Substack on a roll
Gaming FTW, Mobikwik’s nightmare, and making of a retail giant.
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Market summary: 📊
India had a fantastic session, kinda surprising given the otherwise gloomy mood of global markets. US ended lower though with technology companies again staying out of favor.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.32%
Nasdaq 100 - down 0.53%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 2.33%
Sensex - up 2.30%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Winners gonna win—gaming company Nazara Tech, which had its IPO oversubscribed by nearly 175x, opened to a grand welcome with stock popping nearly 80% for first trade. The stock’s one of the only legit ways to ride India’s piping hot digital gaming boom, which is expected to witness hyper-growth through the next several years as hundreds of millions of more users come online. Meanwhile, Big Bull Rakesh Jhunjhunwala made bank on his stake, turning a 10.82% stake in the business acquired for ₹180 crores about 2 years ago into nearly ₹656 crores.
✅ Bringing acceptance to crypto—old payment companies are finally waking up to the changing tides. Yesterday, Visa made history by settling payments on Ethereum, and today PayPal announced it’ll let its 100 million+ users in the US pay online purchases directly using crypto money in their wallets, building the rails for users to seamlessly convert currency at checkout, at all of the 29 million or so merchants they serve. It's a small feature, but PayPal processes nearly $250 billion worth of payments a quarter, and this could give crypto the strong consumer buy-in it always needed.
Sponsored
Airmeet — Hiring alert👋
Airmeet is one of the fastest growing video-SaaS platforms for hosting virtual and hybrid events — from Hackathons to Ice-breakers, Panel Discussions to enterprise-scale Workshops. The company raised over $12M recently from Sequoia India to help the COVID-battered global corporate events industry to keep functioning.
Airmeet is hiring for two exciting roles — an Events Marketer to spearhead virtual event strategy, and a Partnerships Associate to lead identification of strategic partners and outreach. We'd be super thrilled if anyone in our community finds these gigs relevant. And oh, best part? 100% remote!
Creator economy’s champion 💪
Substack is on a roll.
The newsletter-first publication platform (for those unaware, literally helps us make these emails for ya) is raising $65 million at a royal $650 million valuation for its Series B, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the round.
For years, journalism felt like it was crumbling under the assault of the free internet, until Substack showed how integrated email-first publications could actually help writers amass an audience and most importantly, get paid.
While journalism was the default creator-base the company targeted, unsurprisingly the knowledge-workers (the VCs, the investors, the gurus, the curators, the creators) found tremendous use for the service too. Literally the easiest way to build an audience for any product!
Not to forget, the pandemic drove widespread layoffs in the media industry, which saw a flurry of writers give the service a legit shot, or those bored out of their minds in lockdowns like us, mustering courage to even kick off niche “independent” media companies. Anyway, so far some 500K paying subscribers consume content through the service, nearly 2x in just 3 months. Growing like a weed.
Bottomline: so far, the journey may seem like a breeze, but solutions from services like Twitter, Facebook which come with built in distribution, no matter how ugly, are capable of giving Substack tough competition.
In any case though, the creator economy has a long ramp ahead of it and the newsletter space is just getting started.
Solarwinds cut through deep 🧐
Remember the SolarWinds cyberattack which took down the US Treasury Department and several other MAJOR government agencies? Well the damage has been worse than imagined, and latest reports suggest that Russian hackers in fact got 24x7 access to official emails of top ranking US officials, including Trump’s Department of Homeland Security chiefs.
Those affected also include several US spies and analysts primarily tasked with evaluating national security threats emerging from foreign lands. It’s embarrassing to say the least, and likely needs more media attention than it's getting right now.
FYI, the impact of the ongoing Microsoft Outlook email hack which affected nearly 30,000 US companies is still being evaluated, and from what the press is hearing, the Biden administration is strictly keeping a tight lid on the combined impact of both the happenings.
Key takeaway: state-sponsored cyber attacks are replacing bullets in 2021-esque modern warfare. The question looms—if the government can’t protect its own most-sacred systems from falling prey to rudimentary assaults, how can the public and corporations be defended?
Regardless, all these happenings are bound to make cybersecurity services one of the hottest technology sectors over the next 5 or so years.
What’s up on Venture Street? 💰
Kids-focused online retailing platform FirstCry doubled its valuation to $2.1 billion after raising a massive $315 million from a bunch of private equity players, including TPG, Premji Invest, and ChrysCapital.
FirstCry runs one of the largest platforms in the kids-category in India, and has pioneered growth through an omnichannel model (an offline + online strategy). With 300+ stores across 125+ cities, and a robust digital presence, the company has accumulated over 4 million customers, booking revenues of nearly ₹900 crores, up 68% in 2020 despite the pandemic.
Anyway, an IPO in the next 18 months or so is looming, and the fresh $$ will go to streamline operations and get the company in shape to woo public market investors.
What matters: as ecommerce slowly starts to mature, major verticals are starting to peel off from the leaders. The expansive kids-category is overall estimated to top ₹1.7 lakh crore in spending by 2028, and digital platforms here have a LONG and exciting ramp to glory.
Stuff of nightmares 🤕
MobiKwik’s grand IPO plans just hit a major PR roadblock.
Personal information of nearly 10 crore+ of MobiKwik’s customers was apparently found on sale for pennies on the dark web. The news was broken by a few ethical hacking researchers, who claim the file has been up for sale for quite some time now.
The 8.2 TB of stolen dataset contains users' information including email ids, names, and loans procured, as well as card numbers of over 4 crore users. A hacker named Jordan Daven is believed to have stolen the data from MobiKwik’s main server.
What makes matters worse is the company’s awkward denial of the mess, and then somewhat twisted attempt at slyly pushing blame onto erring users. Anyway, a third party audit will apparently follow.
Tweet of the day 🐦
Uniqlo is out to beat H&M and Zara to become the largest apparel retailer in the world. We dug into their humble beginnings in small town Japan, starting out with just 1 store.
Otherwise a slow news day yesterday, with most folks still lost in the Holi-weekend mood.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🍎 Apple’s date with developers - Apple’s flagship Worldwide Developers Conference will be held from June 7 through June 11, again going virtual this year. A bunch of key updates to software and developer tools, including the launch of iOS 15 are expected.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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I love the sponsorship pivot to hiring roles in startups :)