Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/29 - We have Lyft-Off! (Sorry)

Episode Date: March 29, 2019

Lyft IPO’d today, Huawei’s profits don’t seem affected by governmental pressures, Stack Overflow is looking for a new CEO, Alexa Business Blueprints allow you to create custom skills for your business and the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: LightStream.com/ride DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Lyft pops 20% in trading debut (CNBC) In This Tech I.P.O. Wave, Big Investors Grab More of the Gains (NYTimes) Huawei tops $100 billion revenue for first time despite political headwinds (CNBC) The Next CEO of Stack Overflow (Stack Overflow Blog) Amazon’s Alexa for Business Blueprints lets employees make custom voice apps (VentureBeat) The Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Podcast Suggestion: RunAs Radio The danger of 'I already pay for Apple News+' (TechCrunch) Europe is splitting the internet into three (The Verge) ‘A battle for the top of the funnel’: Pinterest’s long road to becoming a commerce platform (Digiday) Forget Brexit and trade wars, Europe’s start-ups are thriving (Financial Times) The Enormous Numbers Behind Amazon’s Market Reach (Bloomberg) The Elaborate, Dying Art of Hustling for Money at Dave & Buster's (Vice) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, March 29th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the Lyft IPO.

Huawei's profits don't seem to be affected by governmental pressures. Stack Overflow is looking for a new CEO. Alexa Business Blueprints allow you to create custom skills for your business, and the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Lyft officially became the first of this crop of tech unicorns to IPO today. And at the time of this writing, it looks like it was a success. Shares of Lyft opened up more than 21%, which means the company is valued at around $25 billion, and Lyft itself raised $2.3 billion.

Quoting CNBC, Lyft said Thursday it sold 32.5 million shares more than previously expected at $72 a piece. That's at the high end of the stated range, which was already boosted from an initial range of $62 to $68. That means the company raised about $2.3 billion from the listing. The stock held at around $87 in its first few minutes of trading before falling to around $83 per share, something of a modest IPO for such a giant tech company. Appetite for the stock was strong, though, with more than 6 million shares traded at the open. More than 19 million shares had been traded as of noon in New York about 15 minutes after the debut, end quote. I don't know that I agree with that tepid assessment entirely. especially given that Lyft has always been in Uber's shadow, the fact that they were able to come to market first and attract enough investor interest to essentially be oversubscribed and sell more shares at a higher price than anticipated is a win, by some measure, certainly. And it's definitely a win, of course, for Lyft's early investors. But actually, that's something important that's worth pointing out. This crop of unicorns coming public this year, they're all of this new generation that came of age in our new investment paramed. of mega rounds, of sovereign wealth funds, of being able to stay private for nearly a decade

or more without even needing to go to public markets to raise money. That means, potentially, as the New York Times points out, quote, the company's fastest phases of growth are behind them. As a result, there is an increased risk that in this wave of tech IPOs, an elite group of investors like sovereign wealth funds and venture capitalists will grab a larger share of the winnings compared with new investors. Individual investors are going to get in too late, said Jason DeSenna Trenert, managing partner at Strategic Research Partners, a markets and economic analysis firm. Quote, they're going to be the last investors in, and that's the concern, end quote. Tech companies are able to IPO at fully mature stages of their life cycle at this point.

That means that they're mature companies and they are mature stock. stocks. The days when a company could 10 or 20 or even 100 X in value in the decade or so after its IPO, those days are probably over. Of course, it's Facebook that pioneered this modern era. And if you bought Facebook stock on its IPO day, then you still did very, very well, even with it trading far from its all-time highs at the moment. Every exception proves the rule, I guess. Just yesterday, I caught you up on the efforts of some national governments to block Huawei devices on security grounds. Well, don't cry for Huawei yet because all of this government pressure doesn't seem to be having any effect on Huawei's bottom line yet. Quoting from CNBC, Huawei's revenue grew 19.5% in 2018, surpassing $100 billion for the first time,

despite continuing political headwinds from around the world. Sales came in at 721.2 billion yuan, which is $107.13 billion last year. Net profit reached 59.3 billion yuan higher by 25.1% compared to a year ago. The revenue growth was faster than that scene in 2017, but the net profit rise was slightly slower, end quote. Translating that just a bit, Huawei reported around $8.8 billion in profit, and its overall revenue growth, in its consumer business grew 45.1% year over year. Joel Spolsky announced yesterday that he will step down as CEO of Stack Overflow and will become chairman of that company's board of directors.

And guess what? Stack Overflow is launching an open search for a new CEO, as Fred Wilson tweeted, a dream job. Stack is an internet treasure, end quote. In a blog post announcing his change of hats, Spolsky wrote, quote, Where are we after 11 years? Practically every developer in the world uses Stack Overflow, including the Stack Exchange Network of 174 sites. We have over 100 million monthly visitors.

Every month, over 125,000 wonderful people write answers. According to Alexa, Stackoverflow.com is one of the top 50 websites in the world. That's without even counting the Stack Exchange Network, which is almost as big. And every time I see a developer write code, they've got Stack Overflow open in one of their browser windows. Oh, and hey, we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers. The company has been growing, too. Today, we are profitable. We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked 70 million in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The software as a service products like Stack Overflow for teams and enterprises are growing at 200% a year.

That speaks to the fact that we've recruited an incredibly talented team that has produced such fantastic results. But we have a lot of work ahead of us, and it's going to take a different type of leader to get us through that work, end quote. I liked this tweet that I managed to catch from Vicki Boykis, quote, just trying to make sense of the universe through some revenue numbers here. $70 million. Stack Overflow, a site that powers all of modern software development. One billion dollars. Snap. An Iware. company that lets you put stickers on your selfies, end quote. Amazon has launched Alexa for Business Blueprints, which is a set of templates for employees

to create and publish private Alexa skills for their organizations without having to write any code. Quoting from Venture Beat, as Amazon product marketing manager Ben Grossman explains in a blog post, Alexa for Business Blueprints stay within workplaces. They can't be used on devices outside of an organization. and any employee can use them to submit voice app requests. How? Simply by signing in with an Amazon account, filling in the requests and response fields,

and supplying an Alexa for business organization identifier or ARN. It's up to IT administrators to review and selectively enable apps for rooms or the entire organization as they come in. A few of the available blueprints address work-related questions like, what's the guest Wi-Fi password? What are the hours for IT? And when does open enrollment start?

Others cover pertinent subjects like office layout. ALEXA. Ask team guide, where's the mailing center? And equipment setup. How do I set up corporate email on my phone? There's also been two new skills blueprints added to the Alexa Skills Blueprints website, a business Q&A blueprint for creating custom questions and answers, and an onboarding guide blueprint for answering questions for new hires at your business.

Only available in the U.S. for now, but this seems like a super useful thing if you have a Lexus set up in your business. So I'm sure it will roll out widely soon. Time for the weekend Long Reads suggestions. Guess what? After about a month's absence, I've got a podcast recommendation for you. Run as Radio. Run as Radio is a weekly podcast for I. IT professionals using Microsoft technologies.

If you're using Microsoft in your organization, run as radio sounds like it's right up your alley. The podcast has actually been around forever. They've been publishing every Wednesday since April of 2007. They're actually the top of the podcast list on Reddit's SIS admin wiki because they've been doing it forever. It's a half hour show discussing a single topic and guests run the gamut from across the IT continuum. So if you've not heard of it, give Run As Radio a shot. Search your podcast app for Run as Radio. First for the long read suggestions, let's go with a couple of pieces which follow up directly on news from this week. In TechCrunch, Josh Constine voices the very thought

that I had when I signed up for Apple News Plus this week. Gee, I can cancel that Business Week subscription now and that New Yorker subscription and that Vanity Fair subscription. quote, why subscribe to that publisher? I already pay for Apple News Plus should be the question haunting journalists' nightmares. For readers, $10 a month all you can eat from 300 plus publishers sounds like a great deal today, but it could accelerate the demise of some of those outlets,

leaving society with fewer watchdogs and storytellers. If publishers agree to shake hands with the devil, the Dark Lord will just garner more followers making its ruinous offer more tempting, end quote. I know they think that this is just free money, that it's just additive, but I honestly don't know what any publisher is thinking by taking this deal. In The Verge, Casey Newton writes about that European Copyright Directive, and again, voiced an exact thought that I had earlier this week.

The fracturing of the Internet is upon us. Quote, the Internet had previously been divided into two. The open web, which most of the world could access, and the authoritarian web of countries like China, which is parceled out stingily and heavily monitored. As of today, though, the web no longer feels truly worldwide. Instead, we now have the American Internet, the authoritarian Internet, and the European Internet, end quote.

We don't yet know how this will shake out, but I can't see it as being good for anyone going forward. Next, as all the unicorns step up to have their day in the sunlight in Lyft's wake, a look at one of the other expected debutants, Pinterest. What is Pinterest angle exactly? Well, according to Digidae, there is going to be a battle for the top of the purchasing funnel,

Apu Gupta, CEO of Visual Commerce Platform Curlate said, referencing Instagram checkout and Google's foray into shoppable ads. I don't think anybody's got a lock on this yet, end quote. Well, Pinterest believes that it hopefully has a lock because Pinterest is trying to be not just an advertising play, full stop, it's an advertising into commerce play, which is trickier, as proven out by the fact that no one has quite pulled it off yet, but could be incredibly powerful if done right.

The Financial Times says that all of the talk of Brexit and trade wars while hogging the headlines is hiding the fact that the European startup scene is quietly thriving. Why? Well, for reasons that we've discussed recently. Success begets success. Quote, Toby Cople, partner at Mosaic Ventures, a London-based venture capital firm, says there has never been a better time to build a startup. The European startup ecosystem continues to mature, he says. There are many more successful companies like Spotify, where the next generation of founders are trained and then leave to start up the next company, often with former colleagues to start something new, end quote.

Europe is just now beginning to reap the rewards that Silicon Valley has long benefited from the so-called startup mafia system. Next, lots of people have done variations on this type of piece, but Bloomberg has a piece that does it really, really well with cool interactive graphics that make you feel the numbers viscerally, thanks to interactive charts and stuff. The piece is titled The Enormous Numbers Behind Amazon's Market Reach shows how big Amazon's business and all of its businesses really truly are, and as I think I've said before, how amazingly recently they got this big.

And finally, I just love this piece from Vice entitled The Elaborate Dying Art of Hustling for Money at Dave and Busters. Quote, far away from the glitz and glamour of the e-sports circuit, a different breed of semi-professional gamers are eking out an honest day's work at arcades around the globe. If the ninjas of the MLG with their celebrity lifestyles and lucrative promo deals are the World Series of Poker Stars, these arcade hustlers, referred to within their community as advantage players or APs,

are more akin to legal card counters. These unassuming sharks will walk into a Davin Busters or any other entertainment center with an arcade awarding tickets that can be exchanged for prizes, hit their handful of preferred games and quietly rack up thousands and thousands of tickets. Doing this, just a few days a week, can quickly amass enough of a ticket balance to trade for the top shelf prizes that casual players could only dream of redeeming, like game consoles and iPads which APs often sell for profit. For the elites in this scene, advantage playing straddles the line between obsessive hobby and part-time job. They aren't scamming or stealing their way to big wins. They're just incredibly good at these games and much of their skill is learned rather than innate. though baseline speed and reflexes are prerequisites for success,

it's primarily repetition and a nerdy devotion to the scene that breeds top-tier APs who are able to quickly discern whether a game's jackpot is ripe and able to be won or if it needs more time to, quote, refill through casual play. At home, APs study PDFs of game manuals downloaded from manufacturer's sites, discuss strategies on their subreddit, track fluctuations in price-ticket value and post YouTube videos showcasing their talents. But despite the Internet's aid in connecting APs worldwide and revealing the tricks of their trade,

to new generations of players, their numbers are dwindling, end quote. I won't spoil it for you, but it's a fascinating thing to read why these Chuckie Cheese Game Sharps are a dying breed. Guess what? The Google Podcast search test actually worked. At about 10 a.m. this morning, listener at CAHAB 9 tweeted me a screenshot of what I presume is his search within his Google Podcasts app. He only had to enter Iowa River Puppet, and sure enough, there's yesterday's episode. So, man, first of all, Google works fast, and yeah, I did make it super easy with a super unique string of words, but you got to say, that's impressive nonetheless. I've never seen audio transcription and search work that well before. If there was someday actual long-tail podcast discovery and search,

that could end up being huge for discovery and actually as a traffic driver for podcasts. So we'll see. Anyway, enjoy the weekend bonus episodes. Talk to you on Monday.