The Snips Journal - Weekly Newsletter - Issue #4
Snips In Numbers
SiN #16 – $148 Million to $50 Billion
Back in his first letter to shareholders in 1997, Jeff Bezos declared that Amazon was doing $148 Million in revenue. Last week, on his final letter, he noted that just Amazon Web Services had a run-rate of $50 Billion!
SiN #13 – $56 Billion
That, according to research firm Javelin Strategy & Research is the total fraud losses incurred in 2020 compared to $16.9 billion in 2019.
SiN #34 – 145 Million
The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts there will be 145 million electric vehicles, including cars, buses, vans, and heavy trucks, on the roads by 2030.
SiN #29 – $1.8 Million
On Monday this week, A pair of prototype Nikes(Nike Air Yeezy 1) worn by Kanye West during his performances of “Hey Mama” and “Stronger” at the Grammy Awards in 2008 fetched $1.8 million in a private sale. It was acquired by RARES, a sneaker investment marketplace.
(honestly, this is what goes through my mind when writing this)
Tiny Snips
TS #21 – AirBnB for Swimming Pools?
Swimply is a platform that acts as a marketplace for swimming pools. Just like how hosts can list their unused rooms or apartments for others to hang out, through Swimply, people can list their pools and make money out of it while the platform takes a small cut as its charge. It plans to go beyond pools to cover other outdoor activities like tennis and basketball courts etc.
The idea came to its current CEO Bunim Laskin, when he was in his late teens. To keep his younger siblings entertained, he asked his neighbor whether he could use her pool in return for its maintenance expenses. It got traction with other families nearby and this success made him start Swimply in 2018, when he was 20, with four pools in the New Jersey area.
It recently raised a $10M Series A round funded by Norwest Venture Partners, Trust Ventures, and some angel investors. In 2020, its sales grew by 4,000%, reaching “7 digits a month in revenue” and 15,000 to 20,000 in monthly reservations.
TS #20 – Berkshire H x Robinhood
In their recent shareholder’s meeting on April 30, Warren Buffet and his business partner Charlie Munger, considered the legends in investing, outright denounced Robinhood and the entire culture around it.
Buffet said there is “nothing illegal to it, there’s nothing immoral, but I don’t think you build a society around people doing it.” He said it was “taking advantage of the gambling instincts of society, and it isn’t admirable.” He also said “It’s become a very significant part of the casino group that has joined into the stock market in the last year or year and a half,“
Meanwhile, Munger said it’s “deeply wrong” and “god awful that something like that brought investments from civilized men and decent citizens.”
Robinhood did not keep mum. In fact, They went all offensive. They wrote an article on their Medium page where they said, “people are tired of the Warren Buffetts and Charlie Mungers of the world acting like they are the only oracles of investing.“
“It is clear that the elites benefited from a stock market that kept many families sidelined from participating while they amassed huge wealth from decades of investing — driving a deep wedge between the haves and have-nots. Suddenly, Robinhood and other online trading platforms have opened the doors of financial markets to everyday people, deeply unsettling the old guard who will fight to keep things the same.” the post read.
TS #17 – YouTube over Netflix!
YouTube has been the go-to for people of all ages to stream content online. Netflix is just like the new rich kid on the street and the one raking in higher revenues. But not for long.
Last week, both companies announced their earnings for the first quarter. While Netflix generated $7.16 billion in revenue, YouTube brought in a revenue of $6.01 billion FROM ADVERTISING, almost 85% of Netflix’s.
While Netflix viewers tune in for 400 million hours daily, YouTube users watch one billion hours of video. That is about 2.5x more! Also, While Netflix spends tens of billions for its content(it estimates $17 billion for 2021), YouTube doesn’t spend a dime!
If its current growth trajectory continues, YouTube will book between $29 billion and $30 billion in revenue this year. Netflix is expected to report $29.7 billion in revenue for 2021, according to an average of estimates from analysts polled by Refinitiv.
In Alphabet’s earnings call, YouTube was mentioned a whopping 33 times! It seems to be justified considering YouTube had a growth rate of 49% YoY.
Snip Threads
Spotlight on Tesla
Introduction
Tesla is the world’s biggest Electric Vehicle maker also the largest automobile manufacturer by Market Capitalization for that matter. It’s CEO aka “Technoking” Elon Musk is one of the most influential people in Twitter these days, so influential that the CEO of Volkswagen, had to start an account in Twitter of his own. Apart from all that, Tesla is an interesting business. We’ll look at the beginnings, the Q1 2021 earnings report and some other stuff in this thread.
Coinbase: The Leading Light To The “CryptoEconomy”
What is Coinbase? – a 30-sec rundown
It is a mainly a marketplace for cryptos. It is the second biggest crypto exchange in terms of volume behind Binance. Makes most of the money through commissions. Diversified into other products like stake, store, borrow and lend a couple of years ago. Basically a Fin, Tech and Cyber Sec company, think NASDAQ for cryptos but with NO physical headquarters.