Solved!
Andreessen Horowitz is well-known far beyond Silicon Valley.
And its team does a great service of uploading its conference videos onto YouTube ($GOOGL):
One of my favorite new follows from last year is Angela Strange, a general partner at the firm who specializes in FinTech:
Her presentation from November is worth watching, even if her glowing review of Plaid comes a little late in case you wanted to privately invest in it:
Yes, Visa’s ($V) acquisition of Plaid made for a huge headline this month, but there are plenty of private companies growing stronger with faithful fanbases:
“McGuffin Creative Group set out to explore the relationship between valuation and brand awareness among US-based Business 2 Consumer unicorn companies. To do this, they surveyed over 4,000 consumers to determine which [unicorn] companies’ consumers are most familiar with. The analysis by McGuffin Creative group analyzed the top 25 best-known unicorns, how brand value aligned with consumer awareness, the fastest growing unicorns as well as demographic breakdown for the best-known unicorns by gender and by age.
Reddit, Airbnb, Buzzfeed, Credit Karma, and DoorDash are the best-known unicorn companies.”
I was pleased to see Airbnb and Credit Karma on the list but was surprised by how well Reddit did with both the young and old crowds.
Recently, I’ve been more active on Reddit and have been impressed by several subreddits, most notably by the helpful Internet sleuths on r/tipofmytongue:
Yes, I have a buy wishlist for 2020 with names including:
- Affirm
- Chime
- Duolingo
- Grammarly
- Impossible Foods
- Neuralink
Thanks to listening to Angela, I will closely monitor SentiLink and Synapse.
But the transition from private to public is never easy and, even when I feel positive about a brand, I’m not always optimistic about its financial future.
For the most part, I agree with professor Scott Galloway’s latest take on Casper, Away, and Warby Parker:
“Casper will not go public. If it does, the stock will shed 30%+ in the first year. Away — a better business with a more differentiated product in a less competitive category — may or may not get out. If I were advising Away, which I am not, I would give them the same counsel I gave to Casper management (talented, impressive young men) 24 months ago: sell. Casper should be acquired by a bigger retailer, like Target, or any middle-aged retailer looking for a shot of Botox. That would give them momentum in the sleep category, domain expertise in DTC, and Casper would get the scale they clearly don’t have. They may have missed their window. Away’s is closing. The gangster here will be Warby Parker, who will have one of the more successful retail IPOs in recent memory.
Casper and Away have to pay to generate traffic while Warby Parker gets nearly 80% of its traffic organically. Warby is the tallest midget of start-up retail, as the sector has been a wonderful place to shop and a terrible place to invest or work. Unless, of course, you work for an unregulated monopoly. Monopolies not only prematurely euthanize big firms that are good taxpayers and employers but perform infanticide on emerging retailers.
Casper is being drowned and likely won’t survive. Away needs to be adopted by someone who will feed, clothe, and protect them. Warby looks to have the muscle and fat to survive an Amazon winter and emerge stronger.
The financial press argues Amazon and other disruptors have resulted in millennials enjoying subsidized sleep, rides, and desks. CNBC leads us to believe there are start-ups everywhere. There aren’t. The greatest engine of job growth, small business, is on life-support. Half as many firms are founded today as during the Carter administration. Even the most promising struggle to find the scraps ignored by the great white sharks of big tech.
Wages are stagnant, and student debt has never been higher. But mattresses, glasses, and dog walkers have never been more affordable. There’s never been a better time to have the money young people don’t have.”
Still, don’t sleep on some private companies going well once they enter the stock market, e.g., Airbnb.
