other day on the NASDAQ. Coinbase have a very exciting business and I have been trying to learn as much as possible about the Crypto world for the past year or so (but feels like I’m barely scratching the surface).

At one point Coinbase hit $100 billion in valuation, but I suspect that will drop below half over the next few months as the froth from the initial trades die down.

It will be very interesting to see how Coinbase performs over the long term, but it does seem to be a good hedge if you expect cryptocurrencies to be strong in the next 10 years or more.

Prediction – it drops below $30 billion in market cap and then it starts to climb again.

Investors With Inflated Ego

Do you need to have a big ego to be an investor?

I have had an experience for a long time now with one investor who for the most part is your perfect type of investor (silent and then helps when required). However, the only problem is that they tend to over inflate their involvement to everyone they know (even to the point of flat out lies), which then end up making their way back.

Why?

Why can’t some people just be happy with what they have? Why can’t they simply say they have got the best investment of their lives and they didn’t even need to do anything apart from be in the right place at the right time with a little bit of money at Seed stage?

Spotify Acquires Locker Room – Watch Out Clubhouse!

Spotify Acquires Locker Room and Announces Plans for a New Live Audio Experience

“Creators and fans have been asking for live formats on Spotify, and we’re excited that soon, we’ll make them available to hundreds of millions of listeners and millions of creators on our platform,” said Gustav Söderström, Chief Research & Development Officer at Spotify. “The world already turns to us for music, podcasts, and other unique audio experiences, and this new live audio experience is a powerful complement that will enhance and extend the on-demand experience we provide today.” 

This makes perfect sense for Spotify and an area that I’m sure they are going to be strong in.

Clubhouse has performed well because everyone has been in lockdown, but I’m not sure it will perform as well on its own over the long term as people get back to their normal lives at the end of the summer.

Companies Get Harder as they Get Larger (not easier)

It’s funny… when you start a company you think the larger it gets the easier it is going to be – as you’re able to start handing off jobs and deligate your team.

However, no one really explains to you the larger it gets the harder it actually gets.

Yes.. you can hand off those jobs to the other members in your team and they can take complete autonomy over the decision making, but there are all the little things that no one ever talks about – culture, strategy, team structure, heirarchy, wages, policies on pretty much everything from HR to Finance.

Sometimes a lifestyle business in which the owner can have an amazing lifestyle really is the best way to go!

Twitter Becoming More Innovative! $300 billion Market Cap inside 10 Years!

I have found myself Tweeting a lot more over the past couple of months and getting more engagements and interactions on the platform. There seems to be something in the water at Twitter at the moment – as they seem to be going through a big change in innovation and launching more and more product (Twitter Spaces is a great example of this).

I would love to see Twitter Space become its own standalone app (as currently it is quite hard to find who is talking, when and where). Twitter also recently acquire a Newsletter company, so it seems like they are now trying to make a conscious effort to push through monetization for creators in all shapes and forms.

Great moves overall… Im very bullish on Twitter over the next 10 years.

(at the time of writing this Twitter has a $48 billion market cap with $3.7 billion in revenues over the last 12 months). In 10 years I can easily see Twitter being a $300 billion market cap company.

Deliveroo Financials 2020 YOY

Deliveroo is planning to go public at a valuation of around $7 billion USD. Here is a quick breakdown of some of their numbers that have just been released.

  • Gross Transactional Volume (GTV)
    • 2020 – £4.1 billion
    • 2019 – £2.5 billion
  • Gross Profit
    • 2020 – £357.50 million
    • 2019 – £188.70 million
  • Operating Profit / Loss
    • 2020 – £-223.70 million
    • 2019 – £-317.30 million

These number make for hard reading, but it seems like there is a real path towards profitability – but it feels like it is going to really require mass scale of nearly £10 billion per year in GTV to get there.

However, Deliveroo have the ability to start new product lines and delivering in other areas as well as corporate contracts, plus geographic expansion.

Technology stocks are currently dropping fast – so it will be interesting to see if there is an appetite on the London Stock Market for a heavy losing technology company with growing scale.

Coinbase Valued at Over $100 billion – You Have to Be Kidding Me (From $8 billion to $100 billion in a year)

Coinbase is looking to go public very soon and its valuation in the secondary markets has just gone over $100 billion.

Coinbase’s valuation over the years:

  • 2016 — $500M
  • 2017 — $1.6B
  • 2018 — $8B
  • 2020 — $100B

Coinbase reported revenue of $530M for 2019 and $691M for the first nine months in 2020. The company posted a net income of $141M between January-September 2020, up from a loss of $30M in overall 2019. Notably, these numbers don’t include 2021, when the Bitcoin price surged more than 90% YTD.

Is the S&P 500 Over Weighted in Tech Stocks or Not?

The S&P 500 is an index of some of the leading companies in the United States. The S&P 500 doesn’t push extremely high in one area as its supposed to show a cross section of America.

Here is the breakdown the S&P 500 by Market Sector:

As you can see there is a very broad cross section of companies in all sectors of America. Technology is the leading sector, but it’s not the whole S&P 500.

Blackstone Group Investing $5 billion in Second Asian Fund (China and India Focus)

Blackstone Group is looking to raise $5 billion for its second Asian fund.

Blackstone is seeing huge potential in Asia and really wants to invest heavily and faster than ever before. Around 66% of their first fund $2.3 billion has been invested.

Blackstone see’s great growth potential in China and India and really wants to get a foot in those markets before they mature.

SellerX Raises $118 Million To Start Buying Top Amazon Sellers and Provide Them with More Services

SellerX is a startup from Berlin that focuses on acquiring top Amazon sellers. SellerX has just raised $118 million led by Cherry Ventures, Felix Capital, TriplePoint Capital, participation from Village Global, et al.

It seems like buying Amazon based businesses is becoming an interesting proposition. Once Amazon sellers get to a certain level they need a lot of back office support and the vast majority aren’t set up to do this. It will be interesting to see if they are able to get a lot of great Amazon sellers together and turn this into a strong long term business.

Shutterstock Buys AI Driven Amper Music – Shutdown and Keep More Margin on Music?

Shutterstock has acquired AI driven Amper Music.

Amper Music claims to have over 1 million individual audio samples in its catalogue.

It seems like Shutterstock wants to be able to create endless AI driven music and be able to monetize that in its marketplace and keep 100% of the royalties. It will be interesting to see what happens to Amper Music after the transaction closes, as I expect that the company will be completely shutdown immediately.

Free Music Distribution for TikTok and Resso

RouteNote has started offering Free Music Distribution to TikTok and Resso. RouteNote was one of the first music distributors to partner with TikTok and Resso globally and they can provide full access into the platform for no upfront fees and artists and labels keep 85% of the royalties.

TikTok and Resso pay royalties to both artists and labels so its worth adding your music into the music library into TikTok so creators of all shapes and sizes can find you and promote your tracks to a global audience.

Spotify Buys Megaphone for $235 million – Who is Losing Out? Consumers

It was confirmed that Spotify is buying Megaphone for $235 million.

Megaphone is a podcasting hosting and advertising company – it’s easy to see how this fits into Spotify’s plans for world domination in the podcast market, but it will throw up a lot of concerns on how powerful Spotify is in this market now and how they plan to control all the data around podcasts.

These podcasts should be platform agnostic – like music. However, they seem to be getting acquired and then made exclusive for either Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or whoever has the most money at the time.

Who is going to lose out? CONSUMERS!

Amuse Fast Forward Charges Artists 12% Interest on Their “Advances” / Loans

Amuse announced the other day that they were expanding their Fast Forward program – which allows artists to have an advance on their royalties of between $250 and $300,000 (MA).

However, all these “news outlets” forgot to mention that Amuse will be charging artists 12% interest on the loans they provide as advances on their royalties.

12%!

I’m struggling to understand why any artist in the world would consider this a good idea!

This also goes against the artist first idea of Amuse. It’s not artist first in any way!

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Announces They Are Currently Changing Their Offices to Adapt to a Hybrid Model in Future

Google seems to think the future of work lies in between the office and working remotely.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google were currently making changes to its physical spaces to better support employees in the future. He didn’t specific state what those changes were.

“I see the future as definitely being more flexible,” Pichai said during a video interview for Time 100. Pichai was an honoree on this year’s list of the most influential people in the world. 

“We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having that sense of community, is super important for whenever you have to solve hard problems, you have to create something new. So we don’t see that changing, so we don’t think the future is just 100% remote or something,” he said. 

Pichai said that Google is “reconfiguring” its office spaces to accommodate what he called “on-sites” — presumably, days where employees, who mostly work from home, gather in the office. 

Amuse.io Music – Release Financial Figures for 2019 – $9.5m Revenue – $10.9m Loss!

Amuse.io is a new music upstart that has been getting a lot of press of late. Amuse.io has just released their official 2019 financials and it’s very interesting reading.

Revenues = $9.5 million USD

Profit / Loss = $10.9 million USD Loss

Staff = 49 staff

Cash Liquidity = 208%

This basically means that Amuse will need to raise another round of Venture Capital within the remainder of 2020 or start of 2021 to be able to survive.

Source – https://www.merinfo.se/foretag/Amuseio-AB-5590367016/2kgcyso-1hslk

Tesla Shares See Their Biggest Ever Single Day Decline!

Tesla shares have finished the day at 21.06% down. This is the biggest single day share decline for the company in its history.

Why this matters: Tesla is a company going after a big dream. However, it also seems to be the company that is riding a very high valuation based on very little fundamental numbers being it. Revenues have increase 14% in the past 12 months, but the share price has increased 573%.

My views: I love the company and I love what they are trying to achieve, but it seems like they have become the poster child for a heavily overpriced stock market based on poor fundamentals.