Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/18 – So… Who Actually “Takes Delivery” Of The Constitution?

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Paytm has a rough IPO. Nvidia has another in a long line of crushed earnings reports. Grammarly is an interesting raise. Twitter wants to take the pulse of the stock market. And if ConstitutionDAO wins its auction today, there are some practical questions to answer like, who actually goes and picks it up? Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Dataiku.com Links: Paytm falls 27% on first trading day after India’s largest IPO (TechCrunch) Nvidia easily beats earnings expectations on strong gaming and data center sales (Yahoo!Finance) Grammarly raises $200M at a $13B valuation to make you an even better writer using AI (TechCrunch) AllTrails raises $150M after COVID accelerates people’s interest in exploring the outdoors (TechCrunch) Nreal’s $599 mixed reality glasses are launching in the US on Verizon (The Verge) Twitter partners with S&P 500 on stock index that crowdsources public opinion (CNET) Crypto Group’s Bid for Constitution Faces Real-World Snags—Who Picks It Up? (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 Tech meme right home for Thursday, November 18th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Paytm has a bit of a rough IPO. Invidia has another in a long line of crushed earnings reports. Grammarly is an interesting raise. Twitter wants to take the pulse of the stock market. And if that Constitution Dow wins its auction today,

there are some practical questions to answer like, who actually goes and picks it up? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Let's check in on some angles that we haven't talked about in a little while. Remember, paytm, it's one of those big super apps, but in India, handling everything from digital payments to e-commerce to finance, it was backed heavily by SoftBank and Alibaba, and it had an IPO in India yesterday that did not go well. It closed down 20%, giving Paytm a market valuation of $14.9 billion, which is also not great, seeing as how its last private valuation was $16 billion, quoting TechCrunch. Thursday's IPO is the latest in a series of listings by Indian startups as many begin to explore the public markets following years of growth. Indian food delivery startup, Zomato, online insurance aggregator policy bazaar and fashion

commerce NICA have made stellar debuts in the public market this year. Compared to those of its peers, the early hours trading for pay TM shares has been disappointing so far. But many industry executives said that day one, performance of shares is not the best measure to assess the success of Paytm, which offers a range of services, including peer-to-peer payments and digital banking. Paytm chronicles the mobile payments adoption in India today. This is not Paytm getting listed, this is India's youth getting listed, said a stock analyst. The journey for Paytm was never easy. Over the years, the startup struggled to raise funds and received several buyout offers, including from free charge and snap deal, all of which it dissoned.

missed, according to sources familiar with the matter. Paytm today competes with a range of firms, including Google, phone pay, and Facebook, nearly all of which have gained traction in recent years. At stake is a fast-growing payments market that could be worth $1 trillion in a few years, up from about $200 billion in 2019, according to Credit Suisse, end quote. So I know it is an Indian IPO, and maybe that doesn't mean it represents a trend across all markets, but people were watching this one to see if public markets continue to be absolutely gaga about new tech listings, especially fintech plays. So this is a puzzling underperformance that other companies eyeing public markets might be watching. Something else we've not been tracking is Nvidia.

Not sure if you're aware, but Nvidia's stock has been up something like 13x over the last five years. It's roughly doubled over just the last six months. And here's why. Nvidia beat earnings estimates yesterday, Bigley, with record Q3 revenue of $7.1 billion versus $6.82 billion estimated, up 50% year-over-year. Gaming revenue came in at $3.22 billion, up 42% year-over-year, and data center revenue came in at $2.94 billion, up 55%. Basically, GPUs have been where it's at lately, and Nvidia is in the catbird seat when it comes to GPUs, and also, Also, if the Metaverse really is the next big thing, guess who's well positioned for that?

Quoting Yahoo Finance. To say Nvidia has had an incredible run in 2021 would be an understatement. The company's stock is up 125% year-to-date, and it's fresh off of debuting new hardware and software related to its Metaverse platform called Omniverse, its self-driving vehicle initiatives, and its artificial intelligence work. But Nvidia, like other chipmakers, has also been stung by the chip shortage. The company's consumer graphics cards are incredibly scarce, thanks to a run on them by both crypto miners and resellers using bots to grab as many cards as possible. As a result, cards are selling for hundreds of dollars above their manufacturer's suggested retail price. Cards that should cost $599 are going for well north of $1,000,

and finding any near their original prices is a pointless endeavor. Invidia still makes the majority of its cash on its games business, but the company's data center arm has become increasingly important to the company's future. The firm is a leader in large-scale artificial intelligence systems, thanks to the power of its cards parallel processing, and it's going to roll out its own CPU to ensure its data centers don't have to use its competitors' processors. But not everything is going well for Nvidia. The company's $40 billion plan to purchase chip designer arm has hit a regulatory wall in the UK where it's undergoing an in-depth review. It also needs to get through regulators in both the U.S. and China before it's finalized, end quote. Indeed, about that during its Q3 earnings. earnings call yesterday, Invidia said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has, quote, expressed concerns,

end quote, about the arm acquisition, adding to regulatory pressure, as mentioned from the UK, the EU, and China. Again, I'm not sure I'd give this deal good odds in terms of actually coming to pass at the moment. Since we're on this tip of dotting eyes and crossing T's, let's do a couple of interesting raises, shall we? First up is Grammarly, which helps users improve their writing with its AI assistant. Grammarly has raised $200 million at a $13 billion valuation. Now, I know that they are a sponsor of this podcast and everything, but seriously, did you ever imagine that a grammar bot would be a $13 billion business? I know, if I'm being honest, I did not. Quoting TechCrunch. We believe this funding round is a great validation of our business strength. Rahul Roy

Chowdery Grammerly's global head of product told TechCrunch in an interview. We've been cash flow positive from the very early days. The round also validates the strength of our mission to improve lives through improving communication. This funding round comes in the context of product innovation and product scaling, end quote. Roy Chowdry says, Gramerly plans to use the funding to continue making investments in its AI technology. The company will also continue to advance its natural language processing and machine learning to deliver personalized communication feedback to its users. Roy Chowdry also noted that Gramerly plans to make additional investments to earn and strengthen user trust. As for the company's vision for the future of the service, Roy Chowdry noted

that Gramerly will move past simply focusing on conciseness, consistency, and correctness. The company plans to add new categories in which to offer suggested improvements, while also working to become more ubiquitous. Gramerly is already scaling its product offerings and achieving its goal toward ubiquity with the launch of Gramerly for Mac and Windows earlier this week. The new desktop application can be used on apps such as Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, Jira, and more. Roy Chaudry says the new desktop app aims to be user's go-to writing tool wherever they type, as the service is now able to break out of technical barriers associated with browser extensions. Gramerly also recently announced the launch of Gramerly for developers with the rollout of its text editor SDK,

which enables programmers to embed Gramerly Text editing functionality into any web application. The beta release of this SDK gives developers access to the full power of Grammally automated editing with a couple of lines of code. Although users of the target application don't need to be Grammally customers, if they do happen to be, they can log into their Grammarly accounts and access all of the functionality that comes with that, end quote. And I thought this was an interesting raise, because this is clearly something that's gotten traction, and I had never heard of it until this morning. All Trails is an app with more than 40 million downloads, and crucially, more than $1 million, paid subscribers. It provides resources for hikers, bikers, and climbers, and on the strength of those

numbers, it has raised a $150 million round, quoting TechCrunch. Like many companies, AllTrails benefited from how the pandemic impacted consumer behavior. Amid lockdowns and social distancing measures, many people rekindled their interest in exploring the outdoors and connecting with nature, and they turned to All Trail's extensive collection of over 300,000 hiking, running, and mountain biking trails to find where to go. The past 18 months drew more users to the AllTrails mobile app, which now has more than 40 million downloads and 30 million registered users across 190 countries. During the past 12 months, over 100 million users also visited AllTrails.com to find a trail. While the company doesn't typically disclose its revenue or paid subscribers on an ongoing basis,

it did celebrate crossing the 1 million paid subscriber milestone back in January. All Trails didn't need to raise capital. It's been profitable since 2017. Rather, the company chose to bring in new funding to help it accelerate its existing momentum. The funds will be used for product development to build out the AllTrails team and to expand its community internationally. Today, about two-thirds of All-Trails users are in North America, but it's seeing some of its highest rates of growth across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, end quote. Enreal, that AR company that impressed me at CES a few years ago, says its new light-mixed reality glasses will launch in the U.S. for $599 on November 30th in 20, in 20.

Verizon stores and online, December 2nd. Quoting the Verge. The Unreal Light is one of the only consumer-focused AR headsets on the market. The light glasses launched first in Korea last year, and they've since expanded to Japan and Germany. They support projecting 3D images into real space using reflected micro-OLED displays, while outward-facing cameras let the glasses scan real space and pin virtual objects like screens or game boards into particular locations.

The visual experience is broadly similar to the Microsoft HoloLens, or Magic Leap One, although the light uses different optics technology. Unreal particularly touts the glasses wider than average 53-degree field of view, as well as a light 106 gram design. Enreel's glasses are powered by an Android smartphone. In the U.S., they'll work with Samsung's Galaxy S-21 Ultra 5G, Samsung Galaxy S-21 plus 5G, Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold3, 5G, Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 3, 5G. Actually, this is a long list.

check the link if you want to see everything. Once you've plugged it into the glasses, you can either directly mirror your phone screen, including streaming video apps, or enter a fully mixed reality experience that includes some AR games and productivity tools. The phone itself acts as a controller, although Enreal also lets developers build apps with hand-tracking. Earlier this year, Enreal announced that it was launching a second cheaper pair of camera-free glasses called the Enreal Air. Those glasses are set to debut in China, Japan, and Korea, with no launch date set for the U.S. yet, end quote. Twitter and S&P Dow Jones have partnered to launch the S&P 500 Twitter

sentiment index using Twitter's API to analyze bearish and bullish tweets in real time, quoting CNET. Conversations and opinions about companies posted on social media have had an increasingly significant impact on markets, as we saw in the meme stocks frenzy earlier this year, which saw stock prices surge due to individual investors sharing information on social media platforms such as Reddit. Social media is impacting the way information is being conveyed to investors, Peter Rothman, S&P, Dal Jones Indices, Global Head of Innovation and Strategy, said in a statement. Factor-based indices are a popular strategy for passive investors, so we're excited to work with Twitter

to bring this unique tilt to the S&P 500, end quote. The Twitter index will measure the sentiment performance of companies in the S&P 500 by analyzing tweets that mention the company's cash tags, which contain their ticker symbol, such as dollar sign TWTR, assigning a Z score that reflects sentiment surrounding each company. A training database is used to determine the likelihood that words in a tweet are positive or negative, and filters are applied to weed out spam tweets that could skew results. The index will measure the performance of the 200 companies with the highest sentiment scores, taking into account float-adjusted market capitalization.

A sentiment select equal weight index will track the performance of the 50 S&P 500 companies with the highest sentiment scores, end quote. Finally today, today's the day that Constitution Dow is going to go to Sotheby's to try to win that copy of the U.S. Constitution that is going up for auction. What they've achieved, even to this point, is quite impressive, quoting Julian Weiser on Twitter. 16,203 people have made a contribution to Constitution Dow. The median contribution is $228.58. The community has grown to 18,000 on Discord and more than 29,000 on Twitter, all in under a week, end quote. Last I heard, they had also raised over $40 million, but they're not disclosing the exact amount because they don't want to tip off other bidders at the auction. But there are still some practical things to figure out today, like how to actually remit payment, who actually has ownership if they win, who, you know, actually picks it up. You can't just walk out on the street with a copy of the Constitution under your arm and where they're going to end up displaying it, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The consortium whose members work at social media companies have founded apps,

and buy crypto and NFTs regularly don't have much experience buying objects at traditional auctions. The Constitution is not a security, said Brian Wagner, one of a few dozen core organizers of the group. We actually had to figure that out, which is hilarious, said Miguel Piedra Fida, a 19-year-old organizer who works at an NFT social media company and lives in Spain. The group's organizers have been consulting legal, historical, and auction experts to smooth out some of the challenges of crowdfunding with new technology to purchase a centuries-old artifact. It's a document, Mr. Wagner said. a lot of the complexity is related to the fact that it's not on the blockchain, a data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers. There are no returns on investment here either. Contributors who can remain anonymous won't make a cent if the group wins the auction, and no one person will own the physical copy. Instead, taking an anti-establishment posture that might have been familiar to America's founding fathers, as well as crypto enthusiasts, the group agreed to get the document out of millionaires' art collections and back into the hands of the people. according to organizers. Everyone got into it for different reasons, but everyone was really inspired

by how we can collectively determine the fate of and govern where this document goes, how it's displayed, said Mr. Wagner, age 30. If they win, Constitution Dow's goal is to have the document housed in a place that is free and accessible to the public, but like the object they hope to possess, they have left that final decision to contributors. Each will be allotted voting power determined by how much crypto they contributed. While contributors are widely anonymous and sometimes only identifiable by a username, they have the option when sending crypto through Juicebox to leave messages. Mr. Wagner says those have ranged from Britons joking that this is their small act of revenge on Americans for the Revolutionary war to immigrants saying the U.S. has provided them so much and that this is their

chance to unite for a democratic cause. Constitution Dow's core organizers are averse to using titles, though some release their identities to add credibility to the group. With no one person to lay claim to ownership if the group places the winning bid Thursday, organizers are trying to figure out which museum or historical artifact expert will pick up and transport the copy of the Constitution. Sotheby's will hold the object for 30 days, giving them time to talk to museums about long-term and short-term storage as they sort out their vote on the document's ultimate destination, organizers said, end quote. Also, OpenAI has made the API for GPT3 generally available. If you live in a country that's

allowed to make use of GPT3. That's all the news I have for this news, which is why it's not getting its own segment. There is still a waiting list to use GPT3, but if you're interested in getting your hands on it to go hog and create something amazing with it, you've got your shot at it more generally now. P.S., we do have a time for this week's Twitter space. It's going to be on Saturday, November 20th at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, noon Pacific time, which is what is that, 8 p.m. GM. MT. Just look for us on Twitter this weekend. Talk to you tomorrow.