3 charts for you today:
This week two tech giants debuted on the stock market: Airbnb and DoorDash, with both companies soaring on their first day of trading — DoorDash shares jumping more than 85% from their IPO price, and then Airbnb more than doubling yesterday.
Whether we're in a stock market bubble is, unfortunately, a story for another day, because apart from soaring valuations these 2 companies have something else in common: both were backed by the prolific start-up accelerator Y Combinator.
Darts at the board
The start-up directory on the Y Combinator website suggests that, since its first cohort in 2005, YC has invested in more than 2400 companies, with Dropbox, Stripe, Twitch, Reddit&The Athletic among some of the most valuable and well known of their investments to date.
For their latest batches, YC offers a set investment of $125k in return for 7% equity in the start-up, terms that have changed over the years and were initially just $20k for 6% of a company.
The YC model of making lots of "little bets" perfectly encapsulates investing in risky start-up companies at the early stage: many will fail, most will be unspectacular and a handful will (hopefully) produce returns that pay for all of the other investments combined.
Take YC's investment in Airbnb. Although Y Combinator's equity stake will have been heavily diluted throughout the years, even owning 1% of Airbnb at today's prices would be enough to pay for literally every other seed investment they have ever made - and more.
More to come
Perhaps what's most interesting about the YC portfolio is that the majority of the biggest hits they've had are 6, 7, 8 or 10+ years old — when the YC cohorts every year were closer to 50-100 companies, and not the 350-400 they've been doing in the last few years. Safe to say there will be another DoorDash, and probably another Airbnb, in those latest batches.
With Apple releasing the AirPods Max (that come with a truly max price tag of $549) we thought we'd wheel out this chart again — as pundits already begin to ask who on earth will spend that much on a pair of headphones.
Apple doesn't explicitly disclose AirPod revenues, but even the conservative $7.3bn estimate reported by Wired, would make AirPods roughly the same size as Spotify, the leader in global music streaming, which did $7.6bn of revenue in 2019.
For AirPods, the rocky start as an internet joke that made fun of rich people turned into a feature – as the market began to see them as a status symbol. Whether the same will happen with AirPods Max is yet to be seen, but if any company is capable of convincing millions of people to spend $550 on headphones... it's Apple.
Yesterday Brandon Bernard, who was found guilty of murdering Stacie and Todd Bagley in 1999, was executed in Indiana. Despite a last minute plea to the Supreme Court, as well as pleas from celebrities on social media, the execution went ahead.
Since the year 2000, there have now been 929 executions across the US, although that number has been falling in recent years. So far in 2020 there have been 16 including Brandon Bernard — according to data from the DPIC.
What does public opinion say?
Fewer executions perhaps reflect changing public opinion on the death penalty. The latest data from Gallup, which has tracked US public views on the death penalty for more than 60 years, suggest that 55% of the US public are currently in favour of the death penalty. That's a majority, but it is down on the 80% support that was polled as recently as 1994.
1) It's estimated that Google handles 2 trillion searches per year — check out the highlights from its "Year in Search 2020".
2) Disney has revealed that its Disney+ streaming service has hit more than 86 million subscribers since launching in November of last year.
3) An Italian man has walked 450km after an argument with his wife, getting a €400 fine in the process for breaching the COVID-19 curfew.
4) The FTC, and 48 state attorney generals, are suing Facebook over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
5) Russians who receive the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine are being told they should abstain from drinking alcohol for almost 2 months before and after immunization.
