Smart moves 🤙
History is made, season of IPOs, and Jack Ma’s bacc.
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Market summary: 📊
Back to back good days in India, with Sensex now in a stone’s throw of 50K. US investors popped champagne with a new administration putting an end to the political circus.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.39%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.31%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.85%
Sensex - up 0.80%
He bacc 😎
When Jack Ma had disappeared, everyone was quick to assume the worst. Speculations were finally put to rest when he resurfaced after 8 months of no show to give an online talk to a bunch of school teachers in China. Dude was also later seen touring his hometown of Hangzhou.
Stock of Alibaba, which had been taken to the woodshed over the fiasco, was trading up 8% on the news, adding $60B to the market cap in one day. Priorities!
Satya bought some insurance 💰
Microsoft wrote a decent sized check to self-driving startup Cruise, which is leading charge right up there with Waymo, and Tesla on the autonomy game (fans don’t like anyone comparing, but with all cards drawn out, we’re talking a pretty aggressive match).
The total round of $2 billion values Cruise at over $30 billion.
Some context—the self driving game is a long haul endeavor. Just like any other generational technology that takes decades to come of age, autonomy is not going to happen overnight. What further complicates things here, is that there is very little room for error. Startups gotta keep testing, building, and investing until someday the tech is 99.999999999% accurate for mass deployment. Half-assed MVPs don’t cut it.
While its too late for Microsoft to throw its hat in the arena now, without struggling to climb a tough slope up, they can play the self-driving infra game and still meaningfully contribute to the future.
Once autonomous deployment hits ground, we’re going to need wide infrastructure that facilitates car-to-car and car-to-datacenter communication, customer support infra, monitoring systems, data sharing and governance and what not. Imagine something like the mobile revolution all over again—towers, base stations, small cell deployments, sales centers, repair centers. This time a lot more AI driven, and obviously cloud hosted from the get go.
That’s Satya’s bread and butter—his Azure empire is primed for the unsexy back-end infra stuff, and with the right partnerships in place, he can get to the forefront of this multi-billion dollar deployment that will facilitate the connected economy of the future.
Cruise is owned by global auto giant General Motors (bought by them for a $1B steal back in 2016). GM is a powerhouse but their technology and AI chops are at best sub-par. In Satya, they have a formidable partner with the might of Microsoft’s resources.
Bottomline: with this deal, all 3 top cloud vendors have secured their base in the self-driving game. Google has Waymo—the one leading charge. Amazon (AWS) just bought Zoox last year, and has partnerships with other car companies. Satya and his bois pick Cruise. Wars on!
BTW, Kyle Vogt has some thoughts on why a business with zero revenue can be with $30 bills!
Tis the season of IPOs 🙌
Gaming startup Nazara Tech is leading charge on domestic digital platforms filing for an IPO this year, backed by some of the best investors in the game—including Sequoia, Plutus Wealth, and Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, among others.
Nazara has been around the block forever. Founder Nitish Mittersain was a coding prodigy who rose up with the first wave of digitization we saw in India back in 2000s. Since then, they’ve launched countless games under that banner, to dominate the space with the likes of World Cricket, Carrom Clash, and stuff the kids can’t get off, like Chhota Bheem racing.
Quick look at the company right now:
Current year revenue targets of ₹470 crores, 2x jump from last year
Makes money on digital ads mostly
Apps used in 60+ countries
Well diversified investments in e-sports, fantasy sports, and other cutting edge gaming services picking pace in India
FYI—this is actually the second attempt Nazara is making to go public, after a first bid In 2018, ended up unsuccessfully. A lot has changed since then though—with India’s underlying digital usage probably doubling, and COVID giving some of these ventures escape velocity.
History is made 👏
Joe’s in office already, formally inaugurated and through with signing major orders including bringing the US back into the Paris climate accord. Markets put up a grad welcome to 46, with the Nasdaq (tech stocks) particularly gaining over 2%!
Kamala Harris was right by the side, making history as the first woman ever to become VP, and perhaps someday in line for the top office. Here’s some pictures from the ceremony that consumed most of today’s business day.
Meanwhile, on his way out, Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, the dude who was found guilty of stealing self-driving IP from Waymo and selling it to Uber—you can’t make this shit up. All of the politics and lawsuits had weighed heavily on Uber’s autonomy program, eventually killing it. 🤷♀️
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💉 Back up deployments incoming - supporting momentum in the vaccination campaign, more pharma players are getting ready with more vaccines. Zydus Cadila has started enrolling and dosing participants for its phase 3 trial to determine the efficacy of its covid-19 shot ZyCov-D. 28K volunteers across 5 sites in 4 cities will be enrolled.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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