Nerds pay bills
Second hand fashion, mo unicorns, and WhatsApp’s shifts.
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Market summary: 📊
Indian markets continue to advance forward, as new cases drop well below 60% of all time highs. US receded a bit, with tech taking some serious beating.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.36%
Nasdaq - down 1.07%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.73%
Sensex - up 0.74%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Apple’s ecommerce pie—new report suggests Apple processed nearly $650 billion in digital commerce volumes on its App store last year, which would be nearly 15% of the total global e-commerce spending—quite a staggering volume for a meta-platform that never set out to be a commerce marketplace. For comparison, Amazon sold about ~$600 billion worth of stuff around the world in 2020, not apples to apples (don’t @ us) but the volumes processed underline the force of the Apple-laid pipelines and the ecosystem. Techcrunch has some details on the breakdown.
✅ Saving a sinking ship—activist investor Elliot Management, run by the legendary Paul Singer, quietly built a sizable 10% stake in Dropbox, forcing CEO Drew Houston to the table for a serious discussion on how to fix problems and turn the giant around. Dropbox pioneered consumer cloud storage, but has been struggling to differentiate amidst competition from Google and Apple’s smartphone linked-cloud storage offerings. Meanwhile, Paul Singer is just fresh off a hot streak having twisted Jack Dorsey’s ear and putting Twitter on a growth path. Markets seemed excited, sending DBX stock up 5%.
Nerd social is hot property 🧐
Online coder community and forum Stack Overflow is getting bought out by private equity giant Prosus Ventures, for $1.8 billion.
Stack Overflow, which started off as a Q&A style forum for developers to get their technical questions answered, has overtime become a default solution library for coders—used passionately by both the noobs and the pros.
Nearly 100 million unique users visit the site every month, which is monetized via ads, a premium tier, and a pretty fledgling job board.
Big picture—Prosus has been building a wide portfolio of exciting SaaS projects worth several billion dollars, and having a “top of the funnel” community-led platform, where you’re certain that literally EVERY developer in the world is going to stumble across at least once in their lifetime, is a great way for the company to build native distribution for its portfolio.
Also, the opportunity to build more developer tools, messaging applications, code quality improvement and measurement tools, around Stack Overflow is quite promising.
Softbank gettin’ real aggressive again 😎
The company is in talks with B2B marketplace OfBusiness to lead a $100 to $150 million round at a $1.2 billion valuation, minting India’s 15th unicorn in 2021.
Like many other bulk-marketplaces, OfBusiness basically offers a procurement platform for SMEs, who use it to bulk order raw materials and other industrial products. The company goes a step further, offering a suite of financial services to merchants it works with, for staple products such as supply chain financing, merchant financing, and other lending services.
Over the past year, the business has swollen to process $1.5 billion in gross merchandise volumes, and recently raised a sizable $97 million round from Falcon Edge.
Bottomline—well under 10% of India’s B2B commerce is formalized or digitized, which leaves ample room for multiple platforms to coexist and dominate specific verticals. Moglix was recently made a unicorn here, and there’s quite a few others leading the charge too.
Meanwhile, quick look at another buzzing deal…👀
Locus Analytics, a geo-analytics and research platform, raised a promising $50 million Series C led by GIC, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Singapore.
Locus basically works with logistics service providers, last mile companies, and ecommerce giants to offer a data analytics platform that churns through millions of rows of logistical and mapping data, to help enterprises understand their geo-operations in granularity, optimize planning, and drive outcomes like cost savings at scale.
Fresh funds will go to beef up its tech and accelerate hiring.
Quick look at Etsy’s ambition 📿
What happened—Etsy, the ecommerce platform that caters to handicraft sellers and artsy merchants, dropped $1.62 billion on acquiring Depop, a thrift-marketplace for second-hand merch and clothing.
Depop basically lets people list their used clothes for sale—which like so many other weird things, is becoming a popular behavioral shift among GenZ and young millennials. Over 30 million people use the platform across 150 countries, and Depop made $70 million in revenues last year…
With the acquisition, Etsy is hoping to tune its brand to emerging needs of the younger population, shedding an “uncool” and old-school image the service often gets.
Quick insight—we were kinda shocked to know that the second-hand fashion market is expected to top $64 billion in spending by 2024, much larger than the global fast fashion market.
Closing out—Quick look at Zuck’s tall hopes with WhatsApp 💬
WhatsApp just announced a couple major changes to the platform, particularly around communications.
Disappearing messages, with just 1 view—to be introduced for 1:1 chats as well as media, giving readers more control
Multi-device support, aka, use your account on upto 4 devices—even when not connected to the internet
These updates, in addition to already pretty aggressive payments + commerce feature shifts in the making, all add up to major moves FB’s been planning to make its golden-goose platform future-proof.
Why care—penetrating Whatsapp’s network effects is impossible for competition, but if the platform ever loses its power, it starts with the younger demographic moving elsewhere because of things they prioritize—privacy, no bullying, and non-invasive 1:1 communication with a tight group of friends. Zuck had to act in anticipation.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📈 Unstoppable - global media-research firm Kantar sponsored a report which claims India’s active internet users base will top 900 million by 2025. That’s 45% more users joining the ecosystem over the next 4 years.
💻 Wait’s Over - Microsoft will be launching Windows 11 by the end of this month, ending a 6 year long run led by Windows 10.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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Very exciting collection of interesting news - thanks team! :)