The Best One Yet - 🍪 “The Toll House Cookie Effect” — SpaceX’s “genuine risk”. Grammarly’s $13B tYpo. And the winner of Black Friday is...

Episode Date: December 2, 2021

We’re ready to crown the winner of Black Friday and Cyber Monday — and it all comes down to chocolate chip cookie dough. SpaceX is on the brink of the space exploration, but now Elon says it’s on the brink of bankruptcy. Adn Grammarly h!t $13 billloin becase off you’re tYpos.$AFRM $PYPL $TSLAGot 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 Thursday, the new Friday, December 2nd already. First of all, Nick and I are blown away. We are, I can't think of other verbs. Yesterday kicked off Spotify rap season, and we are so thankful of so many of you posting about Snacks Daily as your number one pod.

Snackers, if you post it, you're the best ones yet. If you know, you're now. So Jack and I decided to make today's pod the best one yet. TBIOI for our first story. We have a winner of Black Friday. and Cyber Monday. It's called Spending Every Day. Yeah, and it's best explained by cookie dough and cookies, chocolate chip. For our second story, SpaceX is on the brink of a space exploration.

But Elon is telling employees it's also on the brink of bankruptcy. For our third and final story, Grammarly, just hit a $13 billion valuation to fix the your, your, your there, there problem. Do you need the apostrophe? Do you not need the apostrophe? Snackers, decacorns are the new Unicorns. To whom it may concern. To that it may concern? But Snackers, before we hit that wonderful mix. This is honestly, Jack, I'm blown away by this mix. I did not see this mix coming today. When it comes to holiday travel, we got your back. We do. And Snacker Low Green, he tweeted at us about an Airbnb that Jack and I think you should know about. Yeah. So actually,

Snacker low green has your back, really. Here's the thing, Snackers. Nothing says Christmas like the high-pitched tone of Joe Pesci's lovely voice. Hi, pal. And nothing feels like Christmas more than the McAllister family home from Home Alone. Harry, why are you dressed like a chicken? Well, slap your hands against your cheeks. Get this. You can now rent the Home Alone Home right there in Chicago.

Fuller, easy with the Pepsi. The actual Home Alone movie house. That's what we're talking about. It's on Airbnb. I made my family disappear. Now we know what you're thinking. What's going on with this Home Alone Home? This Home Alone Home, it features the original large Home Alone

kitchen that you know well. With 1980 style, perfect for making highly nutritious microwaveable macaroni and cheese dinners just for me. And Jack, if you'll walk upstairs, you're going to notice that every room, it's red and green. Every room, just like every scene in McCauley Culkin's real life. Now, FYI Snackers with Jack and I want to let you know, scheduling is tight. Bookings for the Home Alone House start on December 7th next week at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard. There's an old man next door with a shovel, a bucket of salt and really scary black boots,

but he actually has a heart of gold. Great guy. There is an Airbnb warning, though, that Uncle Frank is the worst. Uncle Frank, don't even talk or don't even listen to him. Jack, I'm going to give you it till the count of three to get your ugly, yellow, yellow, no-good keister, kicking off our three stories.

A lovely cheese pizza just for me. Mom, let's in our three stories. Keep the change of filthy animal. You're tuned in the snacks daily. We spoke to the lawyers and we got to get something illegal out the way. The snacks are about to hear rain food. It's air candy. They don't reflect the views of the Robin Hood family.

It's all informational just so. You know, 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 Fenra slash SIPC. For our first story, Jack, call it the queen. We are crowning a new winner of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It all comes down to. cookie dough. You're going to have to wait for the takeaway on this one. But in the meantime, you know, honestly, Jack, I miss the photos of people like crowd surfing to snag the last Furby. Black Friday used to be way more eventful. Nothing like hitting someone over the head with a baby Yoda toy just to get said baby Yoda toy. Hitting your neighbor over the head. Everyone

forgives in January. But in the meantime, Snackers, every December, there is one question that everybody asks when they're looking back on the last week. Who won Black Friday and who won Cyber Monday? Who won? Was it the online store? or was it the offline stores? Was it Amazon or was it Walmart? Was it Target or was it Macy's? We think the winner of Black Friday is actually... Okay, wait for it.

Can we get like a drum roll or some kind of a sound effect here? Buy now, pay later. Buy now pay later. It wasn't the big box stores. It wasn't the small box stores. It was buy now pay later. The Gen Z credit card that won holiday shopping 2021. Just call it BNPL because people are talking about it so much.

I don't even have time to say it anymore. Boom. Jack and I have been shopping. checking the stats, jumped in snack style, and we just got the data on Black Friday week. And here's what stood out to us. PayPal's CEO called their Buy Now Pay Later option, the star of their holiday season so far. It surged over 400% over Black Friday week compared to last year. We saw similar data from the Buy Now Pay Later business at Clarnow, which is the most

valuable startup in Europe, by the way. And from a firm, too. Which is the only publicly traded only Buy Now Pay Later company out there. That's all that they do. Maybe wondering, why are we seeing quadrupling and quintupling of buy now pay later usage this year? Well, somewhat obvious here because you can buy something now and then you pay for it later. Why would you pay $100 right now if they're giving you the free option to pay $25 every three months for a full year? Do you want to keep your money or do you want to give it to us all now?

As long as you just do the pay later part, then there's no catch with buy now pay later. The catch is that buy now pay later may lead you to overspend. With this amazing option, people spend 30 to 50% more on average using buy now pay later. So it's not just pay later. It's probably pay more later because you bought more. The key is the pay later. So Jack, what's the takeaway for our buddies who are everyone who spends money over the holidays? Black Friday and Cyber Monday are facing the toll house cookie effect. Okay. Snackers, this is wild. Get this. For the first time ever, we actually saw a

drop in spending on both Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year. That's right. Less money was spent by Americans on those huge legendary shopping days. But here's what Jack and I think is the interesting part. Over the whole month of November, more money was spent. Spending in November of this year was up 14% compared to November of last year. So here's how we're seeing this. This is the Toll House chocolate chip cookie effect. It started as a doughy ball on a baking pan, but it flattened out into a flat even cookie. Holiday spending used to be one big spend. Now it's one long spend. The ball of buying

is now one wide cookie of splurging across all of November. The toll house cookie effect. For our second story, Elon is also the CEO of SpaceX at the same time. And he put a fire under SpaceX employees last week by feigning that bankruptcy could be near. Okay, SpaceX based out of lovely Los Angeles, widely seen as the leader. in the space race right now. Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, cute competition over that. Enjoy the hospitality industry. Have fun on the vacations.

Well, on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, Elon sent an email to all SpaceX employees. Employees of SpaceX are trying to like, you know, unwrap a leftover yam, and then they get this in their inbox. They get an email. They get an Elon mail. And the website Space Explorer got a hold of that email. And here's what Elon said. To all of his employees.

The day after Thanksgiving. This is what Elon emailed everyone. We face genuine risk of bankruptcy. And I, Elon, and working through the weekend, and I'd like you to too. Sounds like Boss of the Year. Yeah, I'm going to need you to come in on a Saturday. Yeah. Now, Snackers, that extremely alarming email message,

it was about one thing and it was about one thing only, the Starship. Elon hopes that soon you will see SpaceX's Starship rockets bringing humans to the Moon. Yeah, SpaceX just got a $3 billion dollar NASA contract to bring astronauts to the moon on his SpaceX starships. And that's just practice. The real task that he hopes for, you know,

timing TBD, is to bring humans to Mars on these starships. But here's the thing about these lovely, really big universe running around Starship Snackers. They're huge. They're huge rockets. And they're heavy. Yeah, they're heavy. And imagine how much force it takes

to lift a gigantic rocket up into outer space. Yeah, they require 39 Raptor engines working together to blast off a single giant starship rocket. And 39 Raptor engines. Each Raptor engine, we saw a picture of it. It's like the size of a velociraptic. Don't ask us, ask Dr. Grant.

So Elon said in the email that SpaceX must launch one Starship rocket every two weeks next year or else there's a genuine risk of bankruptcy. That's SpaceX's business model next year. They got to launch one rocket every two weeks or there's a genuine risk of bankruptcy, according to Elon. Now, we're not rocket scientists, but we do know basic arithmetic. And 39 engines times 26 weeks of launches next year. This feels like a lot.

A lot of Raptor engines. As Elon said, we need all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, in his words, a disaster. So, Jack, what is the takeaway for our buddies over at SpaceX? Fear is the greatest motivator in the office, too. Snackers, SpaceX's risk of bankruptcy, we think it's better described as, extremely unlikely. Because if SpaceX gets low in cash, it's one of the most popular companies in the world. They can issue new stock to raise as much money as they need. Just look at what Tesla did,

Elon's other company. They issued $10 billion worth of stock in 2020 to raise money. SpaceX could do the same thing. Now, SpaceX is private. It is. You know what you're thinking. Yeah. But it's one of the most coveted private stocks there is. And they could IPO if they need to raise money. Oh, and Elon is the wealthiest human being on Earth right now, so he could write a check from the bank of Elon to SpaceX. The elephant in the room is Elon's personal checkbook. Elon said it's a genuine risk. We think he's just pushing employees. Right.

Like back in 2018, when Elon said that Tesla was weeks from collapse too. Yeah, back then, Elon slept on the floor of the Tesla factory to set an example, again, to motivate employees. It looks like Elon's doing with SpaceX today what he did with Tesla three years ago. Fear, it is the greatest motivator, or as Elon tweeted yesterday, Today, only the paranoid survive. For our third and final story, 2021 is the year of the decicorn. 30 startups have passed a $10 billion valuation and one of them is Gramerly.

So we're going to talk about Grammarly. Unicorns, by the way, they're like so 2019. 10-headed unicorns. Yeah. Or unicorns with 10 horns. Decacorn. That's what this year is all about. That's 2021.

Now, Snackers, the most recent Decacorn, it's Gramerly. 11-year-old Ukrainian-born writing assistant software. Grammarly is a plugin for your internet browse. Classics. Like, they're helping you identify typos, misspellings, like the your, your, you know what we're talking about. It's artificial intelligence that will read your sentence that says, you and me went swimming. And they'll be like, ah, uh, uh, it's you and I went swimming. Do you know how many times, Jack, I have misspelled the word, accommodate?

You know how many Cs are in that? You know how many Ms are in that? I have, like, buy a vowel. Yeah, but that's just a typo. which like Google or Microsoft can do. Gramerly is going to tell you whether you use whoever or whomever. Yeah, whatever. Trick question.

Neither. Now, the business model here is a classic freemium model. You can do the typo check, which is free, or you can pay 12 to 30 bucks a month for a hardcore spell checker. Gramerly also offers tone detection to make sure your email isn't too aggressive. Like sometimes I may have next. I'm not looking at you. Or too excited, which I think my point.

partner, Nick here may have an issue with once in a lot. How did you spend your Thanksgiving weekend? So what gravely software does is it's like, hey, ease up. You don't need four exclamation points there, Nick. Hey, you may want to remove, please advise, thanks in advance from the end of your email. What they really need, Jack, is a passive aggressive tone detector to stop you from writing something like, as per my last email. Now, what really shocked us and seemed to justify their, what is it, $11 billion valuation? $13 billion valuation. It's the user base. It's huge.

It's 30 million daily users. That's 30 million daily users. Now, that's about as 10th as big as Snapchat, but it is. Look, this is a spelling service. It's not like social media dancing videos. So we know what you're thinking. How did a spell checker get 30 million daily users? They pivoted customers from the obvious customers to the not so obvious customers.

Yeah, the first three years of grammarly, they were all about the students, spell checking, plagiarism checking, all that good stuff. Yeah, they're making sure you didn't do a little too much copying and pasting from the web for your final paper. Because who doesn't want to mess up an apostrophe, the high schooler who's applying to college. But in 2012, grammarly pivoted from academic to business customers. From students to workers. A 15-year-old is not going to pay 20 bucks a month for the premium, but a boss might pay 20 bucks a month per employee to make sure they look good in digital communications. So, Jack, what is the takeaway for our?

our $13 billion buddies over at Gramerly. Communication is the greatest hidden corporate cost. Yeah, look, Snackers, Jack, me, both of our therapists. They can tell you that communication is the key to literally every relationship you've got. In business, bad communication doesn't just hinder your productivity. It has a monetary cost to the company. Yeah, miscommunication. It's inefficient.

It waste time and it causes dreaded thrash of like 10 emails back and forth. That is a cost. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, bad communication costs the average large company $62 million a year. Because typos lead to mistakes and bad tone, that leads to employee tension. And all that, that's costly. A writer can miswrite, a reader can misunderstand, a project can get dropped. Dropped projects, that's dropped business.

Customer may judge you. Client may knock you down a peg or two if you have the wrong punctuation. Miscommunication. It isn't just inconvenient. It's the greatest hidden. corporate cost. Jack, can you eat some junk food, watch some rubbish, and whip up the takeaways for us over there. Black Friday and Cyber Monday, sales fell this year.

Spending. It flattened out like cookie dough into a cookie. For our second story, SpaceX's leader. Warn the company, they need to do better or there's a risk of bankruptcy. Elon said that because fear is the greatest motivator. And Gramerly is the latest decacorn. Because communication is the greatest hidden corporate cost. Jack, I feel like that. Professor Adam Grant's going to like love two out of three of these takeaways.

Now, time for our snack fact of the day. This one sent in by Tracy Loflin from lovely Charlotte, North Carolina. Hazelnuts. It's the world's fifth largest nut crab. Yeah, peanuts always taken number one. Hazelnuts, number five. Well, related, Nutella is the world's most delicious breakfast spread. Not a fact.

Just a personal opinion, Jack and I share. Get this. 25% of the world's hazelnut harvest, goes to Nutella. Yeah, those chocolate hazelnut spreads, one out of every four hazelnuts ends up in a Nutella jar. It's like turkey.

Or five out of every four turkeys goes to the Thanksgiving table. And four out of every three Nutillas is eaten on Thanksgiving. Two out of three of those are real facts. 60% of the time, Nick's right every time. Snackers, you look fantastic today.

If you haven't yet, ask a buddy H-Y-H-Y-S-D, that's how we grow. Word of mouth, that's how we do it. Have you had your snacks daily? If you know, You know. And before we go, happy birthday to Ryan Weedoff from lovely Seattle.

He got the whole family snacking this year. Happy birthday to love it from Washington, D.C. And Arriva Anwar, happy birthday in Carlton, Texas. Happy 30th to Chris John Brewer in Austin, Texas. And congratulations to Brown Bear Michael Alene in Sydney, Australia. Not only. Did he pass his surgery exam? He only studied for two days.

He sounds prepared. You know what? He sounds prepared. No, he's like, great test. Great test. And to anyone else, celebrate it today, make it a team. Celebrate the wins. This is Jack.

I own stock of Amazon. 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.

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