Monday Moves v0.6
*Feb 25, 2020*
Raj: When’s the last time this newsletter made it to your inbox on Monday morning? Yeah I can’t remember either. Just don’t tell anyone, and we’ll be cool….
An astute reader spotted an error in v0.5: GAN stands for generative adversarial network, not general adversarial network. Bravo!
Matrix 4 was filming last week in San Francisco, and Market Street really looked like a dystopian warzone. I can’t wait.
Sam: Have you ever been stuck in traffic and thought to yourself, “the only thing that would make this better right now is more advertising?” Neither have I, but unfortunately for us advertisements are coming to cars and they are coming soon. At least your new Xbox can play the original Halo!
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Moves
Raj: Just a month after filing to go public, Casper massively slashed its IPO valuation. Early employees will face the brunt of the shockwaves resulting from this unexpected move.
Casper, the mattress company that desperately wants you to believe it’ll be the next tech unicorn, went public earlier in February with shares priced much lower than initially expected to decrease its valuation from over $750 million to $500 million. The company initially hiked its valuation by rebranding itself to millenials as a “pioneer of the Sleep Economy”, but the public markets didn’t fall prey to the loose and enticing use of buzzwords. Despite what Casper wants you to believe, its sole tech product is a smartphone-controlled bedside light. Casper is not the only company recently to fall short of expectations generated by undeserved hype: remember WeWork? It’s unfortunate that so many companies feel the need to use false advertising in a quest to become the next tech giant, since it is often the vested stocks of early employees that are hit the hardest. Early employees at startups toil for years to produce something of value and bear enormous uncertainty over the returns they will end up receiving. Startups like Casper should end such irresponsible behavior if they value their employees.
Sam: The Xbox Series X is the gaming console of the future with an emphasis on the past. Gamers are excited about the new backwards compatibility options.
Microsoft has slowly been revealing details on their latest version of the Xbox which is going to be released later this year. In their most recent announcement they revealed that the Xbox Series X is designed to play games from the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, and the Xbox One. They are also working with game developers so that if you buy an Xbox One game in the near future, you won’t need to repurchase it if you upgrade to the Series X. The Series X will feature advanced graphics such as variable rate shading and ray tracing, along with 120 FPS. The processor will allow the console to achieve 12 Teraflops which is more than 4 times faster than the current generation. The Xbox Series X is supposed to release alongside its biggest competitor, the Playstation 5, this holiday season and I am looking forward to hearing more announcements from Microsoft and Sony as the year goes on.
Raj: Uber Eats India has been acquired by former competitor Zomato. Expect major growth in India’s food delivery app market as a duopoly consolidates and a new player (expectedly) enters the ring.
Uber has sold its food delivery business in India to Zomato, the food delivery and restaurant discovery service that also has a foothold in the American market since its acquisition of Urbanspoon in 2015. With this move, Zomato has called itself “the undisputed market leaders in the food delivery category in India.” This confidence certainly isn’t misplaced, as Zomato now probably controls over 50% of the Indian market and leaves most of the remainder to Swiggy. But it will be unwise for Zomato to revel in its market domination with Swiggy without paying attention to an all-too-expected competitor with way more resources than Uber. I’m of course talking about Amazon. The e-commerce giant is making major moves in an effort to disrupt the Zomato-Swiggy duopoly, so stay tuned.
Sam: Uber is looking to make some extra cash by selling advertising on top of cars.
Uber is trying to figure out how to make their pro forma work, and they think that selling advertisements on top of their drivers’ cars might help. The partnership with Adomni means that drivers in Phoenix, Dallas, and Atlanta can make $300 for installing a digital rooftop display and then $100 extra per week while driving. The digital displays will be adaptive and we can expect the ads to be targeted by time of day, location of the car, and other Adomini displays in the area.
Rearview Mirror
Raj: There’s no such thing as “just a janitor”. How Richard Montañez came up with Flamin’ Hot Cheetos is an ode to the value of resourcefulness, persistence, and self-belief.
Here’s a compelling account of Richard Montañez, a former janitor at Frito Lay who rose through the ranks despite all odds and now serves as a vice president at PepsiCo America. Montañez took to heart the an ask by the Frito Lay CEO for all employees to act like they owned the company: he did all he could to be the best janitor possible and to learn about the various processes that drove the company. Upon observing that products like Fritos or Ruffles were all sold plain in Latino neighborhoods, he experimented with putting chili on Cheetos. After his experiment was a hit with his own family, he called the CEO himself to ask permission to demonstrate his revelation. It was a wild success, and out of Montañez’s drive and ingenuity were born Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Montañez knew it was not in his job description to call the CEO or to conduct experiments, but he did so anyway because he had a sense of ownership of the company for which he worked.
Eyes on the Road
Sam: Amazon filed a patent to catapult satellites, drones, and maybe your packages.
Amazon was recently granted a patent which covers an “energy-efficient launch system for aerial vehicles.” The idea is rather simple: use a giant cable to whip a payload and launch it into the air or even space. This is an important step in the right direction - helping to reduce the most energy intensive part of getting something in the air, the launch. This wild concept is still in just the idea phase, and it is unlikely that Amazon is doing any sort of rigorous testing on it… yet.
That’s all for this week. Keep on moving.