Nuggies: Real Money for Fake Offices
Thursday, March 16th, 2021
Welcome to the 40th edition of Nuggies, an email newsletter that aggregates articles and commentary on business, economics, startups, and more, in bite-sized nuggets sent right to your email weekly. Created by and for college students.
Our quote of the week comes from social media marketing expert Steven Bartlett, “If you can't handle uncertainty, you can't handle growth."
This Week’s Articles:
Maybe Amazon Has No Master Plan, New York Times
This opinion piece takes a look at Amazon’s long, belabored foray into grocery and discusses the role these big bets tech companies take on society. The author suggests that these bets aren’t part of a large master plan but are instead instances of large tech companies tinkering with market discovery. She discusses the potential implications of this view of tech giants in a short, but good read.
Read it here
Why Do Some People Hate Cathie Wood?, The Irrelevant Investor
The recent correction in tech stocks has taken a colossal toll on Ark Invest, the ETF issuer that invests in many hot, emerging tech industries. Cathie Wood, their founder, grew their ETFs from $800m assets under management in 2018 to $50b today. This blog post takes a look at why, despite these returns, Cathie is absolutely hated by some. This is a topical and interesting read that speaks to the culture in financial markets and is definitely worth a read.
Read it here
Sequoia Capital puts millions of dollars into Gather, a virtual HQ platform, TechCrunch
If you’re interested in the venture space and what tech companies are getting looks from the best VCs, look no further than this article. This talks about the startup Gather, which just raised a $26m Series A financing round from famed Bay Area VC firm Sequoia. Gather is a virtual workplace with video conferencing that brings back many of the workplace traditions we lost when offices closed—just virtually. TechCrunch does a great job at putting this into context and reporting on the story.
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
In 1959, you could buy your Volkswagen with a built in coffee maker. Someone should tell Elon!
This Week’s Question:
Which happens first? Bitcoin to $100,000 or to $5,000. Currently around $55,000 (as of 3/16)
What are we listening to this week?:
This week we’re listening to Alfredo by Freddie Gibbs. Although we love Nas, we recognize that Alfredo is an incredible album that likely should have won the Rap Album of the Year of Nas’ King’s Disease. In a time where lots of rap sounds similar, Gibbs cuts out his own style with unforgiving flows under broken down, gritty, and minimal tracks. Definitely worth a listen. Congrats to Nas for the Grammy—well deserved after the Illmatic and Stillmatic snubs.
Thank you for reading! Nuggies is created by Thomas Pero and Spencer Koehl, two undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame.
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