The Best One Yet - 🧱 “Legos & SPAM” — Lego’s un-focus focus. Ferrari’s iPhone guy. TikTok’s billionth user.

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

Lego became the biggest toy company on Earth by no longer targeting kids. TikTik just joined the One-Billion-User Club, but TikTok’s not making enough money on TikTok. And Ferrari just snagged the guy who designed the iPhone to design the iRaceCar.$RACE $HASGot a SnackFact? Tweet it @RobinhoodSnacks @JackKramer @NickOfNewYorkWant a shoutout on the pod? Fill out this form:https://forms.gle/KhUAo31xmkSdeynD9Got a SnackFact for the pod? We got a form for that too:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe64VKtvMNDPGSncHDRF07W34cPMDO3N8Y4DpmNP_kweC58tw/viewformLearn 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 Wednesday. September 29th. Um, is it just me? Did you look at your stock portfolio? Look at it.

I heard it, Jack. I felt this thing. I kind of hate calling it a portfolio, but all my stocks were down. Yeah, it was Tuesday, bruised. I got smacked up like a fruit fly and a bowl of vinegar. Today's pod, though? Today's pod is the best one yet. We should say that.

T-B-O-Y. For our first story, Legos, just cemented themselves as the biggest toy company in the world. Get this Lego. makes 10 times the profits of the number two toy company on earth. For our second story, Ferrari, just hired the guy who designed the iPhone at Apple. Because Ferrari, it's got to combine hardware and software just like the iPhone did.

Then you get wearware. Yeah, and that's the best kind of wear. Software and hardware. For our third and final story, TikTok, just announced that they reached one billion users. And they got there twice as fast as any other app. Yeah, Jack, you can clone it, but you can't own it. I think I saw that on a juicy shirt like 15 years ago.

Yeah, I was going to say, that's a sassy line. Very sassy, but this mix is fantastic. I do love this pot today. Before we hit those stories, the biggest name in crypto right now, a German name Mr. Gox. Yeah, he's super chill. He's super low key, and we noticed he's super quiet, too. It's Mr. Gox with two axes.

But Mr. Gox isn't a dude. No, he's a hamster. Yeah, Mr. Gox, the hamster, is actually picking crypto investments like a Orsupial Bill Ackman. The owner of Mr. Gox started getting his hamster into investing back in June. And that rodent, is he a rodent actually? I think technically. He's up 16% with his investments.

We're talking about a hamster who's beating Bitcoin, beating the S&P 500, beating Warren Buffett and beating both of us. Mr. Gox is very into Ethereum, very into Tron, very into nibbling on carrot nibblets. It's all about the leafy greens, Jack. That's what gets him going. But here's the thing. Mr. Gox, the hamster, he won't explain his crypto picks because he's a hamster. But here's how the scheme goes down.

First, the owner places Mr. Gox into his hamster intention wheel. Yes, yes, after he's done pooping. Right. Then Mr. Gock spins in his wheel until it lands on a cryptocurrency. Boom. Step three, he runs through a buy tunnel or a cell tunnel, which then triggers a buy or sell of $20 worth of crypto. And of course, his trading sessions are live streamed onto Twitch.

Jack, he's trading so well. He's going to settle down with Mrs. Gawks. pretty soon. She's also a hamster. Mr. Gox, retire early, the American dream. Move on to the other side of the cage. Play a little mini golf the rest of his life. Jack, he's going to buy himself a fancy new hamster peloton wheels. Time to upgrade from wood shavings to some other fancier savings. Get yourself that velvet flooring two feet by two feet. But take away your sackers, if you had a bad day in the stock markets like we did, remember Mr. Cox. Sometimes you just get beat by hamster and that's okay. Let's hit our three schools.

the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something legal out the way. The snacks about the hearing food is air candy. They don't reflect the views of the robberhood family. It's all informational just so. You know, we're not recommending any securities. 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. Robahood Financial, LLC, member Fembra, SIPC. For our first story, Legos, they just cemented their place as the biggest toy company on planet Earth.

Key to Lego's success. Drop it on us. They stop focusing on kids. Yeah, they actually stop focusing and that is what helped them focus. I don't even think they like kids. This is like Raul Dahl basically, scaring us every week. Now, by the way, Lego, not a publicly traded company. This is like family owned and operated.

It's still owned by the Christensen's of Denmark. Yeah, that's four generations of Vikings right there. And the CEO. CEO today is actually also named Christensen, but no relation. They had been Legowing for four generations. But 18 years ago, Lego, it was actually on the verge of bankruptcy. It was tough times for the toys. 2003.

Yeah, brutal. Guitar Hero, we weren't using Legos. N64. Super Soakers. The footballs that whistled when he threw them, that's what we were playing with. You know, not in an Eiffel Tower Lego. Tough time for Legos. But 2020 was the best year for Legos in five years.

Parents wanted kids off screens and parents wanted parents, off screens. All right, private company, they don't have to tell us their financials, but they did. And so far this year, Legos has sold $3.6 billion worth of Legos. Yeah, or let's throw some context on here, Snackers. That is 50% higher than the second closest toy company on the planet, Hasbro. All right. So it's 50% bigger in terms of sales than Hasbro, number two. That's impressive. But Legos is a thousand percent more profitable than Hasbro than number two toy company. That is insane. We're talking plastic bricks are like 10 times more profitable than my little pony. They do one thing. And Legos makes 27 cents of profit for every buck of Legos they sell.

Okay. So here's what fascinated Jack and me about Legos. We jumped in snack style. Legos is focusing on being less focused. That's how they're doing this. Johnson, who are we trying to sell to today? Anybody. That's the new thing Legos is doing. And it's totally work. They're not checking IDs anymore. They're selling from cradle to grade. They've expanded the whole age spectrum. For example, Lego said, you know what? We're going to whip up more Harry Potter Lego. Harry Potter Lego sales are through the roof to millennials who grew up with Harry Potter and love Harry Potter. And then they noticed, hey, that's working. Why don't we whip up more Star Wars Legos? Han Solo crushing it with Gen Xers. And then Lego said, you know what, we're going to do a whole lot more of the random architectural Legos. Boomers. Yeah. Boomers are into the Eiffel There's nothing my dad likes more than like a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Legos. I just got my father-in-law, Claudia, a Porsche Lego set. Thoughtful guy.

He loves it. I'm sure he does. I'll take one too, but hey, you know, I don't know. You can just mail it. Well, Porsche is an aspirational LEGO. Why buy the car when you can get the 1 to 17 replica? Let me get your starter Lego set first. Focusing and not focusing classic Lego.

So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Legos? It's not about the Tam. For Legos, it's about the spam. Snackers, one thing that we hear in every earnings report and we notice in every entrepreneur pitch deck is the Tam, the T-A-M. The total addressable market. Basically, how big is the chunk of consumer spending for the product that you're targeted? But Jack and I think there's something that has even more value. It's not the Tam. It's the spam.

This is a Snacks original. Yeah, it is. The surprising potential addressable market. That's the spam. And the spam is all about broad. broadening your core focus to wider opportunities, the surprising potential addressable market. Legos is Tam used to be toy sales to kids. Yeah.

Their spam is toy sales to anybody. Spam, not Tam. That's what separates the Legos from the toys. For our second story, Ferrari, it just hired the godfather of the iPhone. Big deal. Johnny Ive. Johnny Ive. Merge software and hardware at Apple.

Now he's doing it for Ferrari's cars. Okay, first of all, we don't give. them enough credit for this, but Ferrari's stock ticker symbol, fantastic. It's race, R-A-C-E. It could have been Roar, which is available. Fantastic. Someone take that. Because they're known for incredible engines, 12-cylinder, 600 horsepower. Can we interest you in the 15 Formula One championships? Michael Schumacher, the German, only drove Ferrari and won a bunch of races. I feel like we also don't give your German pronunciations enough credit. That could be,

that's just an incredible highlight right there. But don't be. Machin Zichner. But Snackers, Nick and I found it kind of interesting that in Ferrari's earnings presentation, which is 26 pages long, this is weird. They mentioned the word electric just one time. Yeah, that's in the legal disclosures. That wasn't even like the meaty part of the deck. Ferrari, you're familiar that Tesla's like taken over the world, right? Right. Actually, Ferrari mentioned their new fashion show, which they did with like a bunch of fancy gowns and tuxedos in Milan more times than they mentioned electric vehicles. So this whole electric vehicle,

trend that Tesla is leading. It's kind of an existential Ferrari issue. And we should get more specific here, Jack. This isn't just existential. Ferrari can't like kind of or eventually do. They must pivot to electric very soon. In the United Kingdom, gas powered cars, which is all that Ferrari sells right now. That's it. They are banned starting in 2030. You can't buy them. Over in China, they've banned gas powered cars by 2035 and what she wants, she gets. The European Union is also proposing a gas powered car ban by 2035, and the USA could be next. It honestly could happen. So like, if Ferrari doesn't pivot to electric, it is literally going to be stuck selling an illegal product straight out of Italy. They're like, but it has 600 horsepower.

They're like, they're illegal. The car becomes contraband. So that's why this week's news was so big. Ferrari just hired Johnny I. Yeah, that Johnny Ive, the guy who was Steve Jobs number two man over at Apple headquarters in Cooper Tena. He's actually Sir Johnny Ive. This is a British subject. You apologize, sir. And for 23 years, Johnny Ive was the head of design at Apple. Yeah, think of as the Elton John of I everything. Johnny Ive drew up the blueprints for what eventually became the iPhone, the iPad, and the Apple Watch. This guy's responsible for like a trillion dollars of market value.

Absolutely. His fingers are responsible because he knows how to style tech. And it's reported that Johnny Ive was hugely interested in working on Apple's Apple's Apple car. Which, where do we stand on that? What's the status update? Apple hired thousands in 2014, invested billions on an Apple car project, but we have nothing to show for. Nothing in seven years. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over at Ferrari and their new hire Johnny I? Cars of the future are pretty much four-wheeled rolling iPhones. Snackers, Ferrari already knows how to design hardware. They've been doing cars for 82 years. But they don't know how to do hardware harmoniously, embedded with software. And that is what an electric vehicle is. It is a big rolling iPhone chassis

that happens to hold people. By 2025, consumers are going to expect that cars are electric, they're autonomous, and they're connected to the internet. Well, Ferrari said in April, its first electric car, it's not going to hit showrooms until 2025. That is incredibly late. But now Ferrari's got the iPhone guy to make up for lost time. For our third and final story, an Austrian hamster starts podcasting and has a bigger audience than us. My name is Arnold Schwarza Hampster. But for a real third story, TikTok just held its first ever TikTok world event. Huge event.

Everyone's making money on TikTok. Yeah, they are. Except apparently TikTok. Weird situation over at TikTok. But the way we're looking at this, TikTok, it isn't an app. TikTok is an economy. The average American TikTok user is on TikTok for 24 and a half hours a month. Okay, carry the one, add the nine. That means that millions of Americans are going to spend 12 days out of their life this year on TikTok.

All right. Now, TikTok also just announced this week right before the event that they reached one billion monthly active users. Impressive. That's like a third of a Facebook. But Jack, let's look at the race course here. How quick were they to get to a billion users? Right. TikTok isn't as big as Facebook. But it took Facebook nine years to reach one billion users. It did. It took Instagram eight years to reach a billion. And everybody's over at TikTok, Jack? Five years. Wow.

Fastest ever to reach one billion users. And that one billion, that doesn't even include the hundreds of millions of TikTok users on its Chinese sister app, Do Yin. Do you in is like TikTok's pen pal. It is, yeah. But all of the letters between them are reviewed. Perfectly put, Jack. But here's what Jack and I think is the problem going on over TikTok. TikTok has a platform problem.

Remember that Fleetwood Macs? video. Yes. The skateboarder. It's just like pounding cranberry juice. I mean, I wish he was wearing a helmet, but he looked like he was really good at skateboarding. Well, that was quite a thing. And Fleetwood Mac got a bunch of music streams, ocean spray got a bunch of cranberry juice sales. And Dog Face 208. That's him. Ended up on the Ellen DeGeneres show. And TikTok, which was the platform on which all that magic happened, didn't get much. So brands learned from that event that try to get your content to go viral for free. There you go. That way you don't have to pay TikTok for ads. So that was the whole point of this huge TikTok world event yesterday.

They're trying to persuade advertisers to actually pay for advertising, not just take the viral route. If TikTok could, they would use that men in black thing that erases your memory and erase all of advertisers' memory of that whole ocean spray skateboarding Fleetwood Mac thing. Because that one video, that got a lot of advertisers very thirsty to not pay for advertising. So TikTok's new system connects advertisers. to creators so that they can make Fleetwood Cranberry-like videos. Yeah, unlike Instagram and Snapchat, which squeeze ads into your feed, TikTok wants to broker viral videos.

They're going to connect TikTok influencers to brands like Ocean Spray so that they can create something cool together that hopefully goes viral on TikTok. Ch-ching, TikTok takes a cut. Yeah, TikTok is not just selling ads like other social media ads. So, Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies over TikTok? TikTok's real success. They're cloned. but they're not owned.

Snackers, TikTok, it has been copied all year long, but it has proven to be. I can't believe we're saying this, Jack, on the pod live. Unzuckable. August 2020, Instagram ripped off TikTok with Reels. Then Snapchat did it with Spotlight. Then YouTube did it with shorts. All those things, those are TikTok knockoffs. Despite a TikTok clone being added to like every app, each one.

Tiptock still doubled their users in just two years. TikTok got cloned. TikTok didn't get owned. It's their unique. secret algorithm that is keeping users on TikTok for 12 days a year. And that is getting creators paid more money. And that makes TikTok unclonable. Jack, can you whip up the takeaways for us over there? Legos is the most successful toy company on Earth. Yeah, it's not about the Tam. It's about the spam, the surprising potential addressable market. Ferrari, just hired the iPhone guy. Cars of the future,

they're more iPhone, less 12-cylinder engine. And TikTok is doing incredibly well. but wants to make more money. I mean, it's unzuckable. It has been cloned, but it's not owned. Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one's sent in by James Sheets from lovely Arlington, Virginia. Here on Earth, a year is way longer than a day. That's like obvious.

Yeah, but over with our buddies on Venus, Venus, it's like the total opposite situation. Because a day is how long it takes for the planet to spin. And a year is how long to go around the sun. So a day on Venus, that's 243 Earth days. It's a really long day. A year on Venus is less than that. It's 225 birthdays. Venus, kind of weird planet, but kind of really slow or really fast.

Depends how you look at it. They should rename Venus the knuckleball planet. It's like, you know, barely rotated. What's coming at me? Oh, it's Venus. Venus is coming at you. Snackers, you look fantastic today. If you want a shout out on this pod, all you got to do is go into the episode description,

click on the link. We want to hear your birthdays, your graduations, your bar mitzvizzers, your everything. Your snackbacks, too. Yeah, send us your snackbacks. We want them. Nick and I, I'll see you tomorrow. Can't wait now. And before we go, happy birthday to Elias in Helsinki, Finland.

Have a great cold one. And happy birthday, Chris Brown of West Hartford, Connecticut. Adam broke his hand, but hey, he's still celebrating his birthday in Madison, Wisconsin. There you go. Happy birthday to Adrian in Waterville, Maine. Home of the Fighting Mules in Colby College. Niscack. And Lily Ross, congrats on snagging the Venture Capital Internship over in San Francisco.

stop by. Happy first birthday to Sugarloaf, the kitten in Philadelphia. Lovely. And anybody else celebrating something today, make it a T-boy. Celebrate the wins. This is Jack. I own a Bitcoin. His name's Ben. Is this his name Ben? I thought we were going with Beatrice. Oh, yeah, Beatrice. This is Jack. I own a Bitcoin. Her name's Beatrice. Yeah. Actually, this is Jack. I own a fraction of a Bitcoin. Her name is Beatrice, and I own stock of Peloton. Nick owned stock of Apple and we both own a Theorette. Robin Hood Snacks, newsletters, and podcasts reflect the opinions of only the authors who are

associated persons of Robin Hood Financial LLC and do not reflect the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc, or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. They are meant for informational purposes only and are not a recommendation to buy or sell any security, cryptocurrency, or investment strategy in any account. This is not an offer or sale of a security, not a research report, and is not intended to serve on the basis for any investment decision. Any third-party information provided therein does not reflect. the views of Robin Hood Markets, Inc., Robin Hood Financial LLC, or any of their subsidiaries or if