Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/02 – Try Some “Diet” YouTube

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

YouTube is demoing a diet version of YouTube. Square is paying a pretty penny to join the buy now, pay later sweepstakes. Did an Intel exec accidentally leak the specs for Thunderbolt 5? And did Google’s quantum computer create a perpetual motion machine? Sponsors: UE.com/fits, use promocode RIDE for 15% of Ultimate Ears FITS Grammarly.com/techmeme Links: YouTube ‘Premium Lite’ subscription offers ad-free viewing for less (The Verge) Twitter's Dorsey leads $29 bln buyout of lending pioneer Afterpay (Reuters) Intel Executive Posts Thunderbolt 5 Photo then Deletes It: 80Gbps and Pam-3 (AnandTech) Tech Startup Financing Hits Records as Giant Funds Dwarf Venture Capitalists (WSJ) Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real (QuantaMagazine) Robinhood Sold IPO Shares to More Than 300,000 of Its Customers (WSJ) 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 right home for Monday, August 2, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. YouTube is demoing a diet version of YouTube. Square is paying a pretty penny to join the buy now, pay later sweepstakes, did an Intel exec accidentally leak the specs for Thunderbolt 5 and did Google's

quantum computer create a perpetual motion machine? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. What if you just want YouTube premium to get ad-free viewing and you don't really need all the other bells and whistles. Well, you're in luck. YouTube is trialing what it is calling Premium Light, a subscription that runs 6.99 cents per month, offering ad-free viewing across all major platforms currently available only in Europe. Quoting the Verge. Google is piloting a more affordable premium subscription tier for YouTube that offers ad-free viewing without YouTube premiums other features like offline downloads or background playback. Premium Light is currently being tested in Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Premium Light includes ad-free viewing

across YouTube's main app on web, iOS, Android, smart TVs, and game consoles, as well as in the YouTube Kids app. However, it doesn't include any YouTube music benefits like ad-free listening, and it doesn't include premium's other features like background playback for when you want to switch to another app while continuing to listen to audio from a YouTube video or offline downloads. Speaking as someone who hates the amount of ads on YouTube but isn't too interested in premium's other features like offline downloads, premium light sounds like a tempting proposition. But at its current pricing, it costs around 60% of the price of a regular premium subscription while only offering around a quarter of its benefits. YouTube says that the current subscription is in an experimental

phase, however, and that it's considering rolling out more plans based on audience feedback, end quote. Well, look, it certainly seems like there can't be enough buy now pay later services out there. I can't tell you the amount of companies that are in the space at the moment, though one of them is no longer independent. However, as Square says, it is buying Australia-based Buy Now Pay Later Service afterpay for $29 billion in an all-stock deal paying a 30% premium on After Pay's last closing. quoting Reuters. The Takeover, also the biggest buyout of an Australian firm, underscores the popularity of a business model that has upended consumer credit by charging merchants a fee to offer small point-of-sale loans, which their shoppers repay in interest-free installments bypassing credit checks. The pandemic has also fueled the boom in the buy-now pay-later or BNPL sector. As tech-savvy consumers stuck at home spend money online to buy everything from coats to expensive phones. Over the past year. Melbourne-based Afterpay signed up millions of users in the United States, which is now among the fastest growing markets for the sector. The deal also locks in a remarkable share price run for

after pay, whose stock has surged from Australian $10 a share in early 2020 to an Australian $100 a share in less than two years. Acquiring afterpay is a proof-of-concept moment for Buy Now, Pay later, at once validating the industry and creating a formidable new competitor for a firm, PayPal and Klarna, truest securities analyst said. We expect Square to invest heavily to integrate afterpay and accelerate organic revenue growth, end quote. As Bahama Ben tweeted, quote, based on the price paid by Square, after pay clearly had leverage. Perhaps it was to remain independent or could there have been multiple bidders, end quote.

Also, as an aside, Square reported Q2 earnings this morning, seeing revenue rise 143% year over year, but also note that this trend continues. Cash apps Bitcoin yearly revenue was $2.72 billion up $200, though Square's Bitcoin Holdings had a $45 million impairment loss, quoting Coin Desk. Bitcoin revenue and gross profit declined from the first quarter mainly because of relative price stability, which affected trading activity compared with prior quarters. Future quarters may see fluctuation in Bitcoin revenue and gross profit as a result of changes in. customer demand or market price, the letter says. During the second quarter, Square recognized an impairment loss of $45 million on the Bitcoin the company holds because Bitcoin is accounted for

as an indefinite, lived, intangible asset. If the value of Bitcoin falls below the carrying value, an impairment is required, end quote. A now deleted tweet by an Intel executive suggests that Thunderbolt 5 could double the bandwidth of existing Thunderbolt 4 and U.S. B4 connections to 80 GbPS, quoting Anantec. Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Client Computing Group, Gregory Bryant, is this week spending some time at Intel's Israeli R&D facilities in his first overseas Intel trip of 2021. An early post on Sunday morning showcasing Bryant's trip to the gym to overcome jet leg

was followed by another later in the day with Bryant being shown the offices and the research. The post contained four photos but was rapidly deleted. and replaced by a photo with three in the tweet above. The photo removed showcases some new information about next generation Thunderbolt technology. In the image, we can see a poster on the wall showcasing 80G-P-H-Y technology, which means that Intel is working on a physical layer, pH-Y, for 80-G-BPS connections. Off the bat, this is double the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 4, which runs at 40GBPS. The second line confirms that this is USB 80G targeted to support the existing USBC ecosystem,

which follows along that Intel is aiming to maintain the USBC connector but double the effective bandwidth. The third line is actually where it gets technically interesting. The pH-Y will be based on novel PAM-3 modulation technology. This is talking about how the zeros and ones are transmitted. Traditionally, we talk about NRZ encoding, which just allows for a zero or a one to be transmitted or a single bit. The natural progression is a scheme allowing two bits to be transferred, and this is called PAM4, pulse amplitude modulation, with the four being the demarcation for how many different variants two bits could be seen, either as zero, zero, zero, one, one-zero, or

one-one. Pam4 at the same frequency, thus has two times the bandwidth of an NRZ connection. The final line on the image is something N6 test chip focusing on the new pH, technology is working in the lab and showing promising results. The final line on this image is something. N6 test chip focusing on the new P.HY technology is working in the lab and showing promising results. Intel's goal with Thunderbolt is going to be both driving bandwidth, power, and utility, but also right now it seems keeping it to the USBC standard is going to be a vital part of keeping the technology useful for users who can fall back on standard USBC connections.

Right now, Intel's TB4 is a subset that includes, USB 4. So we might see another situation where TB5 is ready to be a super set of USB 5 as well. However, it seems that USB standards are slower to roll out than TB standards right now, end quote. A little bit of inside baseball here, but worth knowing if you're in the startup universe at all. In the first half of this year, U.S. startup funding was $150 billion with fiscal year 2021 on pace to double 2020's total. We've spoken about that before. records are being broken everywhere in terms of funding raises this year. But also note this, in Q2 of this year, non-VC funds invested in a record 42% of tech startup funding deals.

Something, something Tiger Global is writing checks to everyone and quickly at the moment, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Hedge funds, mutual funds, pensions, sovereign wealth groups, and other so-called non-traditional venture investors were more active in the second quarter than in any previous period, according to research firm Pitchbook data. These firms participated in 42% of startup financing deals, and these deals accounted for more than three quarters of the invested capital, according to Pitchbuk. The large asset firms have massive pools of capital, move quickly, and are less likely to ask for board seats or involvement in company decisions, often making them more appealing to founders, according to interviews with investors and startup executives.

The result has been a dizzying pace of dealmaking. It's like speed dating, but more extreme, said Peter Fishman, a longtime Silicon Valley tech professional who last year co-founded data automation startup Mozart Data. Big money managers have long allocated some of their portfolios to invest in traditional venture capital firms, but many started investing directly in startups around a decade ago in a near-zero interest rate economy, looking for better returns from tech companies that were staying private longer. Over the years, traditional venture capitalists often pan them as tourist investors and dumb money who lacked the particular skill set for startup investing. But they stuck around and doubled down. Today, among the top 10 investors and startups

by dollar amount, half are non-traditional venture investors, including Fidelity Investments and Tiger Global Management. The number of startup funding rounds that include non-traditional VC investors and zero venture capital firms has doubled over the past 10 years, according to Pitchbook. Some traditional venture firms are scrapping old practices. to keep pace. To move quickly, some venture capitalists said they are cutting back on audits and customer checks and taking a startup's word on profit and loss. Quote, there are no VC funds with pricing discipline. All of us have caved. Venture capitalist Keith Roboys tweeted last month. From 2016 through 2019, there were on average 35 deals a month with funding rounds that

reached $100 million or more, according to data provider CB Insights. This year, it's 126 deals. a month, end quote. Missed this over the weekend, but physicists say they have used Google's quantum computer to demo a time crystal, which forever cycles between states without consuming energy for the first time. What does that mean? Well, it's sort of a perpetual motion machine, for one thing, quoting Quantum Magazine. A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal

is an object whose parts move in a regular repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change, without burning any energy. The consequence is amazing. You evade the second law of thermodynamics, said Roderik Mosner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the physics of complex systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author of the Google Paper. That's the law that says disorder always increases. Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break time translation symmetry, the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals and time. The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is.

All other known phases like water or ice are in thermal equilibrium. Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don't change with time. The time crystal is the first out-of-equilibrium phase. It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state. This is just this completely new and exciting space that we're working in now. Vedica Kamani, a condensed matter physicist now at Stanford, who co-discovered the novel phase while she was a graduate student and co-authored the new paper with the Google team said. It's unclear whether a time crystal might have practical use, but its stability seems promising to Mosner. Quote, Something that's as stable as this is unusual and special things become useful, he said. Or the state might be merely conceptually useful. It's the first and simplest example of an out-of-equilibrium phase, but the researchers suspect that more such phases are physically possible. Some scientists argue that time crystals illuminates something profound about the nature of time.

Normally in physics, quote, however much you try to treat time as being just another dimension, it is always kind of an outlier, end quote. Einstein made the best attempt at unification weaving 3D space together with time into a four-dimensional fabric called space-time. But even in his theory, unidirectional time is unique. With time crystals, Nyack said, this is the first case that I know of, where all of a sudden time is just one of the gang, end quote. Finally today, remember when Robin Hood went public last week, they made offers to a lot of their user base to get in on the action, to actually scoop up shares. of the IPO, well, Robin Hood has since revealed that 301,573 users took them up on the offer and

participated in its IPO, representing about 1.3% of its 22.5 million funded accounts as of June 30th, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Breaking with recent Wall Street tradition, the company sold a big chunk of the shares in its hotly anticipated debut to the small-time investors who trade on its app. As much as 25% of the IPO shares went to Robin Hood customers, the Wall Street Journal earlier reported, and a typical IPO individual investors get well under 10%. An allocation of 25% would mean the average Robin Hood customer participating in the IPO spent about $1,600 to buy 41 shares. While a small share of Robin Hood's customer base, the number of users who invested in the deal is high for a typical IPO offered on the trading app.

Some 78,250 Robin Hood users bought shares in Fitness Company F-45 training holdings, recent public offering the most popular IPO offered on Robin Hood before its own, end quote. So I tweeted something about this last week, but here's a prediction. This decade, it will become common for companies to try to let their user base in on IPOs, or even though this will be harder, allowing them in on early stage funding rounds. You already see this happening on platforms like Republic, which hosted a fundraising round for Gumroad recently. and Ride Home Media uses Mercury as our bank, and sure enough, we got an email this weekend

inviting us to get in on their series B round, along with the likes of A16Z and other big-name VC firms. I say this is going to become more common because companies are learning how valuable for brand loyalty letting your users have an actual stake in what you're doing can be. Just look at Tesla. What percentage of Tesla owners are also Tesla shareholders? It's got to be huge, I bet, and a lot of them have probably ridden that stock all the way up, and in the meantime created a cult of worship and fandom around Tesla that borders on the quasi-religious in terms of fervor. Customers are cool, but you know what's cooler? A cohort of fanatical customers with skin in the game in the form of their 401ks,

willing to be hodlers of your stock. Yes, crypto has understood this for years, so expect more traditional startups to understand understand this too. All right, first show of August in the bag. Time to put the nose back to the grindstone, I guess. The lazy days of summer are behind us. One thing we've got coming up is our 1,000th episode of this podcast. If we do bonus episodes every week this month, like I think we will, the 1,000th episode milestone will come on August 28th. Should we do something special? special, special guest, special type of episode. I'm open to all ideas. Tweet them at me or leave them on the show, subreddit at R slash ride home. Talk to you tomorrow.