Nuggies - Gen Z Techies and U.S. Buying up China
Thursday, September 17th, 2020
Welcome to the 19th 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 founder of Angelist, Naval Ravikant, “If it is not making you happier, or healthier, or calmer, or having better relationships, or wealthier, then what good is it? It's useless. You can safely discard it.”
This Week’s Articles:
Gen Zers Say Silicon Valley Is Elitist and Exclusive. Can They Build a New System?, The New York Times
Gen Z web developers, coders, software engineers, and builders who feel like they have been left behind by the tech bros and venture capitalists have banded together to create the “Gen Z Mafia”. The name is a reference to the PayPal Mafia, the group of men, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal and went on to wield massive influence in Silicon Valley. The collective is a collaborative space hosted on the chat app Discord, where Gen Z (anyone under 24 years old) gather and build in an environment built to be inclusive and supportive—the opposite of what they perceive the old guard of Silicon Valley to represent. This article walks through what they are, some awesome projects they’ve put together, and also some of the problems they’ve ru into.
Read it here
TikTok will spin off into a separate company, partly owned by Oracle, The Verge
In a deal announced earlier week, U.S. tech giant Oracle will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations in an attempt to shore up data privacy concerns, as the social app is owned by a Chinese internet giant. What this exactly meant was unclear until recently, when it was announced that, pending approval from the White House, TikTok will be a separate company from ByteDance, their Chinese parent. Oracle will take a minority stake in the company and ensure that U.S. data will remain in the U.S. This could be a remedy to the concern that purchasing TikTok would not sell its algorithm.
Read it here
Nvidia acquisition of Arm throws company into tech spat between U.S. and China, Reuters
This article focuses less on the ground-shaking $40 Billion acquisition of chip maker ARM by U.S. based Nvidia, and more on the implications it has for U.S.-Chinese relations. Essentially, China’s smartphone industry is key to its strategic push and pull with the U.S., and ARM is a huge part of their smartphone industry. Leadership in China will likely not like an American company having such influence. Definitely worth a read for a more in-depth analysis.
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:
^Super interesting story of how Kanye changed the rap game forever in 2007
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
Bessemer Venture Partners, a large venture capital firm, known for a lot of huge investments, just released their initial investor memos for some of their most famous investments and they are definitely worth a read: https://www.bvp.com/memos
This Week’s Question:
Does Apple deserve to be the most valuable brand in the world? Why or why not?
What are we listening to this week?:
IT’S LIT! It’s been a grind week at Notre Dame, so our heads are down and Travis Scott’s Rodeo is on repeat. The album that first got Travis mainstream success, Rodeo is packed full of classics, including 90210, 3500, Apple Pie, and of course, Antidote.
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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