Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/30 – DoorDash’s IPO Seems To Be Cresting The Wave

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Tech meme right home for Monday, November 30th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. DoorDash lines up for its IPO and seems to be cresting the wave perfectly. Airbnb is right behind it, swelling a bit as well. Salesforce looks like it will be buying Slack as soon as tomorrow.

Starting point is 00:00:51 The UK finally officially bans Huawei, the monster computer display I want very badly, and remembrances of Tony Shea gone tragically way too soon. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. A whole bunch of big financial news today. First up, we've got the filing for DoorDash's IPO this week. The company is looking to raise $2.8 billion at an implied valuation of up to $32 billion, which is notable because at its last private valuation, DoorDash was valued this past June at only $16 billion. So it's clear that they seem to be cresting the wave at exactly the right time. They plan to list shares in a $75 to $85 window, so if you want to play along at home, those are the dollar markers to keep in mind this week.

Starting point is 00:01:45 Reminder of why suddenly DoorDash is looking so swell, quoting CNBC. DoorDash reported $1.9 billion in revenue for the nine months ended September 30th. That's up from $587 million during the same period last year. As its revenue grew, DoorDash also narrowed its net loss to $149 million over the same period in 2020. In 2019, DoorDash had a net loss of $533 million over the nine-month period. DoorDash is set to join competitors Grubhub and Uber on the public markets. DoorDash has the lead in U.S. market share among them, with 49% of meal delivery sales in September compared with Uber's 22% and Grubhub's 20% according to analytics firm Second Measure, end quote.

Starting point is 00:02:35 And by the time you listen to this, we might already have a similar filing from Airbnb, which also hopes to make a public market debut this week. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Airbnb is swelling a bit as well, targeting a valuation of $30 to $33 billion, up from the expected $30 billion. Reminder that Airbnb was last valued at $18 billion back in April. From the Wall Street Journal, reminder of why both of these folks are going public now. Both Airbnb and DoorDash have weathered the coronavirus pandemic as more people shun hotels in favor of houses for vacations or longer-term stays and order out to avoid restaurants.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Airbnb was valued at $31 billion in a 2017 investment round. The San Francisco company's valuation fell to $18 billion when bookings plummeted at the outset of the pandemic as travel came to a virtual standstill. Airbnb chief executive Brian Chesky quickly borrowed $2 billion slash marketing spending, laid off a quarter of the company's staff, and put many non-core projects on hold. Bookings at Airbnb rebounded by summer, though nowhere near the pre-pandemic levels as people increasingly seek houses for local getaways. For DoorDash, a valuation of more than $25 billion would continue what has been a sharp upward march. San Francisco-based DoorDash's private valuation had already ballooned to more than $15 billion this year from just $1.4 billion in 2018 as it took an ever-greater share of the U.S. food delivery market.

Starting point is 00:04:01 It is now the biggest player in the sector. For both companies, their road shows will look different than they would have in the pre-COVID-19 world. Executives at both companies will market their offerings to mutual funds and hedge funds in Zoom meetings rather than a whirlwind tour across the country, end quote. And big news that I missed because of the holiday here in the U.S. last week, rumors are that Salesforce is going to buy slack. The tie-up is expected to be announced as soon as tomorrow, after markets close, since Salesforce is going to report Q3 earnings. tomorrow. Slack's stock has jumped up on the news and quoting CNBC. The deal is expected to be about half cash and half stock, the sources said, and will price Slack at a premium to its current price. Slack's market cap was more than $24 billion as of Monday morning. Shares of Slack rose

Starting point is 00:04:55 about 8% Monday on the news. Salesforce shares fell about 1.5%. Talks between the two companies were first reported last week by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by CNBC sending Slack's stock soaring 38%. Salesforce has made several large acquisitions in recent years, including its $6.5 billion deal for Mulesoft in 2018 and its $15.3 billion deal with data visualization company Tableau. The deal with Slack could become one of the largest software deals ever. IBM bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019 and Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $27 billion in 2016. It could also make Slack a more formidable competitor to Microsoft's team's communication product. Slack filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission this summer. alleging it abused its dominant market position to eliminate competition for teams. Microsoft has said teams has benefited during the pandemic from video conferencing capabilities that Slack lacks, end quote. The United Kingdom has announced it will ban the installation of new Huawei 5G network equipment beginning in September 2021, after initially announcing a 2027 framework to cauterize their Huawei exposure only back in July of this year.

Starting point is 00:06:08 and actually most of last year and early this, the UK government seemed to be downplaying the threat from Huawei tech entirely. No more, though, quoting Bloomberg. British ministers announced in July that Schengen-based Huawei would be banned from Britain's next generation mobile networks in 2027, with purchases barred from January 2021. To comply with those rules, phone companies would have had to stop adding Huawei components eventually, but the new ban may accelerate their plans to overhaul systems. Maintaining existing equipment will be allowed. The crackdown followed a U.S. push for allies to exclude Huawei on the grounds that it was an unacceptable security threat, which the company denies. In January, British officials said Huawei could play a limited role with manageable risks.

Starting point is 00:06:51 They since reversed that stance and backed a ban following U.S. sanctions introduced in May, saying the American squeeze on Huawei's silicon supply chain meant its security could no longer be guaranteed. Telecommunications carriers like BT Group will now be reliant on a duopoly of Nokia and Erickson, and those Nordic companies have already won big contracts in the wake of the Huawei ban. To help cut that dependency, the government will start a national telecoms lab by 2022 to research security and increase compatibility between vendors as well as fund trials with potential challengers like Japan's NEC. To make it easier for competitors to enter the market, setting out a path to phase out older 2G and 3G technology would also speed up the diversification process according to the government's statement.

Starting point is 00:07:33 carriers will be banned from outsourcing service management to Huawei from April 2021, apart from in limited circumstances, the government said. A consultation on rules for the fixed broadband network is also underway, end quote. Following up on something we've been following all year long, after the years of trade wars, companies like Foxcon, Pegatron, and others are increasingly offshoring their industrial production away from China to places like India, Vietnam, and Mexico. But geopolitics aren't the only consideration. It turns out that finally, as you maybe could have predicted over a long enough time horizon, China has simply gotten comparatively too expensive, quoting Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:08:17 The splintering of the global tech supply chain that begun during President Donald Trump's watch looks set to persist under his successor. Apple, the largest of the many tech giants that rely on Chinese factories to make their gadgets, will move some production of its iPads and MacBooks to Vietnam. Key assembly partner Honai Precision Industry, also known as Foxcon, has allocated $270 million in new investments to the Southeast Asian country. These moves presage a larger and longer-term migration that may have ramifications for the iPhone maker as well as China's role as workshop to the world. Foxcon founder Terry Gao coined the term G2 to describe the trend of a unified supply chain splitting into at least two. Company Chairman Young Liu said in August that the likes of India, Southeast Asian, and the Americas could each in the future end up with a dedicated manufacturing ecosystem of their own. The trend now looks irreversible as other countries, including India and Vietnam, are boosting

Starting point is 00:09:10 their infrastructure and efforts to lure manufacturers through lower costs and fewer geopolitical worries. As China gets more expensive and as U.S. politics have been unpredictable, companies have shifted production of some goods out of China. That trend will continue as China gets more expensive and as Vietnam and India improve their competitiveness, said Dan Wang, a technology analyst, at at Gevicol Dragonomics, end quote. Roughly three years ago, Bitcoin hit an all-time record price of $19,783 per coin,

Starting point is 00:09:48 and today it briefly surpassed that price once again for the first time. So, notable that Bitcoin is doing the all-time high thing once again, especially when you consider that it had sunk below $4,000 a coin earlier this year when the coronavirus first hit. So why now? Why how? Well, let me briefly turn you over to the New York Times' Nathaniel Popper, who literally wrote the book on the Bitcoin phenomenon, quote. Bitcoin's latest climb is different from its last spike in 2017, which was driven largely by investors in Asia who had just learned about cryptocurrencies. Back then, the digital token soon lost momentum as people questioned what it could do other than allow for easy online speculating and drug and ransom payments.

Starting point is 00:10:31 While those questions remain, Bitcoin is now being fueled by a less speculative fee. Beyers, led by American investors, including companies and other traditional investors, are treating Bitcoin as an alternative asset, somewhat like gold, according to an analysis from the data firm chain analysis. Rather than quickly trading in and out of it, more investors are using Bitcoin as a place to park part of their investment portfolios outside the influence of governments and the traditional financial system, chain analysis and other industry firms said, quote, It's a very different set of people who are buying Bitcoin recently, said Philip Gradwell,

Starting point is 00:11:05 the chief economist at Chainalysis, which analyzes the movement of cryptocurrencies. They are doing it in steadier amounts over sustained periods of time, and they are taking it off exchanges and holding it as an investment, end quote. As I'm sure you're well aware, it is Cyber Monday today across the universe, and this thing isn't probably being discounted today, but I still wanted to make note of it because, man, there's probably not a gadget that I lust after more than this at the moment. I think we first saw this thing about 11 months ago at CES. Samsung's Odyssey G9 monitor, the huge, wide, curved Q-LED computer monitor coming in at a stunning

Starting point is 00:11:50 49 inches. Basically, it does the work of three monitors. It comes in at $1,479, at which point you could probably get a full smart screen TV, but then Sean Hollister at the Verge has been using one of these and says, it is the most immersive display you can currently get, quote. My first big test for Samsung's Odyssey G9 wasn't a console or even PC gaming. Last month, I co-hosted the Verge's industry famous Apple Event Live blog, capturing every screenshot you saw.

Starting point is 00:12:23 I normally run three monitors because I switch tasks like Mad, and if there's a better multitasking test than an Apple event, I haven't met it yet. At first, I wasn't sure this epic screen would work. Most apps and websites aren't designed to display across the vast expanse of a single 32 by 9 monitor, so you have to live in Windows. I couldn't simply toss one or two apps onto each monitor like I normally do. But while Samsung doesn't ship the G9 with any good windowing software and Windows 10's default snap is woefully insufficient, Microsoft's free downloadable Fancy Zones windowing manager worked wonders. I built my own set of dedicated snappable spots for the Apple Live. stream, the Virgin's live-bogging tool, Slack, a browser window to keep track of any Apple press releases that might pop up during the show, and even a narrow strip of Windows Explorer so I could see which images I had already captured and weed them out as necessary. The only other wrinkle was the additional Chrome extension I had to download to ensure YouTube could launch full-screen in a browser window instead of taking over my entire ultra-wide

Starting point is 00:13:22 monitor. In general, while I did occasionally miss my two vertically oriented monitors for scrolling long web pages, Google Docs, and TweetDeck, I found the G9's giant gigantic horizontal expanse of real estate nearly as effective for most tasks, where I could only squeeze four narrow columns of tweet deck onto my old portrait orientation screens. The G9 would comfortably fit five, plus a 30 tab web browser, a nice vertical strip of Evernote for note-taking, and our Slack newsroom alongside. I wouldn't say it's better than having three screens for work, but it seems like a sufficient substitute, except maybe that toast notifications now pop up in the corner of my eye where they're still pretty easy to miss. Still, it's nice,

Starting point is 00:14:01 not to have to match color, contrast, and brightness across three screens at a time, or just how my mouse crosses from one monitor to the next. Having a single, vast, unbroken, expansive real estate, that's always the same distance from my face as I spin in my chair is an absolute treat. And while the Odyssey G9's unprecedented curve does tend to catch ambient light, the matte screen does a great job of diffusing any glare, and quote, he concludes by saying this, quote, The Samsung Odyssey G9 cost $1,479.99 a premium price for a premium monitor like nothing else on the market. You can find other 49-inch 32 by 9 panels for less, but none with this combination of resolution, brightness, curvature, and refresh rate. The closest you can come is last year's $1,200 Samsung CRG9, which maintains the resolution and brightness, but with half the refresh rate at 120 hertz and a notably less pronounced 1800R curvature, which I imagine would.

Starting point is 00:14:56 be as good at giving you convincing peripheral vision in games. If you're looking for the ultimate ultra-wide, this is currently it, end quote. And finally today, you might have heard the news over the weekend of the sad passing of Tony Shea, once the founder of Zappos, but actually a fixture in the startup scene since all the way back to 1996. Truly, you could not find a guy who was more universally beloved in our industry, who seemed genuinely genuine and friendly, idealistic in a way that seemed to be more common, perhaps in an earlier time. The outpouring of encomiums was endless this weekend, and if you Google around, you'll find Tony's stories galore. But I'm going to share just two recollections with you. The first is from the great Omalek, who makes

Starting point is 00:15:48 note of the sense that an era feels like it's passing with Tony, something that a lot of us felt this weekend, quote, with Tony's passing, I feel something special has ended. I can't put my finger on it. Maybe a certain innocent aspect of the early possibilities of the internet. Maybe I feel the contrast of those days to a now that is more mercenary, less friendly and more polarized. Whatever, without knowing Tony as well as I should, I mourn him deeply. Tony and Zappos's biggest achievement was that it showed long before anyone else, you can build an internet company anywhere. Unlike so many pundits and Twitterati, it didn't take a pandemic for Tony to have that insight. Zappos was also an example of how tech companies could care about their customers and not treat them as data, end

Starting point is 00:16:32 quote. And second, more personally, from Paul Bradley Carr, quote, the true test of friendship in the tech industry, I think, is if someone still acts like a friend when they don't need anything from you, when, in fact, there's nothing you can give them. By that metric, Tony Shea was a true friend, not just to me, but to countless others to whom he gave his time, energy, hospitality, support, and yeah, sometimes money without ever expecting a return, end quote. If you want more background on Tony Shea's life and career, the final link in today's show notes is a Forbes piece collecting a bunch of reminiscences from across the entire technology and startup industries.

Starting point is 00:17:12 I think we should just end with that today, with a rest in peace wish for Tony. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/30 – DoorDash’s IPO Seems To Be Cresting The Wave

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