TechCrunch Newsletters - Week in Review - Is meme finance dead?

Saturday, January 29, 2022 • By Lucas Matney

Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review!

Last week, we looked at Microsoft’s “metaverse” M&A and how their vision differs from some of the other big players like Meta. This week, we’re looking at the market uncertainties and how they’ve impacted meme stock investing.

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the big thing

Is meme finance dead?

This past week saw investors spooked, wondering whether a steady decline in tech stocks paired with some expedited downward momentum in public markets last week could be signs that the party is over and we’re looking at a full blown crash due to rumblings that the Federal Reserve is planning to raise interest rates to clamp down on inflation.

After a weekend of panic, things seemed to proceed pretty normally for the broader public markets.

This wasn’t the case for crypto, which saw a 20-40% pullback across the board last weekend stick, leading to some very depressed crypto investors wondering whether the dip would ever stop dipping. Over the past month, stocks like GameStop and AMC have seen their market caps decline steadily upwards of 30-40%.

What’s worse, the tech firms behind these trends have also lost much of the support of private investors. Robinhood is down some 80% from its all-time-high it reached shortly after going public back in August. Meanwhile, Coinbase’s stock price has halved since November.

These stocks have been hit particularly hard, but it’s important to note that tech stocks across the board have been feeling the hurt. That said, there’s been a broader conversation this past year about whether meme stock investing is a new normal or just a ridiculous fad that investors and the media are probably focusing a bit too much mental energy on. What is clear is that the threat of a Fed rate hike has taken the wind out of the sales of funny money investing and dampened the interest in some of the hyper speculative stocks and riskier bets like crypto.

Image Credits: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

7 ways to automate your sales process & simplify your workflows

Here are a few stories this week I think you should take a closer look at:

Mark Cuban debuts online pharmacy for low-cost generics
Everybody loves a billionaire behaving well. Okay, well that statement isn’t entirely true. Nevertheless, Mark Cuban got quite a bit of good PR this week for his online pharmacy for low-cost generics. Health insurance in America is one of the country’s greatest embarrassments, and too few companies seem to be working on how to find hope for patients in a broken system.

Notably, the startup, Cost Plus Drug Company, was already working on this goal before Cuban slapped his name on the company and gave it funding, but that’s a pretty standard Silicon Valley story, and his involvement has certainly brought more attention to the company’s much-lauded efforts. “I want to be above breakeven while maximizing the number of people who can afford their medications,” Cuban told TechCrunch. “Shoot. I would be happy if we can make a little, but push pricing of generics sold elsewhere down significantly.”

Apple updates ‘Personal Safety User Guide’ with AirTags guidance
We’ve talked about how AirTags are already showing signs of growing into a massive safety debacle for Apple. This week, the company aimed to showcase the safeguards they’ve been trying to install to protect users. There isn’t anything new in this guide for the most part.

Apple has been positioning its messaging as though it introduced a solution to a problem that already existed, but Tile and other tracker companies were operating on a laughably smaller scale than Apple, which has 1.8 billion iOS devices in the wild which can act as beacons for AirTags — that’s a level of scale that’s not even on the same planet as what other operators offered.

Y Combinator’s founders start an exclusive crypto club
I’ve been focusing a lot of my time on tracking the crypto sector — a space that’s been a lot of fun to cover because it’s so damn controversial. This week, I wrote about Orange DAO, an exclusive crypto investment group that you can only become a member of if you were previously a member of the Y Combinator accelerator.

“It’s crazy to think about an alumni group that becomes its own entity that is for-profit and generates wealth for its members, but that’s exactly the state of the world we’re in,” the DAO’s co-founder Ben Huh told TechCrunch in an interview. “We think that these groups will serve as a buying power as well as validation… So, if 1,000 YC alumni choose a specific service provider or toolset to use, it must mean that it’s actually quite good because these people build for a living.”

Image Credits: Brad Barket

added things

Some of my favorite reads from our TechCrunch+ subscription service this week:

How early-stage investors have lowered expectations
“…The data indicates that seed, Series A and Series B rounds have seen a recent and rapid decline in revenue reported by the SaaS startups raising. It also shows that seed and Series A software companies raised with slower growth rates from 2019 through Q1 2021. What’s going on?”

The global IPO market continues to soften
“…News broke this morning that WeTransfer’s parent company, WeRock, is putting its IPO on hold. The Dutch company was set to list on the Euronext Amsterdam, bringing liquidity to its founding team, employees and external backer Highland Europe. And to cap off the retinue of bad news, a fascinating SPAC deal involving space and flying objects hit turbulence once it reached Max Q and began to trade this week…“

6 cloud trends to watch in 2022
“…For many businesses, the pandemic accelerated their digital transformation plans by months, or even years. Reliance on cloud infrastructure will only continue to grow as organizations adjust to the hybrid work model. Gartner projects that global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $313 billion in 2020…”