The Bolt Saga continues, The Robinhood Takeover Begins, Emergent Creators takeover tech media, Kendrick Lamar returns, and Elon backs away from Twitter Acquisition
Stretch Four Insights Volume 24
Happy Saturday,
This week was a great one for me and the weather in San Francisco helped a lot.
If you didn’t get to check it out I launched my first edition of the Long Four where I go deep on a company or trend I am seeing within my expertise window within technology. I covered my friend’s company Neo Tax in our first edition.
This week I will recap:
The mainstream media has a narrative to attack companies on inflated metrics; ironically the entire market is inflated.
SBF has raised a ton of capital for FTX and may leverage that to acquire Robinhood
How creator is driven media businesses are taking over tech media
Kendrick Lamar returns with his first album in five years
The Elon/Twitter saga
Let’s dive in.
More Media Dunking On Ryan Breslow and Bolt
Ryan Breslow continues to give us Twitter content and the New York Times chose violence against Breslow and his company Bolt this week. The inflated metrics narrative seems to be at an all-time high, but if you look under the hood and into the financials of 95% of startups you will find similar data points. To raise large amounts of venture capital at increasingly high valuations founders and their teams are often pressured to only show charts that go up and to the right. The media loves using this as an angle, but inside the finance teams at your top private and public companies, there is always something happening to make things look better than they are. Bolt is now the punching bag.
SBF launching takeover of Robinhood
While the stock market has tanked all week. The FTX founder referred to as SBF purchased a nice chuck of Robinhood. Ranked as the sixtieth richest man in the world according to Forbes this purchase is interesting with the emergence of the new style of takeovers (see Elon and Twitter) you cannot help but assume SBF could be eying a takeover of Robinhood. That leaves the next question — who is going to buy 10% of Coinbase for ~$1B?
Acquired Live Podcast Part 1 (Seattle, WA)
The Acquired media brand had a live show in Seattle. The first episode highlighted a conversation between the Acquired.FM hosts, Packy Mccormick of Not Boring, Mario Gabriel of the Generalist, and moderated by form Softbank partner Shu Nyatta. It is interesting to see the power of media in technology and venture capital moving to content creators. While at an event in San Francisco this week a friend of mine who runs a large startup told me that the Acquired team is capturing well into six figures for their seasonal sponsorships. Each of these new brands Acquired, Not Boring, and The Generalist are generating well over a million annually. They finished with a candid conversation with the YCombinator continuity fund partner Anu Hariharan. She spoke about the plans YCombinator has to continue to the mob and dominate the early stage startup landscape but more importantly to continue to expand to the growth stage and even potentially launch a post-IPO business.
Kendrick drops…
It’s been five years since DAMN, and we waited so long for KDot aka King Kendrick and he delivered.
Kendrick Lamar’s rise to the top of music much less hip-hop may have culminated a few months back at the Super Bowl, but this album after less than 24 hours solidifies him in another class of musical genius.
It is fascinating following an artist in real-time, i.e. I am a 1987-born individual myself, and I have adapted to Kendrick’s music since 2011 — his consistency is rivaled by no one else. I say that as J. Cole and Drake are in the same age bracket. Kendrick touches everything you feel in his music it is quite hard to describe it.
I have to say this is not only one of the most anticipated hip-hop albums in the last five years that Kendrick Lamar delivered.
Elon backs out of the Twitter deal
As Twitter’s stock, like nearly all public technology stocks, continues to plummet it is clear Elon Musk is getting cold feet regarding his proposed purchase. Now, Musk says he intends to still make the purchase but I am sure he is positioning for a lower price. This entire ordeal is likely a bad business decision from the beginning, and with a fragile market, it makes sense for Elon to pull back.
Other news
What’s Next
I will be attending my first few business events in the coming weeks. Two will, fortunately, be local including the Finovate Spring conference and the Plaid Forum The next week I will be in NYC for two days for the Lendit Fintech event.
On the Stretch Four side, I will be following up our first Long Four edition with an audio version this week and I am planning on expanding with a new series where I go deep with Series A founders.
With the Long Four, I am starting a new series where I go deep into the fintech infrastructure wars.
Hope everyone has a safe and amazing weekend.
Back to the trenches,
Matt