Nuggies: Silicon Valley's Own Stock Market and More Softbank News
Thursday, September 24th, 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 Nike founder Phil Knight, “No matter the sport, no matter the human endeavor really, total effort will win people’s hearts.”
This Week’s Articles:
Silicon Valley Is Quietly Building Its Own Wall Street, Adam Bluestein
Eric Ries is a founder who is known for his pioneering book The Lean Startup, which has, as this article states, become the unofficial bible of Silicon Valley.
The article talks about Eric Ries’ new venture, the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE). This is a new stock exchange that will help shift focus of public companies from satisfying short term profits, which may end up hurting the environment or engaged parties, to long term value creation, the goal of any good startup.
The LTSE will be run like a normal stock exchange, and has 20 companies ready to list once they launch. Privately-held Silicon Valley superstars AirBnb and Stripe are rumored to be planning to go public on the LTSE. This is a great read to get an in-depth look at it.
Read it here
ARM & Softbank, Acquired
Last week’s announcement of Nvidia buying ARM from SoftBank is big news in the computing business. This episode of Acquired takes a deep dive on the ARM, one of the most important companies you may have never heard of it, and what makes it unique.
ARM develops and licenses intellectual property for computer chips that power traditionally smaller devices- such as phones and smart watches. Pairing ARM with Nvidia’s products that power many of the higher-end AI computing will be interesting to watch.
Listen to it here
Demystifying Snowflake: The Biggest Software IPO in History, Mario Gabriele
The article delivers a clear and concise explanation of data storage company Snowflake’s business model and future outlook. Snowflake went public last week at a share price of $120, but its priced peaked at over $300 on the day, or over 75x forecasted 2021 revenues.
The article deconstructs the hype and explains how Snowflake is different from and fits in with existing cloud players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Read it here
This Week’s Tweets:
^Creative explanation for the post-Covid run up in SaaS stocks
This Week’s Wildcard (an extra, interesting nugget):
This week’s wildcard is a voting ballet from an 1882 San Francisco county election. The ballot not only functioned as a ticket, but also served and anti-Chinese propaganda. It’s unfathomable for a ballot in an American election to have an image like this as it clearly contributed to an inequitable election system that deprived many of their rights. For more on the design history of ballots and how it affects elections, check out this piece from the American Institute of Graphic Arts.
This Week’s Question:
Is Snowflake’s hype warranted?
What are we listening to this week?:
This week, we’re heading across the pond for British rapper and producer Skepta’s 2016 Mercury Prize winning album Konniciwa. As one of the pioneers of Grime, this album is both a victory lap and Skepta’s magnum opus.
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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