Dorsey out, Agrawal in 🐯
Tiger hunts its 5th, FB got issues, and IPO markets still warm.
Market summary: 📊
India opened favorably, shrugging off Omicron worries as spread seems well contained globally. US opened in the green too after Biden explicitly ruled out any more lockdowns.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.32%
Nasdaq - up 2.33%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.16%
Sensex - up 0.27%
Quick shot of espresso ☕
⏯️ Design pioneer passes away — Virgil Abloh, a widely celebrated American fashion-designer who was the artistic director for Louis Vuitton, and the founder of luxury label Off-White, passed away yesterday at the age of 41. Virgil had worked on some remarkable projects from elite sneakers for Nike to concept cars for Mercedes, having his most visible impact on street style and luxury-casual clothing.
Dorsey out, Agrawal in — House Twitter reorganizes 😎
What happened — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is quitting the business, after 16 long years at the company he founded, ending a 6 year-long tumultuous term as CEO.
Indian born, IIT bred, Stanford PhD and Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal will take control of the ship.
Jack’s term hasn’t been much fun — Dorsey scaled Twitter to an unparalleled real-time global-news distribution platform, used by the world’s who’s who — with 330M monthly active users, and $4.8 billion in annual revenues. But not without problems — right from controversial policing, to weak monetization, soft engagement, to spiteful shareholder proxy battles — the story has had all ingredients.
Problems with Wall Street — building cool products is one thing, delivering shareholder value is another, and the lack of the latter made Jack not-so-favorite on the street. Since IPO in 2013, Twitter stock has barely returned like ~10%.
So a shareholder coup began early 2020. Activist-investor, Elliot Management, bought ~4% stake in Twitter and got straight to pushing Dorsey out the door. They eventually settled though — with Elliot and their friend Silver Lake each getting a board seat.
But with growth barely picking momentum, Apple’s IDFA changes hurting ad revenues, and stock not moving more than an inch, guess hard steps were overdue.
Anyway, Jack will continue to be the CEO of his $100 billion payments business, Square, while expectations are aligned from Parag to double down on Bitcoin, Payments, Subscriptions, and building Twitter as a social-layer powering the emerging creator-economy.
Big picture — the “brown CEO to the rescue” trend remains undefeated. :)
Tiger hunts its 5th 🦄
Credit-card startup Slice, became India’s 41st unicorn of the year, after raising $220 million for its Series B from Tiger Global and Insight Partners — at a billion dollar+ valuation!
Slice built out a lending-system for India’s millennials and GenZ — a segment mostly overlooked by old school banks for lack of data, or income potential. Some of the company’s products have been remarkable — for example, a $27-limit credit card for first time users.
Anyway, the platform serves some 5 million+ users, and anticipates $60 million+ in revenues for the forward year. Not bad! 👌
Then back to used cars for a bit, ☝️
Cars24 is in talks with Falcon Edge to raise another $300 million, at a $3 billion valuation. Cars24 had picked up $450 million barely months ago, but competition is arming up rapidly as well (including Spinny’s recent raise).
Also, Cars24 has recently closed one of Dubai’s largest ever commercial leasing deals.
No memes in the Metaverse 🤷♀️
What happened — UK’s anti-competitive regulators are getting all prickly about Facebook’s $315 million acquisition of gif-portal Giphy — moving to block the deal from going through.
UK’s concern apparently is that FB could cut off Snap, TikTok, and other competition from using Giphy, consolidating power.
$315M is a tiny buy for a $1 trillion dollar corp., so the blockade is more a FU to big tech corporations than anything else. FB was looking to integrate Giphy into Whatsapp, Messenger, and tools to make meme-chatting more fun.
Why care — when you can’t sneak tiny-peanuts past regulators lately, how you plan on building out an entire virtual universe for 3 billion+ users macha?
Closing Out — quick pulse on India’s IPO markets 🧐
Tarson Products, the company sells specialized equipment to chemical labs in educational facilities, pharma, and other manufacturing facilities, opened to warm reception on the street with stock jumping nearly 20% at open!
Tarson had pulled in almost 77x higher bids for its IPO.
Roster getting thicker — Star Health, which is one of the largest private health insurers in India, is expected to open for subscription starting today, Nov 30. With ₹7,600 crores+ in revenues, growing 37%+ rates a year — prospects couldn’t have looked any better.
Bottomline — India’s IPO-frenzy, which was looking a bit shaky after PayTM, has gathered itself pretty well favoring businesses with real substance, aka cash flows.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🤷♂️ Can’t sit back - Jio will follow VI and Airtel in hiking its tariff prices by 21% starting December.
☝️ Fast finger wins - Go Fashion IPO, the company that sells women’s athletic and bottom wear, opens today. Bids were oversubscribed by 135x.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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