Permissions
Last month, there was an after-hours event where I work.
The presenters were from Marcus, who did an admirable job at pretending they weren’t from Goldman Sachs ($GS):
The thousands of workers who are now employed out of the Goldman offices in Salt Lake City, Utah, are only bested in number by those working out of New York and London:
“The reason I became curious about Goldman Sachs was their willingness to change their playbook. Marcus is still a small piece of a giant pie. But Marcus Goldman must be smiling, knowing those little notes can add up. Simple relationships built on trust just might be scaling again.
Marcus has been gathering $1 billion a month in deposits. As of June 2019, they had $48 billion in savings accounts and made $5 billion in personal loans. They have also discussed adding credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, and insurance to the menu. In just two and a half years, Marcus has more than four million new customers.
Rather than securitizing and repackaging the loans, Goldman Sachs is keeping them on the books. This back to the future simplicity will be a signature advantage against other fin-tech startups, which will have to find homes for the loans they create.”
Yeah, I was surprised, too, that Utah was where Goldman set up its retail banking operation.
But after a few years of startup branding and online ad-spend, Marcus got a good chunk of Millennials hooked to its savings rate.
To its credit, it is a higher rate than those offered by other banks.
Still, it is also subject to adjustment, i.e., the rate can (and does) go down.
Speaking of startups attracting young people… the peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo has a billion-dollar valuation:
“Right now, the company claims to have at least 400,000 cars listed on its platform and more than 10 million people in its ‘community’ of users. Turo also says that it’s active in more than 5,000 cities and 56 countries.
Haddad explained that the company’s newest funding will go toward ‘perfecting’ the business and building out its international reach, and pointed to the hundreds of millions of cars that exist worldwide.
But Turo’s goal is not to eliminate car ownership altogether. ‘We think that definitely, the car ownership model is going to be transformed over the next many years,’ Haddad said, adding that personal car ownership will decline, but not to zero.
‘We think it’s going to drop from the current 90 percent, or so, to maybe the mid-70s over the next ten years,’ he said.
‘Those are perfect market conditions for a business like our business to thrive because we can provide better economics for the people who decide to continue to own cars. And we provide access for the people who decided actually, owning a car is no longer an option for them.’”
Frankly, I dislike whenever pundits shout Company A should buy Company B because A has a lot of cash and B is valued much lower.
But I did like the Robinhood Snacks podcast’s quasi-suggestion that Airbnb should buy Turo:
Whenever Airbnb goes public in the 12 months, Expedia ($EXPE) and its financials will come under more scrutiny since it’ll be the closest rival.
If travel is summarized as airline + car rental + hotel/room, then Airbnb can get a leg up on the competition by empowering its hosts by offering Turo.
So, if you’ve saved with Marcus and travel around Russia by using Airbnb and Turo, don’t be surprised if you find your FaceApp submissions on billboards:
“While according to FaceApp’s terms of service people still own their own ‘user content’ (read: face), the company owns a never-ending and irrevocable royalty-free license to do anything they want with it… in front of whoever they wish…”
This generation loves to give away control, without even trading away dollars.
