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Good morning. Blue Origin said that 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, son of the Dutch finance exec Joes Daemen, will accompany Jeff Bezos to space on July 20 after the original winner of the $28 million auction postponed their flight “due to scheduling conflicts.”
It's a tough break but we get it. The cable guy said he'd arrive between July 18 and July 23 and you just never know.
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Nasdaq
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14,543.13
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S&P
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4,360.03
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Dow
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34,987.02
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Bitcoin
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$31,731.37
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10-Year
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1.299%
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Morgan Stanley
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$92.63
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*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 6:00pm ET.
Here's what these numbers mean.
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Markets: As expected, companies such as Morgan Stanley continued to crush earnings yesterday. But investors haven’t taken much notice, precisely because the crushing was expected.
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Economy: Lawmakers grilled Fed Chair Jerome Powell on the uptick in inflation and banking regulation as chatter begins to swirl around whether Biden will renominate him for another four years. Powell’s term expires early next year.
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Fintech has become more popular than a white Telfar bag. After an $800 million funding round, Revolut, a London-based fintech startup, is now the UK's biggest private company ever with a valuation of $33 billion. It was worth just $5.5 billion last year.
Revolut falls into the category of “neobanks,” which plug into traditional banking infrastructure and repackage it with a smooth, easy-to-navigate platform. Revolut allows users to bank, invest, transfer money, budget, or do anything else their financial heart desires.
Fintech investing > other kinds of investing
When you say, “Invest in my new fintech startup,” investors say, “How much?” $1 out of every $5 raised globally last quarter went to the fintech industry for a total of $33.7 billion, per CB Insights. With Stripe and Klarna, fintech boasts two of the five most valuable unicorns in the world.
It’s also clear that Europe doesn’t need help from Ted Lasso to build world-beating fintechs.
- Klarna, the Swedish buy-now-pay-later company responsible for the staggering amount of Girlfriend exercise dresses in your closet, snagged a $46 billion valuation last month.
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Wise, a British money-transfer app, was the first tech company to go public on the London Stock Exchange via direct listing last week. The company was valued at $11 billion and its listing was a huge win for the burgeoning fintech industry the country has been trying to birth since Brexit.
Zoom out: Venture capitalists are betting that fintech companies, with their focus on digital and their potential to attract the legions of underbanked or unbanked people in the world, will successfully disrupt incumbent banks.
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Aurora
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Autonomous vehicle startup Aurora announced plans yesterday to go public via SPAC at a valuation of $11 billion. In doing so, it’ll become the first major company in this young industry to hit the markets.
How to describe Aurora? Well, imagine if the CEOs of the WSJ, the NYT, and the Economist all left to start Morning Brew. Aurora was founded in 2017 by three industry pioneers who led driverless tech initiatives at Google, Uber, and Tesla. In January, the company acquired Uber’s self-driving unit and now has 1,600 employees.
And what’s the game plan? Aurora is SPACing to raise money and commercialize its self-driving tech. It wants to hit the road with the Aurora Driver, a self-driving semi truck that could seriously upset kids trying to get truck drivers to honk their horns. Eventually, the company wants to get its tech into more vehicles, including ones that move humans.
Zoom out: In the race to develop autonomous vehicles, there are no hares, only tortoises. The industry has taken a lot longer to grow up than most experts, even Elon Musk, expected.
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While some of us dread heading back to the office, our business school friends can’t wait to exchange biz cards at cocktail parties. Several prestigious MBA programs, including Columbia, NYU, and Stanford, are scrapping their hybrid learning models and bringing students back to campus this fall, reports the WSJ.
The backstory: MBA programs across the country shifted to remote learning when Covid hit last spring. But because Zoom U can’t replicate networking off the Dalmatian Coast, students sued universities and asked for their money back. Harvard refunded $5 million in MBA tuition after canceling its global immersion courses due to Covid.
- Kate Kirsch, an incoming Harvard MBA student, told the WSJ: “So much of the value of the MBA program is the people. Those spontaneous encounters are something that even the top-tier institutions cannot recreate virtually.”
Big picture: Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic (or maybe because of them?) applications to business schools rose 2.4% last year and demand is expected to stay strong for the next three-to-four years.
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The cannabis industry is expected to exceed $38 billion by 2025. But hey, not everyone wants to get their hands dirty. Ironically, that’s where dirt — er...soil comes in.
You can’t grow legal cannabis—or anything—without soil. And GEO’s certified organic soil? It’s absolutely filthy. In the good, cool way.
Investing in GEO soils and amendments is the perfect way to make some green off the legalization wave, while maintaining a portfolio at which your corset-clad grandmother won’t blink an eye.
GEO is one of the few certified organic national brands on the market, and that’s a big deal: Growers are converting to organic soil in spades due to its quality, safety, and increased regulation. In fact, 59% of growers are entirely organic and more than 70% are part way there.
The last day to invest in GEO is July 23rd. Don’t miss your chance to make some green.
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Francis Scialabba
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Stat: There are now more job listings for remote roles that pay at least $100,000 than in any single city in North America, according to Ladders, a job site that advertises six-figure jobs. Around 15% of high-paying jobs are open to remote work, compared to 5% last year.
Quote: “After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight, and artificially enforced scarcity.”
Any guesses on who tweeted this? None other than Jackson Palmer, the inventor of dogecoin. In a thread bashing the industry, Palmer called the crypto world a “cult-like ‘get rich quick’ funnel designed to extract new money from the financially desperate and naive.”
Read: All possible views about humanity’s future are wild. (Cold Takes)
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The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to ordering an item off the menu and having the server respond, “Excellent choice.”
It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.
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CVS and Rite Aid have stopped selling some Neutrogena and Aveeno sunscreen a day after Johnson & Johnson said it was recalling several sunscreen products due to traces of a carcinogen found in samples.
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Southeast Amazonia, historically known as a carbon sink, can no longer absorb CO2 due to rapid local warming, a new study found.
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Lyft will resume shared rides in some cities after pausing the feature 16 months ago. Are you ready to sit next to strangers?
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Netflix’s latest hire shows it’s getting into video games in a big way.
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Jeff Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, which is the institution’s largest gift ever.
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SPONSORED BY WEBEX BY CISCO
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When it comes to speed, trust the experts. The McLaren F1 team uses Webex for virtual, real-time communication that can keep up with their pace. Learn more about how Webex can ready your team for this new era of hybrid work here.
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Got finance queries? Fresh Invest Season 2, our pod with Fidelity, is dropping later this year, and we want it to answer all the investing conundrums you’re too embarrassed to google. Tell us what those are in this quick survey.*
Follow Friday: History Cool Kids on Instagram for history nuggets, Simon Kuestenmacher on Twitter for maps, shiey on YouTube for travel vlogging.
New emoji alert: Ahead of World Emoji Day tomorrow, take a look at the emojis being considered for the next Unicode update this fall. You can also vote on your favorite.
Weekend listening: A podcast episode exploring what we can learn from the management style of Amazon's new CEO, Andy Jassy.
*This is sponsored advertising content
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This puzzle is for all the road-trippers out there: Take the postal abbreviations for four connected states and scramble them to make an eight-letter word.
For example, you can drive directly from South Dakota (SD) to Iowa (IA) to Missouri (MO) to Arkansas (AR). From the letters SD-IA-MO-AR you can form the word “dioramas.” Can you make other words from four-state combos?
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Here are a few answers: Animator (IA-MO-AR-TN), condemns (SD-NE-CO-NM), diamonds (ND-SD-IA-MO), flagrant (AR-TN-GA-FL), ornament (AR-TN-MO-NE)
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