Almost zero activity in consumer internet M&A the past 18 months. 95% of transaction volume in 2022 was the Twitter acquisition 👀

h/t Jefferies for the chart Another look at the data, small transactions have ben non-existent

Coinbase (?) had a $65 million Datadog bill per its Q1 earnings call. Wild.

h/t @ChairliftCap I share crazy factoids like this every week in my newsletter

Subscribe here: thespl.it

The auto industry has been turned upside down over the past 24 months. Car prices nearly doubled in 2021, only to reverse and drop 14% since January.

Here’s how VINN built a startup on top of Typeform that grew 6x this year helping car dealers across Canada sell online: Everything started when @calebbernabe_ was in high school. He spent his weekends rebuilding classic cars and motorcycles, and started a digital marketing agency working with local dealerships to save up money for med school.

Elon has officially acquired Twitter.

1) He now owns what is arguably the most influential media company in the world
2) It benefits all his other businesses
3) He'll use it to take on ByteDance
4) This would be impossible as a public company

He wins no matter what. Here's why: Before jumping in, here’s the full post on @TheSplit_ if you’d rather read the longer version

thespl.it/p/elons-twitter

In September 2020, Walmart launched Walmart+, a Prime-like subscription for free delivery and other benefits.

Two years later, Walmart is nearing $50 billion in US ecommerce revenue and Walmart+ is the biggest consumer product no is talking about.

Here’s what’s going on: First, what is Walmart+?

It's a monthly ($13) or annual ($98) subscription with $1,300 in benefits:

📦 Free shipping
🥕 Free grocery delivery
🤳 Scan & go (shop from your app in the store)
⛽️ Fuel discounts
💰 Rewards and other discounts
🎶 Spotify Premium and Paramount+ subs

TikTok is increasing the description length on videos from 300 to TWO THOUSAND words.

There is currently a massive opportunity in TikTok SEO that 99.9% of people either don’t know is there or aren’t taking seriously. Full article

searchenginejournal.com/tiktok-increas…

A lot of people missed this last week: Canva just announced a suite of new products to challenge Microsoft Office + every other productivity tool.

Here’s why I think this might be one of the most significant product announcements ever: Canva initially started as a simple, browser-based graphic design tool. It was built to be 10x easier than Adobe Photoshop. This meant it hit an entirely different, much larger customer base.

h/t @sacrainc for the graphic (customer base not quite to size, but you get my point)

I think there’s a chance Snapchat+ has 100 million paid subscribers in five years. The company would be doing over $20 billion in high margin revenue, and the public market currently values it at ~$20 billion.

Here’s how Snap could do it: First, Snapchat+ is a paid, $3.99/month feature that adds some (in my opinion) fairly trivial additional features to Snapchat.

We just found out yesterday that, less than two months since launch, it already has 1 million subscribers.

techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/sna…

Woah, Snapchat+ doing $48m in ARR one month after launch 👀

techcrunch.com/2022/08/15/sna… Snapchat+ is going to be extremely high margin cash flow added to Snap's bottom line

Wrote about it in @TheSplit_ a few weeks ago

Quick @BananaCap_ Q4 update (unaudited)

- Fund 1 at 1.83x MOIC (gross), 1.54x TVPI (net of fess, carry)
- All 🍌🧢 at 1.57x and 1.41x
- Gross (Net) IRR on Fund 1 at 276% (205%)
- Fund 1 was 73% deployed
- $26.2m AUM ($16.2m in SPVs), ~81% in follow-ons (some my prev investments) 66% of Fund 1 capital is invested at Pre-Seed/Seed, and 54% with US HQs (JOKR + Umba skew this, US HQs but operate mostly in LatAm + entirely in Africa)

In Q4 we deployed more capital at Pre-Seed/Seed than Series A and beyond, and increased ecom + fintech exposure (mostly ex-US)

Very excited to invest in VINN and support @calebbernabe_ and team!

They have built an incredible product and the foundations of capital efficient business in a trillion dollar market.

Quick thread on my largest publicly announced investment to-date:

forbes.com/sites/ninawolp… VINN has a crazy business model: they help consumers buy cars online but hold zero of their own inventory.

It’s an online marketplace with a very simple and effective product connecting consumers and cars at local dealerships.

Here’s the story of how I almost sold my company to Time Warner in 2000 for hundreds of billions of dollars - but instead walked away with nothing.

🧵 🧵 👇 👇 It was Nov 19th, 1999. I had spent the last 34 hours (maybe 35 hours) coding.

But that wasn’t the full story - I‘d been building non-stop the first 34 years of my life.

I learned to code in the hospital the night I was born and have been inseparable from a PC ever since.

Quick update thread on the Stitch Fix thesis:

https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak/status/1297023704543698944

The tl;dr is Stitch Fix has permission from 3.9m consumers to auto ship them products. It’s ecom’s “recommended bar” but IRL and converts at 10-20%. They know what will sell before its even produced. Can monetize this from suppliers, with private label, + their Direct Buy app.

https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak/status/1365374533419606016

“Online friend finding and social discovery is currently growing twice as fast as online dating, and we think it will be a 2x larger market as well" - Match Group

👀 👀 👀 fwiw, all these apps will add audio rooms (long $API), video rooms, games, messaging tools that reduce friction of self expression (AR filters, stickers), subscriptions, etc.

Winners will figure out moderation at scale, move fastest on new features, and crack long-term retention

Spotify's Stream On event:

"By 2025, we could have 50m creators on our platform, whose art is enjoyed by 1b users around the world. We want to be the place educators, entrepreneurs, storytellers, and artists can touch the world through audio" - @eldsjal

Spotify says it has 40% market share of music streaming and will get to a similar share in podcasting.

Paid-audio increases from $7b to $40b/yr. Combined with podcasting, becomes a $55b opportunity.

…eamoninvestordiscussion.byspotify.com

looking at my 25 startups investments in 2019-20, the two best performing consumer social co’s are literally just built on top of slack and WhatsApp. The founders created for a new format that was underserved, moved quick building, and gradually built their own app over time. tbt to this tweet, thank you to all the awesome people and founders I connected with over this!

https://twitter.com/turnernovak/status/1293564456371458053

Quick thoughts + charts on $SNAP Q4 earnings For the first time ever, Snap's largest user base is now Rest of World, or users outside North America and Europe

For everyone asking, current positioning:

Cash 18.4%
SNAP 27.1%
GME 12.0%
PDD 8.2%
SNAP Calls 7.2%
SFIX 6.5%
DIS 6.2%
SQ 5.9%
TWLO 4.7%
UBER 2.0%
SHOP 1.9%

Sold all my GME calls on the 22nd. Dumb luck easing into the stock on the 11th + 12th. Going to start trimming it today.

https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak/status/1344774274960285696

I also took 2x profits off the table on the FUBO puts, sold the rest at a loss a week later. This is why I very rarely short 😂

Pinduoduo recently launched Duo Duo Maicai, which lets customers pick-up online orders from local shops. It was all analysts talked about on its Q3 earnings call last week and its stock jumped 30% the following two days.

Quick thread: A pick-up ecommerce model pools multiple last mile delivery legs into one trip. 20 orders becomes just one delivery.

This lowers logistics costs significantly, which unlocks ecommerce for lower priced products, new behaviors, and makes it more accessible for low income consumers

Stitch Fix is likely a $100b company within 10 years. Quick thread: Stitch Fix owns a direct channel to recommend and ship products to 3.5m users (growing 20%/yr). Many are caught up in Pinduoduo’s "social commerce" model, but the real beauty is its ability to directly influence demand and thus optimize its operations and supply chain accordingly

Snap Q2 earnings:

- 239m DAUs, up 10m in Q2 (4% QoQ, 18% YoY)
- $1.9b TTM revenue, Q2 up 17% YoY (32% thru July 19th)
- Implied 4.7b snaps sent per day, 20 per user (highest ever, growing 2x faster than DAUs)
- Time watching Snap Shows and AR playtime growing 2x faster than rev Snap Q2 usage metrics:

- DAU’s open 30x per day (up from 25 in Q3 ‘18)
- DAU growth smooth every month in Q2
- Android rebuild in 2019 drove 37% You RoW DAU growth
- India users up 100% YoY
- Thinks Snapchat's user opportunity is 2b (at 239m DAU's today)