Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 12/7 – ARMpocalypse Soon For The Entire Mac Lineup?

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Apple isn’t wasting any time when it comes to ARM-ing up its entire Mac lineup, according to Mark Gurman. Wish is about to go public too. Airbnb and DoorDash are lifting their ranges. Is email signatures a bigger market than I ever imagined? And how drone deliveries might change how we design or homes and neighborhoods. Sponsors: BuyRaycon.com/tech Kiwico.com promocode RIDE for 50% first month! Links: Apple Preps Next Mac Chips With Aim to Outclass Top-End PCs (Bloomberg) Wish plans to price between $22 and $24 per share at up to $14 billion valuation (CNBC) Airbnb Boosts IPO Price Range to Between $56 and $60 a Share (WSJ) Sequoia Capital Warned of a ‘Black Swan.’ Instead, 2020 Is One of Its Best Years Ever (Bloomberg) Exclaimer raises $133 million to help companies manage email signatures (VentureBeat) DRONES ARE POISED TO RESHAPE HOME DESIGN (WSJ) Disney faces digital dilemma despite streaming success (Financial Times) 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 Tech Membride Home for Monday, December 7th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple isn't wasting any time when it comes to arming up its entire Mac lineup,

according to Mark German. Airbnb and DoorDash are lifting their ranges and Wish is about to go public to. Our email signatures a bigger market than I ever imagined and how drone deliveries might change how we design our homes and our neighborhoods. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Mark German, Apple Scoop Monday. day, this time with Ian King, the Bloomberg pair are reporting that Apple is preparing new Apple Silicon-powered MacBook Pros, IMAX, and even Mac Pros, which, you know, we all knew were coming,

but the surprise is they could be coming as early as spring of 2021. Might we get one of those rare spring Apple events that are actually meaningful this year? Not only that, Apple seems to just be ready to do this. Apparently they want to wrap up the full Mac transition by the end of 2022, basically guaranteeing your next Mac will be an Apple Silicon Mac. And not only all of that, quote, the current M1 ship inherits a mobile-centric design built around four high-performance processing cores to accelerate tasks like video editing and four power-saving cores that can handle less intensive jobs like web browsing. For its next generation chip, targeting MacBook Pro and iMac models, Apple is working on designs with as many as 16 power cores and four efficiency

cores, the people said. While that component is in development, Apple could choose to first-release variants with only eight or 12 of the high-performance cores enabled, depending on production, they said. Chipmakers are often forced to offer some models with lower specifications than they originally intended because of problems that emerged during fabrication. For higher-end desktop computers plan for later in 2021 and a new half-size Mac Pro planned to launch by 2022, Apple is testing a chip design with as many as 32 high-performance cores. For later in 2021 or potentially 2022, Apple is working on price-year graphics upgrades with 64 and 128 dedicated cores aimed at its highest-end machines, the people said. Those graphics chips would be several times faster than the current graphics

modules Apple uses from Nvidia and AMD in its Intel powered hardware, end quote. I don't think we've been following this one as closely, but worth noting that e-commerce marketplace Wish is aiming to raise $1.1 billion in its IPO at a $14.1 billion valuation. Wish was last valued at $11.2 billion back in August of 2019, quoting CNBC. Wish founded in 2010 by former Google engineer Peter Shelswesky is an online marketplace that features a variety of discounted goods, ranging from cheap homewares and apparel to electronics and toys. The app offers a slew of products for just a few dollars as a way to target low-to-middle-income customers with more affordable options than they can find on other sites,

including Amazon. The company is going public at a time when e-commerce has surged amid the pandemic, with people around the world relying on online marketplaces for both essential and non-essential goods. In its S-1 filing, WISH said it had grown its catalog to more than 150 million items and sells about 1.8 million per day, end quote. But before that, Airbnb and DoorDash will make their debut later this week. The Wall Street Journal says Airbnb plans to boost the proposed price range of its IPO to between $56 and $60 a share, which would equate to a valuation for Airbnb in the $39 to $42 billion range. Again, cresting the wave quite well, quote.

DoorDash, the food delivery company that is expected to debut Wednesday, the day before Airbnb, plans to price its shares at the high end or above its range of $90 to $95 a share, already raised from between $75 and $85, people familiar with the offering said. That would give the San Francisco company, the largest among its peers, a valuation of as much as $36 billion or more on a fully diluted basis and including proceeds from the offering. Taken together, the developments are the latest sign that the market for new issues already at a record in terms of money raised in the U.S. is set for a climactic ending to the year. The market has been buoyed by soaring stocks, including those that have recently made their own

debuts. So far this year, more than $140 billion has been raised in initial public offerings on U.S. exchanges far exceeding the previous full year record high, set at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, according to deal logic data that dates back to 1995, end quote. We don't often talk about venture capital returns, but then that's because they're not often public knowledge. When people speculate about which VC firms or even which funds have done well, it's often just that speculation and rumor. So it's interesting to see that Bloomberg has apparently gotten their hands on the stats behind some mature Sequoia funds, one of which is returning 11x after fees and another showing 8x returns. So I thought, given what we just spoke about in the two previous segments, it was worth highlighting

this, quote, for three recent Sequoia funds, each one is doing better than the last. Sequoia Capital 11, the 2003 fund led by LinkedIn and YouTube, posted eight-fold returns over its lifetime after fees. The 2006 fund, seven, which contained the first investments in Airbnb and Unity, reported 10.9fold returns, the data seen by Bloomberg show. The 13th fund, called Sequoia Capital 2010, with Stakes in Square, Stripe, and WhatsApp, was 11.1 fold. The performance of more recent funds, including ones that hold DoorDash and Instacart couldn't be learned. Sequoia's stake in Airbnb and DoorDash will be worth a combined $9 billion this week if each

prices shares at the high end of their estimates, end quote. Since we seem to be on a VC tip today, I thought I'd slip in an interesting raise here that made me go, there's a big enough market for something like this. Exclaimer helps businesses manage and disseminate email signatures with consistent footers across devices, which, okay, that is apparently a big enough market to warrant a $133 million raise led by Insight partners, quoting Venture Beat. Founded in the UK in 2001, Exclaimer developed bespoke software before switching its focus to the email signature market. It initially developed an email signature service for Microsoft Exchange

server designed to be deployed on-premises and has over the years expanded its scope to cover the cloud, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Exclaimers' core selling point is that it allows businesses to centrally design and disseminate email signatures to everyone in the company with consistent footers automatically inserted on all company emails across devices. The signatures can also be tailored for specific teams and individuals, with admins able to control everything from a centralized dashboard. Through exclaimers, browser-based dashboard, admins can select from pre-designed templates or build their own from scratch using a drag-and-drop signature editor to include social media icons, promotional banners, legal compliance text, images, and more. Any changes that are

made in the editor are instantly applied to each user in the company, end quote. Turns out that may be my skepticism about this being a big market was just ignorance because grok this paragraph, quote, despite the hullabaloo around modern enterprise communications tools like Slack, soon to be a $27.7 billion sales force subsidiary, a reported 80% of businesses still use email as their primary communication tool. That's not to say companies aren't also using Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom, but emails asynchronousity makes it difficult to fully replace anytime soon, particularly when it comes to external communications. A number of other players operate in the space

from legacy providers like SIMPREX to newer entrants. Danish startup Templify, which raised $25 million earlier this year, helps workers create company-compliant documents and includes email signature management tools. Sigster, which turns email signatures into ads, was acquired by marketing technology platform Terminus

last year, while France-based Boost My Mail raised $1.2 million in a seed round a few months ago, end quote. If I would have told you five years ago that there would be a booming startup scene squeezing value out of email and even email newsletters, would you really have believed me? Startups and VC investing, they're all about imagining a future before most other people can see it coming, right? But they're also about getting ahead of long-term trends that can be obvious to anyone because they're waves of history that you can see coming. So as the husband of a high-end architect. This piece from the journal was interesting to me. The assumed arrival of drone

deliveries is already impacting the design of homes, apartment complexes, even whole neighborhoods, with possibilities like drone landing pads on mailboxes or rooftops. And look, if you live in a doorman building or any community that takes delivery of packages for you, clearly people years ago didn't design for the coming of e-commerce with the deluge of daily deliveries. So maybe a of urban and suburban planning is really in order. Quote, Volkari, a Chicago company founded in 2017, is developing drone delivery mailboxes that can accept all types of shipments from retail packages to restaurant meals. The top of the mailbox acts as a landing pad and the drone activates a retractable door to a space where packages can be

safely deposited, explains Volkari, founder, and chief executive Ryan Walsh. Mr. Walsh says he envisions drone delivery mailboxes mounted on rooftops and windowsills of homes or part of a centralized bank of mailboxes that can serve a neighborhood or apartment complex. Someday drone delivery mailboxes will be as common as a garage, he says. The idea isn't far-fetched. In South Florida, the Paramount Miami World Center condo building was designed to include a skyport, a platform on the roof that could someday accommodate vertical takeoff and landing, or VTOL vehicles as a shuttle for residents.

While the possibility of air taxis is years away, quote, I could see package delivery as happening sooner, says developer, Dan Codsey, Chief Executive of Royal Palm's Companies. We have capabilities because elevators run all the way to the roof. He adds that the Skyport concept has been a selling point at Paramount Miami, where apartments are on sale from about $750,000 to $11 million for a penthouse. Some people bought their units knowing that it could potentially raise the value of their property, he says. Another concept for potentially incorporating drone delivery into residential development comes from Walmart. The retailer submitted a patent application for a delivery chute mounted onto an apartment building.

Dron deliveries would be dropped through the chute and onto a conveyor belt, which would transport packages into the building's mailroom for distribution. When the majority of homes are outfitted with drone delivery mailboxes and landing pads, they could form the cornerstone of smart cities. Mr. Walsh projects. Outfitted with solar panels, the mailboxes could provide their own electricity and even generate enough electricity to sell back to the grid. Data from meteorological sensors could ensure that drones will be able to be able to be able to able to land safely with the added benefit of making weather forecasting hyperlocal. Masses of mailboxes would also provide a place to put transportation sensors that could report real-time road and traffic

conditions or telecom technology that could bolster wireless signals making cities smarter. Mapping sensors would be particularly useful in remote or rural areas which tend to be the least mapped, end quote. Of course, back in the last roaring 20s, the 1920s, the 1920s, there was briefly a fad for putting spires at the top of tall buildings, skyscrapers like the Chrysler building and the Empire State building here in New York City. The idea was radio was the future. You needed to put antenna on top of the tallest things you could find, but also they would be used as mooring masks because everyone assumed by this point, we'd be traveling back and forth in Zeppelins, and it would be easy to disembark at, say, the Empire State Building from your Zeppelin ride. That, of course,

didn't quite turn out. So it's funny to think about how designing for the future back in the past can leave built features that were still stuck with even a hundred years later. Finally, today, some follow-up to the whole Hollywood-going streaming story that we got into over the weekend, as Peter Kafka enlightened us on Saturday. Yeah, the whole move by WarnerMedia to take the leap off the cliff with all of their 2021 movies is maybe a bigger leap than we thought. Here's a bit from Ben Thompson's newsletter just this morning. Quote, make no mistake. Said cost is going to be substantial. Release windows exist for a reason. They allow studios to ring the maximum amount of revenue out of the huge amount of fixed costs that go into making modern theatrical releases.

That is why Disney has, at least until the pandemic, remained committed to theaters. The company would quite like to continue making a billion dollars per tent pole movie in theaters and only incurring the cost of going vertical, i.e. keeping its content on Disney Plus, once it comes to less valuable release windows. Warner Media, though, is basically sacrificing the entire Warner Brothers division that earned $14.4 billion in revenue in 2019 and $2.4 billion in profit. The sacrifice isn't total. The HBO Max strategy only applies to the U.S., which was 45% of Warner Brothers revenue, but it's pretty significant. Moffat Nathanson estimated that this change could cost Warner Brothers 50% of its

domestic theatrical audience and 10% of its international audience, thanks to VPNs, plus 40% of its home video revenue, which means a $1.2 billion shortfall, which without any attendant decrease in costs. Assuming $12 annual revenue per user for HBO Max retail customers, that means this shift has to drive 8.4 million new customers, and that's just to break even in 2021, never mind every year that follows. That's harder than it looks, because remember, there are already 20 million HBO subscribers who already get HBO Max for free, but haven't yet activated HBO Max. I'm sure WarnerMedia will be happy to convert them, low IQ or not, but said conversion isn't going to add anything to the bottom line. Instead,

those 8.4 million customers will need to come from the part of the market that has never been interested in HBO in the first place, which raises the question as to why exactly WarnerMedia felt the need to degrade the HBO brand with those that cared to attract those that didn't. In short, for all of Kallar's arguments that this is about doing right by customers, it is difficult to see this move as anything other than AT&T destroying a huge amount of value at WarnerMedia for the sake of a watered down and bloated HBO Max that will ultimately have about the same size customer base as HBO did previously, but without the same cachet and pool with creative talent, end quote. And according to a piece in the Financial Times, even at Disney,

which has seemingly had so much success moving to digital, this is probably still a time of huge risk in terms of endangering the value of legacy businesses. For example, we've been talking about movies, but what about TV? Quote, as the group re-engineers itself around video streaming, giving up lucrative licensing revenue, it must also manage the decline of its aging TV channels and movie studios. Taking the Longer View, Bob Iger, Executive Chairman and former Chief Executive, recently told friends that once mighty channels such as Disney-owned ABC were, quote, over, and that Disney's future was streaming and theme parks. But unlike the loss-making Disney Plus, TV networks bring in billions of dollars a year.

The predicament has left Disney with an uneven strategy for TV channels such as the Sports Network ESPN and the entertainment networks that feed Hulu, the U.S. only streaming service Disney took majority control of last year. It also reveals that even for the world's best positioned traditional media company, the transition to streaming will be bumpy and financially uncertain. Adapting sports to streaming is particularly punishing because media companies have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars every few years for the broadcast rights to. games. Prices have risen as broadcasters such as Fox and NBC have looked to compete with ESPN,

locking the network into a costly, rigid business model that would be difficult to convert. When they did those deals, they did not anticipate ESPN would go from 95 million subs to to 80 million, said a former senior Disney executive. In the long term, it created a real question about how ESPN can be profitable, end quote. To match its cable profits, ESPN Plus would need to be priced at $40 to $45 a month, according to the former chief executive of one streaming service who warned that, quote, there is not a spreadsheet in the universe that gives you similar economics to pay TV, end quote. In the latest quarter, ESPN Plus reached 10 million subscribers who paid on average only $4.54 a month. Why doesn't The Bachelor premiere on Hulu, said Rich Greenfield, partner at Lightshed Research Group,

referring to ABC's hit dating show. The question is, how far does the TV universe have to decline before they decide to start shifting high-profile content over? It would rewrite their whole economic livelihood, end quote. Yeah, classic innovator dilemma stuff here, which is why I'm so fascinated by it. If you're Disney and you own ESPN, you can't do without sports, obviously, but does the math for sports even work in streaming when you have those huge fixed costs of the rights packages and such? And if you think Disney can just jettison, say, ABC, to do things like Put the Bachelor on streaming or maybe move A&E programming to streaming, it's worth recognizing that Disney got $6 billion in operating income from their cable channels just this year.

Given the softness to their theme parks business, to their cruise ships business, to their lack of traditional box office income, it's probably not exaggering too much to say that it's those cable channels that are keeping Disney afloat at the moment. This is the same Sophie's Choice dilemma that the record labels face a decade ago. Sure, there's lots of growth in digital, but is there a lot of profitable growth? We shall see. That's all for today. We've got cold here in New York this weekend.

Winter is no longer just coming. It's officially here. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, act accordingly. Talk to you tomorrow. Just kidding. How's your mother? She's on her way out. We all are, act accordingly.