Our charts for you today explore:
This week Stripe, the digital payments company, raised $600m at a $95bn valuation. That officially makes Stripe Silicon Valley's most valuable startup, and puts it second only to Bytedance — the Chinese parent company of TikTok — in the competition for the world's most valuable.
Stripe's revaluation this week also underlines just how dominant the US remains in the venture and startup landscape — 51 of the 100 most valuable startups globally are American. 22 are Chinese, 9 are British, 7 are Indian and the rest are spread out thinly between a handful of countries.
Happy St. Paddy's Day
For the Irish Collison brothers, who founded Stripe when they were just 19 and 21, the fresh financing will help Stripe to expand into Europe from its base in Ireland, where one of its two headquarters is located (the other is in San Francisco).
John, the younger of the 2 brothers, recently noted that "Stripe itself is now bigger [by payment volumes] than the entire ecommerce market was when we started working on Stripe". So happy St. Patrick's Day John & Patrick Collison — thanks for making everyone feel bad about what we were doing when we were 19-21.
The full list of the most valuable startups can be found at CB Insights.
Podcasts had a pretty good 2020. Even without the endless hours of commuting time, podcasts managed to grow their reach while we were all stuck at home. According to the latest data from Edison Research, 37% of Americans have listened to a podcast in the last month. That's up from 32% the year before, and is more than triple the number from a decade ago, when just 12% were regularly listening to podcasts.
So you should start a podcast right, seeing as there are more people listening to podcasts than ever before? While the latter is true, there are also more people recording podcasts than ever before, with ~850,000 active podcasts in the world. That makes it hard to stand out and build an audience.
Sell pickaxes
There's an old saying that you should sell pickaxes during a gold rush. If you're on the lookout for your next big startup idea (hoping to get it into the first chart from this newsletter) you might be better off building a "pickaxe" — any tool that helps podcasters or podcast advertisers do their job better. Of course, if you're really funny - just start an actual podcast.
This week Finnish technology company Nokia, once the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones, announced they were cutting up to 10,000 jobs from its 90,000 strong workforce.
For Nokia this is the latest chapter after a tumultuous few decades. At the turn of the millennium Nokia was king of mobile phones, routinely selling more than 100 million handsets a year.
The advent of smartphones, and some unfortunate product recalls, saw Nokia — and many other manufacturers — lose market share spectacularly quickly to Apple and others. Despite that fall from grace, Nokia's legacy is remarkable; the company still holds 8 out of the top 10 slots for the most-selling mobile phone models and its 3310 model maintains a strong cult following for being completely indestructable.
What does Nokia do now?
Though Nokia's share price is just a shadow of its former self, the company has done a decent job of maintaining, and even growing, its other revenue streams. After selling its handset business to Microsoft in 2013, Nokia has focused mostly on its networks business and it's planning to use the savings from this latest round of job cuts to finance further investment into 5G, the latest generation of mobile networks. They also still sell a few phones, including a re-imagined version of their iconic 3310.
1) Uber has confirmed that all 70,000 of its UK drivers will be entitled to holiday pay, a minimum wage and pension contributions. The news comes just over a month since Uber lost a landmark case over its drivers' legal status in the UK.
2) Volkswagen announced a range of new initiatives aimed at taking it to the top of the electric vehicle perch, including plans to have six 40 gigawatt hour (GWh) battery cell production plants operating by 2030. Your move Elon, or should we call you Technoking?
3) The American Kennel Club has released its annual statistics on dog registrations and Labrador Retrievers have topped the rankings as the most popular dog breed for the 30th year in a row. French Bulldogs climbed the rankings to the #2 spot. Full rankings of the most popular breeds here.
4) See math and science in a completely new way with one-of-a-kind interactive visualizations from Brilliant — for ages 10 to 110.*
**This is a sponsored snack.
