The Best One Yet - “Bumble pulls an Oprah” — Bumble’s IPO. Clubhouse’s Black community. Archer’s flying robo-taxi.

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

Women-first dating app Bumble pulled off the double-double IPO before Valentine’s Day (but don’t call it a dating app). Clubhouse gets Kanye on-board, but we’re looking at its earliest Black community. And flying robot taxi Archer (sounds scary) shows why big companies keep their enemies close.$BMBL $ACIC $ACHRGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is Nick. This is Jack. And this is Snacks Daily. It is Friday, February 12. T-B-O-Y. This is the best one yet. It's also our last pod before the three-day weekend. Happy President's Day. Jack, first story. What do we got? Bumble just pulled off the double-double IPO right before Valentine's Day. Yeah, now Bumble just needs to pull an Oprah. For our second story, flying robot taxi company. Yep, that's a real thing. It's called Archer, and they're going public via Spacquisition. Jack, you got to keep your friends close and keep your enemies close to being acquired. For our third and five. story. December was TikTok. Yep, January was Reddit. The rest of 2021, maybe Clubhouse. We're looking at the audio app that tells us actually a lot about the venture capital community and the black community. But Snackers, before we hit those three stories, Sunday is Valentine's Day and the business landscape around the Valentine's Day market is changing. Honestly, Jack and I looked into this a little further. We felt like we should define some new relationship trends when it comes to Valentine's day business. First of all, tomorrow is Saturday, which is Galentine's Day. Technically it is. Now, that is actually the fastest growing segment of Valentine's Day, women,

gifting other women. Darling, gifting Marlene, $15 coffee, cool out of gift card. Okay, so that's Galantine's Day. But close behind Galantines Day is Palantines Day. I love this one. You haven't spoken to your buddy Timmy in quite a while. Yeah, what are we going to do? I don't know. Jack, should we send up some hot wheels? I feel like that. Yeah, why not? Happy Palantine's Day. Okay, so you got Galantines Day. Surprise of last year, though, was a new thing. We call it Selfentines Day. by St. Narcissist spending by you on you doubled last year. Yeah, and get this, it's expected to double again because you need tulips too. A developing holiday Nick and I just made up is Grillentine's Day. Yeah, true. It turns out February 14th, we noticed, is actually a top five holiday for orders of buffalo wings. True thing. Shocking, because buffalo wings are not a romantic appetizer. Yeah. And you don't grill buffalo wings either, but okay. Yeah, but Jack, nothing sets in the mood like a stack of napes.

and a little bit of celery. Snack is this year we may have a one-off holiday called Co-valentine's 19 Day. Yeah, gift of choice, two rapid COVID tests, four masks. One test per person, two masks per person. Let's hit our three stories. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way.

It's snacks about to hear ain't food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the robberhood family. It's all informational just so. We're not recommending any securities. Nope. It's not a research report or investment advice. Not an offer or sale of a security.

Right. Snacks is digestible. Business news for you. Robberhood Financial, LLC, member FINRA slash SIPC. For our first story, Bumble just pulled off the double-double IPO, Jack. The dating app's brand spank and new stock surged 70% yesterday. Okay, but here's the thing. Don't call it a dating app.

Snackers, a year ago right now, Bumble was a private company, were $3 billion. Today, almost $13 billion as a publicly traded company. We're talking about Bumble, the dating app where women make the first move. By the way, Whitney Wolf heard the CEO, youngest female CEO to ever IPO. Congratulations. And remember, women aren't just customers for Bumble. Women are their competitive advantage. Okay, and here's why Bumble's competitive advantage. Women are actually better customers on dating apps than men tend to be. Bumble has 42 million users, a majority of whom are women, Tinder on the other hand, skews heavily male. Because Jack and I noticed women are paying for premium dating features at a higher percentage than men are on Bumble.

Guys might be kind of cheap on dating apps, but women will splurge for the Super Swipe, which doesn't just tell them you like them, you like them. You like them. Maybe they give you this feature for free, but then you're going to have to pay up if you want to use Super Swipe. I think it's like a buck each per Super Swipe. It's a buckage. So Jack and I jumped in Snack Style into the IPO paperwork. Again, we noticed they mentioned the word dating 171 times, but you can't think of Bumble as a dating company. Bumble calls itself the preeminent global women's brand. Yeah, and the reason is they actually have two other products that don't get a whole bunch of attention that Jack and I thought we should focus on, Jack. For instance, Bumble biz, which is Bumble's

networking and mentoring app, it leverages Bumble users to recreate something like LinkedIn, but it's way cooler. Without the annoying endorsements for the ability to use. Gmail. And without the emails that say you got a message, but doesn't just include the message in that email. Why, Reed? Why, Reed Hoffman, did you do that? Now, the other option behind Bumble biz is they also have something called Bumble BFF. This is for connecting platonic friends to be buddies. Yeah. One out of 10 Bumble users also use BFF to find friends. Yeah, and it basically recreates Facebook. We jumped in snack style, and you can kind of just like clarify in the app what you're interested in to make new friends. Yeah, you're like, I'm looking for a workout spotter. Or travel

partner. Or somebody else who's a dog mom so we can talk about treats together. Okay, so on top of Bumble biz and BFF, which are app-based, then you have like real-life bumble hives, a physical thing. These are co-working spaces, physical clubs where you can host events, you can work. They got them in New York, Toronto, and L.A. so far. Jack, just going to throw this out there, kind of wish our wedding had been in a bumble hive. I kind of wish our wedding had been in a bumble hive. Lots of succulence and a whole lot of pine countertops. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Bumble? Dating apps require you to be single, but Bumble wants to have you for life.

All right, Snackers, dirty secret about dating apps. When they're successful, you stop being the customer. After 18 months of dating, you find your life partner and you dump the dating app forever. Yeah, unlike Tinder, though, Bumble wants to keep you as a customer after you define that relationship. And to do that, Bumble needs to build something like what open. Oprah has built. And here's the vision, a holistic empire of products and services that further your career and also further your life. That's the goal. Bumble's moved beyond the dating app to Bumble BFF and

Bumble biz. But next, we think they could launch a media arm. Jack, how about Bumble Plus with Shmovies focused on women? To be way more than Tinder is, Bumble needs to channel Goop and channel Oprah and provide value for life. For our second story, Archer is the latest disruptor of air travel with an E-Flying taxi. Archer doesn't have a product yet. Good point. But it's getting invested in by the company it's trying to disrupt.

Okay, so that last part's key. But before we jump into it, Blade. Blade is the Uber for helicopter rides. Gets you from like Midtown Manhattan to the Delta Lounge at the airport. Blade went public in December. We covered it.

And if Uber for chopper rides isn't enough, Archer now enters the scene. Archer is the Uber of electric helicopter rides. Archer produces a little something called an EV toll, an electric vehicle takeoff and landing aircraft. Basically, this is going to take off and land vertically, like a helicopter, but then it's going to cruise up to 60 miles at 150 miles per hour, like a little airplane. Now, key asterisk we should throw in here, this is a pre-revenue company, aka it has no revenues. It doesn't have a certified aircraft yet. It hasn't even done like a pilot's vision test.

No, it hasn't. What it does have, which we thought was pretty interesting, was it does have some pretty cool pictures. Yeah, they showed a video. The propeller starts kind of like a helicopter, and then it turns 90 degrees to push it like an airplane style. This is worth looking at. It's kind of like a transformer. It's like Tony Stark. Yeah, it's neat. Now, Archer was acquired by a SPAC with the ticker symbol ACIC. So that's what's trading right now. But eventually, that's going to change its name to just Archer. And that's how you're going to see it public. It's a publicly traded stock. No product yet. But here's why investors think it's worth $3 billion already. Yeah, two keys. First, celebrity investors. The founder of Moellis Boutique Investment Bank is an investor. So is Mark Lorry, the founder of Jet.com that was acquired

by Walmart. Second reason investors are excited, the CNS situation. They think companies will use Archer for carbon neutrality as a service. Take United Airlines. They plan to use Archer's aircrafts to reduce their own carbon intensiveness for their own airline fleet. United Airlines already ordered a billion dollars worth of Archer's E aircraft and made a $20 million investment in the company. But despite all those cool elements about Archer, there happens to be one pretty noticeable risk. Competition. Big competition. Turns out by one count, there are 300 other companies also working on electric aircrafts. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over Archer? Keep your friends close. Keep your enemies. Invest in your enemies if you can. Yeah, that's what you got to do.

Now, the latest trend we've noticed for mature companies, invest in your potential disruptor. United Airlines is trying to survive this drought of air travel that the pandemics caused. Honestly, Jack, United Airlines also trying to survive 300 other startups working on a nimbler, cleaner air travel solution. It's investing in one of them, and we're seeing other companies invest in their future potential disruptors. Case and point, we were talking about this last year, Tyson Chicken was out. actually an investor in early chicken disruptor beyond meat. Ford Motor Company is a big investor in the electric truck disruptor Rivium. Jack, we said it before, and I love saying it every time,

keep your friends close, keep your enemies close to being acquired. If an acquisition feels like too much, it just invest in the company like United Airlines just did with Archer. Hey, get a seat on the board, learn what they're up to, keep track of the company. Then if the company ends up disrupting you, You still kind of win because you own part of that disruptor. For our third and final story, Clubhouse is Exhibit A of how wealth gets created fast in America. It's also Exhibit A on how venture capital acts as gatekeeper to that wealth.

Okay, so before we jump into this, Jack and I made it pact. We thought we would never mention Elon three days in a row on this podcast. We did, yeah. Yeah, but he's chatting with Kanye right now on Clubhouse, so it feels like we should mention this. Elon, Kanye, Clubhouse, we had no say in the matter. But for this story, we're looking specifically at how black people help get Clubhouse to be huge. But also how black people aren't enjoying in the wealth gains of this sumo stock.

Yeah, and that's because Clubhouse is still a private company, so we call it Sumo. If you want to invest in this live streaming audio app called Clubhouse, you're straight up missing out. S-U-M-O-Sumo. Now, the way Jack and I look at Clubhouse is we basically divide it into two phases, and this is phase one. Phase one was last year when Clubhouse was worth... $100 million, even though just one and a half thousand people had downloaded the app. Yeah, and those early 1.5,000 users, those were mostly venture capitalists who'd invested in the company and a bunch of their buddies. And the venture capital industry skews heavily white

and heavily male. And because Clubhouse is an invite-only app, those white VC users begat more white VC users. That's why Phase 1 of Clubhouse was conversations about VR, AR, AI, and like self-driving cars. That's what you were going to find. Now, that was. was phase one. Phase two, though, that really began last month. Clubhouse went from $100 million valuation to a $1 billion valuation. It went from... Oh, yeah. One and a half thousand users to five million users over the course of just a few months. Clubhouse has grown so quick, so fast that it has already been zucked twice, two times in the last month. It's reportedly being zucked by Facebook, and it's actually already been zucked by Twitter. So we were curious what was driving that growth. We jumped in

snack style. And this quote pretty much sums up why Clubhouse is growing. This is from VC investor at Mercedes-Bent. Communities of color drive the cultural conversation and a lot of the initial wealth creation for apps like Clubhouse. So then a niche black community started thriving on the app, which drove buzz for Clubhouse outside the app. This story Snackers is wild. It's wild. The end of December, around the holidays, Broadway and New York City was still closed because of the pandemic, so a bunch of Broadway actors weren't doing much. So six black artists built an entire ensemble to stage the entire Lion King musical in a single Clubhouse room for you to listen to. They got 40 actors to perform the entire play all on Clubhouse. They almost broke Clubhouse.

They hit the 5,000 person max to join one of these audio rooms you listen on Clubhouse. Incredible creativity. And then we started seeing Black creativity in the rooms where conversations were happening. Yeah, you had black in tech, black beauty club, black Bitcoin billionaires, all these rooms you could listen to on Clubhouse. Even the Clubhouse app features a black man in a leading role. Yeah, last week, it was a guy named Bomani X, a black artist who started the Cotton Club Club Clubhouse room where he's doing live concerts on the app. His face was the thing you saw on your iPhone when you clicked the Clubhouse app. That's what you saw, not a corporate logo. Now, this all sounds like I've really been missing out by not using Clubhouse, by the way. Yeah, it's also

interestingly a similar pattern to happen to Snapchat when it was just starting out. That's right. According to the Los Angeles Times, early buzz and growth on the Snapchat app was also driven by creativity from black artists. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Clubhouse? The real money made on Clubhouse is with their early venture capitalists, not the black creators creating the buzz. Okay, those early phase one VCs that we mentioned earlier, those venture capitalists got a 10x return already on their investment in Clubhouse. Venture capital funding is driven by connections, and the VC industry skews heavily white. And this isn't something specific to Clubhouse, like VC entrepreneurship in general. This is the case. In 2018, 70% of venture capitalists

were white and just 3% were black. And according to Arlen Hamilton, a black female venture capitalist, 90% of venture funding and angel funding goes to white men in just six cities. Venture capitalists often come from similar backgrounds, similar universities, and similar cities. So then when you add it all up, the founders they tend to meet and then invest in, those tend to be the similar people from similar cities too. Clearly, entrepreneurship needs to be more inclusive, but of course it's not just venture capital's problem to solve. This is a society-wide issue. But the venture capital industry's greatest impact could simply be in diversity.

It's terrifying itself. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us before the weekend? Bumble CEO Whitney Wolf Hurd is the youngest woman at 31 years to take a company public. Bumble needs you for life, so it's building a holistic empire. Archer is the Uber of electric taxi plane things. And United Airlines sees that. They're keeping their enemy close to acquisition. For a third and final story, Clubhouse's explosive growth has been assisted by black creativity.

But the way venture capital works, the gains haven't exactly. gone to the black community. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one tweeted in by Anna Dela Cahia in Troy, Michigan. Astronauts in space can grow while they're up there in orbit up to 3% taller in that microgravity situation, according to NASA scientists. Yeah, we know what you're thinking. What is microgravity? We don't have the answer on that. But even though these astronauts are done growing, they actually stretch, they stretch while they're up in space. That means a six foot tall person could gain as many as two inches while up in orbit. But then here's the thing. You return to Earth, you get right back to where you were.

You're back to being five-nine. I could really use those two inches as a five-foot-ten quarterback next. We always got to round up. Jack and I always round up on these things. Snackers, three-day weekend, our last pod before Tuesday. You know what to do. Get down on one knee before Valentine's Day and ask H-Y-H-YS-D. They're going to be confused and then say, have you had your snacks daily? incredibly disappointed, but have you had your snacks down? Because if they know, you know.

And before we go, happy birthday to Cookie Olivia in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Frolicher, Gerburtstock to Dan Kruger in Vienna, Austria. And happy birthday, Collins-Turus in Nairobi, Kenya. And Matthias Yemma in Sydney, Australia. And Felicitis Allais in Wrigensburg, Germany. Frolycher, Gobertsstock, once again. And happy birthday to Ashley Anderson in Carmel, California. and Uyaz Patel in Austin, Texas, and Alex Schultz in Denver, and Omid in Bergen County, New Jersey, and Jacob Caput in Chicago, and Owen Beeson in Olympia, Washington, and Andrew Hartman in Seaford, New York, Mets Fan, happy belated birthday.

Good luck to Sam B, who's moving to San Francisco. Definitely get this out at Suvla with the French fries. Greek style. Taise Coella and Jesse Link, their one-year anniversary down in New York City. Happy 11 years together to Adam and Anna in Golden Colorado. And Clay and Rebecca Dover, 26 years. anniversary in Plano, Texas. Congrats on getting down on one knee and accepting to Gideon Nelson and Haley Conway in Virginia.

And Kristen Kokonis, new job in Chicago. Congrats to Edwin Moui, who just got a new job and is now an Amazonian. And Cody Kelser also a new job in California. From one Middlebury College Feb to another, congratulations to Molly for skiing down the Middlebury Snowball and graduating Middlebury College. And all the Panthers out there. This is Jack. I own stock of Blade and Nick and I both own stock up beyond me. The Robin Hood Snacks podcast you just heard reflects the opinions of only the hosts who are associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC

and does not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets Inc or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. The podcast is for informational purposes only and is not intended to serve as a recommendation to buy or sell any security and is not an offer or sale of a security. The podcast is also not a research report and is not intended to serve as the basis. of any investment decision. Robin Hood Financial LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.