- Starting with cliches is a good way to start this fantastic piece on Africa.
- It covers everything from demographics to key venture players to opportunities.
- Well worth a read for those interested in this continent.
- Let this map just sink in.
- There are 1.2bn people in Africa, a number that will double in 30 years to 2.4bn.
- Roughly 50% will be under 25 years old. The staggering stats go on.
Tech
Amazon Prime
- JPM think Amazon Prime, which costs $119 per year, offers over $1,000 of customer value.
Car Software
- Fascinating article on the ballooning software requirement in cars.
- “Even low-end vehicles are quickly approaching 100 ECUs and 100 million of lines of code as more features that were once considered luxury options, such adaptive cruise control and automatic emergency breaking, are becoming standard“.
Device Preference
- 80% of users in India are mobile only.
- In the US the preference is a mix of mobile and computer (78%).
- Source.
Video Call Competitors
- Interesting contrast among the various video calling apps over the pandemic period.
- Zoom usage grew strongly but fell back after its initial peak into a pattern of steady growth.
- Microsoft Teams grew steadily throughout.
- Houseparty looks like a flash in the pan – 4.6m peak to only 432k users today.
- Source (based on UK data).
Web3
- Interesting essay on the future of the web – Web3.
- Web3 allows a new generation of disrupters to create products that actually pay people to use them, and aligns the incentives of creators, consumers, suppliers, and investors.
- “Imagine going to Disney World, and getting shares in Disney, the company, every time you took a ride, bought Mickey Merch, or sent your friend a picture. Or that owning shares in Disney let you skip all of the lines as long as you held the shares. That’s what tokens do.“
- In the essay he presents Web3 competitors to all the major web platforms.
- One neat way to describe the landscape is to think of “crypto as listed versions of traditional VC, with a real-time, 24/7 quoted price.” (Source).
Big Tech Regulation
- Good analysis of the bill proposed in Congress on regulating Big Tech.
- The bill tries to restrict a lot of activity that is seen as anti-competitive behaviour on platforms.
- It is also aimed at breaking up the businesses, making data easily portable, and acquisitions harder.
- “Taken together, these laws would be a revolution in antitrust law, adapted for an era where Big Tech marketplaces, not railroads, are the dominant businesses of the day. They could also have many serious unintended side effects, so the final form of these laws matters a lot.”
Cloud is not all Great
- Interesting to see cracks form in cloud computing paradigm.
- In the article a16z make a stark case for repatriating workloads – “We show (using relatively conservative assumptions!) that across 50 of the top public software companies currently utilizing cloud infrastructure, an estimated $100B of market value is being lost among them due to cloud impact on margins — relative to running the infrastructure themselves.”
- “If you’re operating at scale, the cost of cloud can at least double your infrastructure bill.” … “You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it.“
- Good discussion of this article here.
- Computing paradigms do move in cycles but the analysis is missing things like flexibility (cloud is better at flexing workloads up and down) and capital intensity of businesses being a driver of valuation.
FAANMG
- FAANMG premium to the rest of tech sector has come down a lot.
- Source.
eRetail 2.0
- The mind boggles at the level of innovation going in ecommerce.
- One major part is entertainment and retail = retailtainment – “shopping as a mass leisure activity”.
- This is a great article on the phenomenon, covering the plethora of ways it is developing.
- As usual one needs to look east where a lot of development is taking place.
- One of the enablers is software that is designed to be addictive – for example infinite scrolling can mimic the bottomless bowl effect leading to 73% more consumption.
Tech Positioning
- According to the May BofA Global Fund Manager Survey allocation to tech is at an all time low.
- NB these surveys are self reported so actual positioning might be different.
- Source.
Semiconductor Market
- Neat demonstration of a structurally growing cyclical market – integrated circuit (IC) units excluding memory chips over time.
- Currently we are above trend but inventories are generally low.
Andreessen Interview
Apple Wearables
- Pretty stunning how far Apple is ahead in wearable technology.
- This was a good article discussing their lead.
- Start by watching the AssistiveTouch for Apple Watch video – truly science fiction come to life.
- The article attributes Apple’s success to (1) being early (2) voice controlled devices distracting competitors (3) wearables requiring hardware design expertise (4) ecosystem synergies (5) and no price umbrella.
iOS 14.5 App Tracking Opt-in Rate
- This site tracks daily the number of users* opting in for App Tracking with the new iOS 14.5 update.
- Useful for those invested in Facebook and other players in the mobile advertising industry.
- Here is the chart from May 14th for the World, the figure is 5% for the US.
- *they count app users not individuals users. So it is for every app.
- Good article on what participants are doing in the early days.
Apple’s M1 Positioning
- Apple is upending the traditional (x86) CPU markets.
- It is doing this by offering the same M1 chip in laptops, tablets and desktop PCs.
- The same M1 chip at all price points (from $699 to $1,699).
- “Apple’s willingness to position the M1 across so many markets challenges the narrative that such a vast array of x86 products is helpful or necessary. It puts Intel and AMD in the position of justifying why, exactly, x86 customers are required to make so many tradeoffs between high performance and low power consumption. Selling the M1 in both $699 and $1,699 machines challenges the idea that a computer’s price ought to principally reflect the CPU inside of it.“
Semiconductor Start-ups
Tiger Global
- A fascinating read about Tiger Global’s innovative velocity focussed venture/growth strategy.
- It can be summed up as follows:
- Be (very) aggressive in pre-empting good tech businesses
- Move (very) quickly through diligence & term sheet issuance
- Pay (very) high prices relative to historical norms and/or competitors
- Take a (very) lightweight approach to company involvement post-investment
- Above all, deploy capital, deploy capital, deploy capital
- It is disrupting venture investing and earning high returns in the process.
Amazon Ads
- Pictured below are Ebay and Amazon pages.
- Staggeringly, everything shaded in blue is an ad.
- Both have now replaced product recommendations with advertising.
- It makes sense as surveys show nearly 50% of product searches start on Amazon.
- Amazon’s advertising business now likely has the same profitability as its cloud business.
a16z Marketplace 100: 2021
- The latest edition of the top 100 private/start-up consumer facing marketplaces using Bloomberg real-time consumer spending data.
- A lot has changed in 2020 for obvious reasons. The full report is here.
- Interesting to see Turo at number 9 (up 5 places), which is an investment (they own ca. 26.8%) by IAC that few talk about.
