Hack and retire
Autonomy's nightmare, Bumble's solid quarter, and stuff from the week before.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.
Sign up below for free. 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
India finally closed on a mixed note, in all ending the week lower. US had a positive session, but the uncertainty is becoming too much to bear.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.49%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.17%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.13%
Sensex - up 0.086%
Weekend brew ☕
✅ Autonomy’s nightmare—Google’s self driving project Waymo, which is honestly the autonomous world’s most credible horse in the race, just lost its CFO and Head of Partnerships, two ranking members which doesn’t paint a very colorful picture about the state of affairs. Google’s been bringing the iron fist down on its dev teams that have been massively loss making units, demanding financial discipline. On the other hand, nailing the last bit of autonomy for consumer-grade and safe deployment is becoming incredibly hard, which is forcing even the best of initiatives to fold hands. Pretty weird times for the autonomous market, which has been grinding it out for a decade and more now.
✅ Party going strong—Coinbase, the largest legit crypto exchange out there, told investors they’ve tripled revenues for the last quarter as folks continue to sell their playstations and their moms TVs to pile into meme coins. And $COIN won’t let go of the frenzy so easily—CEO Brian Armstrong told Wall Street they’re gonna list Dogecoin soon to cater to the will of the “free market”. That’s 50 million new users coming online to the Dog world, sure you wanna sell yet?
Attacs keep coming 💻
Barely days ago the world saw Colonial Pipeline cyberattack lead to massive fuel shortages in the US, leading to gasoline price increases by more than 40% at retail.
Yesterday, Colonial had to finally pay off the hackers $5 million in crypto as ransom, after which the hackers backed out and apparently even declared they’re dissolving the organization, retiring to living off on a beach earning interest for the rest of their lives...
Meanwhile, we already have anathaa one…
Ireland’s public health infra system, the Irish Health Service, has been hit by a major ransomware attack—IT systems running public hospitals across the country are down, and patients’ appointments, scheduled procedures, and other processes are being messed up, while there’s no clarity on whether data is actively being stolen.
Big picture—if you’re running a remotely sane government anywhere in the world right now that actually cares about safeguarding interests of your operation and your citizens, then you’ve gotta be alarmed, worried, and concerned about these rising incidents.
Biden just signed on an emergency executive order allocating billions of dollars overnight to improving US’ cyber infrastructure, using modern cloud systems, and putting IT companies on code red to instantly report to the FBI and federal intelligence of any new incidents coming up.
Markets start partying— the happenings are phenomenal for service providers, IT companies, SMEs, SaaS companies, and literally anyone building around the cybersecurity space for govt. or other critical infrastructure providers, as spending on security will inevitably spike.
Looking at you $INFY, $TCS, $WIT, $HCL….
Quick look at the dating game 🌹
Thanks to mass vaccinations, and reopenings especially in the western world, the dating market is slowly starting to hum again, and newly IPO'd Bumble is already seeing some solid numbers.
For the first quarter of 2021:
Bumble made $171 million in revenue, up about 43%—wish growth was better, but its solid nonetheless for a quarter where for the most part folks were still trapped indoors.
Total of 2.8 million paying users use Bumble, which is respectable but still lot behind the 10 million+ base of rival Tinder
The entire dating space basically innovated on steroids during the pandemic, adding video calls, chats, disappearing texts, and a host of other features including making room for platonic friendships for locked down pals, virtually creating new addressable markets out of thin air.
Going forward, giants like Match Group (owner of Tinder) are already betting that the “friendships” market is actually going to be much bigger than the romantic relationships space, and it'll be super intriguing to see how that plays out.
Otherwise a quiet Friday…
Quick roundup of all big things that went down this week
🙄Elon buckles—somebody gotta tell Musk where bulk of electricity powering Teslas comes from. After making waves to be the first company to accept Bitcoin as a legit mode of payment for vehicle purchases, Tesla backtracked like a sissy, claiming Bitcoin is not exactly environmentally friendly because of all the electricity consumption that goes into solving cryptographic problems to mine coins. BTC tanked 15%, and the naysayers got another opportunity to ridicule the idea of the tech as a credible reserve currency alternative.
📈Gaming giants rule—Roblox, the gaming platform popular among kids, which had gone public barely a month ago, reported an outstanding quarter. Revenues were up 140% YoY, while spending on the app was up 161% YoY, to $650 million+. 42 million daily active users use the gaming app, mostly kids, who spent a total of 9.7 billion hours on it. Roblox’s popularity is viewed as a HUGE threat to the positioning of Facebook, Google, Snapchat, and other social platforms that are struggling to appeal to young users.
🚗 Volvo is alive, and well—kinda weird that anything other than fintech, crypto, SaaS, or DTC is going public right now, but here we are, cheering for century old Volvo, which is going public in anticipation of its transformation into an electric vehicle first company. The deal will be listed in Europe, and will likely value the company at $30 billion. We're no fans of old giants wearing new clothes but we think the brand has a distinct value here, and given its obsessive focus on safety, we’re glad the cars won’t be ramming into trees on highways like, YOU KNOW WHO.
🤑 See how its done from India’s best stocks—amidst the ongoing mayhem, Asian paints reported pretty heartwarming quarterly numbers. Revenues and profits jumped 44%, both above market’s expectations. Margins however slid about 6%, given rising inflation and higher costs of raw materials down the chain. Management seemed upbeat about navigating safely through the next two quarters, as demand craters due to lockdowns, and supply chains again go stale, but given the company’s flawless execution so far, we’re inclined to believe aaall will be well.
👀Game of billions—tell your neighborhood politician to go home. Vitalik Buterin, the prodigy founder of Ethereum, donated a crazy billion in meme-coin $SHIB to one of the charities working to fund COVID relief in India. That’s literally 20% of the budget earmarked by the government for vaccination of the country for 2021. The real problem now is figuring out withdrawal of the funds without crashing the crypto markets.
💪Bezos always wins—AMZN managed to overturn a $300 million fine the EU had slapped on it for not paying taxes and for running a subsidiary in Luxembourg, through which Amazon had been routing all its Europe revenues to the US. Appeals court didn’t find it crazy though, and it told the EU literally every company out there does something similar. That’s another major embarrassment for the region’s government, which routinely conjures ridiculous ideas to police tech companies, in the process killing jobs, and thwarting innovation. Bezos 1, EU 0.
😡Getting outta hands—the global semiconductor shortage is piling up losses in billions for global corporations. The auto industry is looking at $60 billion+ in lost revenue because orders can’t be fulfilled. Apple is eyeing $10 billion+ annual loss in revenues because, well, can’t make iPhones fast enough. Sony can’t fulfill its pS5 orders, and customers are pissed. Overall it's a shitshow, and major countries are accelerating investments within their own soil to avoid repeat problems in the future.
👏Lastly, Apple kills advertisers—nearly 96% of all iPhone users have opted to block sharing of personally identifiable information with third party apps, after Apple’s iOS 14.5 update handed them control to do so, overnight putting growth for businesses from $FB to independent app makers who rely on ad revenues, at risk. Markets are extremely worried that the digital ad market may never recover from this blow.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀
Amazing read.