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Hi all, Julie here.

Happy Friday! I feel like all of us have had long weeks and are ready for the weekend. My husband Jordan and I are finally settling into our new home in Austin. In fact, I’m proud to report there are NO MORE BOXES in my apartment and I am writing this from our new couch. What a relief!

On Tuesday, I recorded a new episode of Tux Time from our building’s community center with Stephany Kirkpatrick of Orum, and yesterday I recorded with Wiza Jalakasi of Chipper Cash. Stephany’s episode is out now, and Wiza’s will come out on Monday. I'm excited for you guys to listen to both of them! We have other big guests in the works too, such as a fireside chat with Ken Lin of Credit Karma and Frank Rotman of QED, Bo Jiang of Privacy.com and Craig Lewis of Gig Wage.

Another team I want to get on the podcast soon is today’s sponsor, Masterworks. I only have one nice piece of art that Jordan and I bought on a trip to New Orleans, but given how well this asset class has performed, I’d love to invest in more. If I do, Masterworks will definitely be a place I look to for help.

Stripe Financials 🚀

With Stripe’s valuation more than tripling to $95B over the past year, it’s safe to say that we’re all dying to get a better look at this private company’s financials. The WSJ published a piece earlier this week with some of those figures. The payment giant’s revenue last year rose nearly 70%, to about $7.4B. Excluding what it pays other financial partners to facilitate payments, it generated $1.6B in 2020 revenue.

Fintech Today community member Jareau Wade of Finix had a great tweet on this showing how massive several payments companies can be all at once:

Kabbage and American Express leave businesses hanging

I can’t say I’m shocked that this happened, but it’s heartbreaking regardless. When American Express acquired Kabbage in August, the deal didn’t include Kabbage’s loan book, which had become one of the biggest in the country for distributing PPP funds. Instead, it was moved over to something called K Servicing, which has left loads of borrowers in the dark. Now borrowers from the first round of PPP are having trouble getting new loans or contacting K Servicing about their old loans, threatening the life of their businesses.

Dogecoin

Everyone’s favorite meme is back at it! As of writing, Dogecoin is trading at $0.37, which represents a gain of nearly 500% week over week. In fact, trading volume was so high last night that Dogecoin broke the internet (well Robinhood). It will be interesting to see how high the Doge community can send the valuation of this seemingly worthless crypto. Unlike Bitcoin, which has a limit to the number of coins that can ever be minted (21M), there are reported to be over 115B Dogecoins in circulation. I’m all for fun and games, but I sincerely hope that no one loses a significant chunk of their net worth if this 🚀 comes crashing back to 🌎.

A Deli With A $100M Valuation

Here’s a fun headline for you: There’s a single New Jersey deli doing $35K in sales valued at $100M in the stock market. Hedge fund manager David Einhorn is drawing attention to this crazy story. Under ticker HWIN, a tiny New Jersey deli has a market capitalization of more than $100M (though this is lower today since shares are falling..but I don’t want to do the math here). Your Hometown Deli is the sole location for Hometown International, and it only has $35,748 in sales in the last two years combined, according to securities filings. Another wild stat: According to the company’s latest 10-K, its sole location was closed from March 23 to September 8 of last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, yet its stock price rose to $9.25 per share from $3.25 per share during that time frame.

Today's Partner, Masterworks

This Asset Class is Returning 13.6% Annually

According to new research from Citi Private Bank, contemporary art prices rose 13.6% per year from 1995 to 2020, compared to 8.9% returns for the S&P 500. Additionally, research shows that over the same period contemporary art not only had a lower loss rate than gold, but also had virtually no correlation to the stock market. But unless you have $10,000,000 to buy a Monet yourself, the barriers to this asset class have been too high. Until now. Masterworks allows you to invest in paintings by artists like Basquiat and Piccaso at a fraction of the entry price. Recently Masterworks sold their first Banksy work for a 32% return for investors. Explore Masterworks and skip the 8,500 person waitlist today.

*See important information​

Two super job postings today:

1. ​Enterprise Sales (Financial Services) at Nova Credit: Nova Credit, which is focused on helping immigrants get access to credit, is looking for someone to join its stellar Go-To-Market team. With deep product and industry knowledge, these leaders are focused on bringing Nova Credit into an ever-broadening set of businesses. Within its Enterprise Sales team, you will play an essential role in building, unlocking, and winning its relationships with financial institutions - specifically, banking institutions, credit unions, and fintech lenders. You will be responsible for executing Nova Credit’s entire sales process, from initial prospecting, to direct client negotiations, through to contract execution, and ultimately transitioning accounts to our Solution Architects (for implementation) and Customer Success (for ongoing account management) teams. Your focus will be on developing & leading large, complex, new enterprise deals and building strong, high-stakes, trust-based relationships. And you'll help shape how we engage, design, and build products for the best brands in banking.
2. ​Product Engineer (Backend) at Monzo: Monzo is expanding its US team and is looking for an outstanding product-focused backend engineer. Monzo is the top neo-bank in the UK, having recently passed 5M customers and to date raised more than $500M funding from top investors such as YCombinator, General Catalyst, Accel and Stripe. Now, it's expanding its office in San Francisco. The team is looking for candidates who are passionate about building magical experiences that real people will want to use every day. This is a unique opportunity to join a small product-focussed team at the ground floor, with lots of autonomy and independence. Monzo develops all its core banking systems in house, using a modern microservices based architecture, written in Go and hosted in the Cloud.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.

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