Amazon vs Alibaba. US fintech could slow. Meat meets lab.
Future of Fintech deadline today
Hi there,
If you didn’t read the great writeup on the fake follower economy in the NY Times from this past weekend, you should.
Another gem from some time ago was a writeup about the Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (FAKE) in which the author created this fake karaoke truck business and bought it an amazing online reputation.
(Both articles are in the Blurb.)
We’ve got the best customers
With the launch of CBI’s market map maker (and then smart image positioning), we saw this funny tweet by Matt Turck, partner at FirstMark Capital (investor in Pinterest, Shopify, Invision).
We owe a big thanks to Caitlin Strandberg and Demi Obayomi over at FirstMark for their feedback and ideas as we were building the market map maker. It was super helpful.
Hopefully we’ll get rid of a bunch of logo chasing and repositioning work they had to do in the past. 🙂
If this is the retail apocalypse, are Amazon and Alibaba…cockroaches? While many traditional retailers are closing down stores, these two e-commerce giants are pouring money into brick-and-mortar.
Amazon paid a cool $13.7B to acquire Whole Foods last summer and opened its Amazon Go grocery store last week. Alibaba has publicly announced a strategy to combine online and offline commerce, dubbed “new retail.”
TBD if their efforts in the physical retail space will be successful, but both stand to gain a lot if they can pull it off.
Inspiration
In our early days, one of the sources of inspiration for our data-driven research was…
OkCupid.
Yup. Really.
Christian Rudder of OKC had a way of taking data and making it interesting and writing like a human. If you want to learn how to write about data in a way that people actually want to read, I recommend looking at the OKC archives.
One of my favorites from the company’s blog entitled “We Experiment on Humans” is in the Blurb.
Meat cute
Top meat producer Tyson is aggressively going after the alternative protein space. Now the company is investing in food tech startup Memphis Meats, which creates real meats by farming animal cells.
Despite a record $16.6B brought in by global VC-backed fintech companies in 2017, deal activity in the space ended on a downward trend, falling for the second straight quarter in Q4’17.
What do an SVP from a $90B global telecom co, a C-suite exec from a billion-dollar automotive supplier, and the head of a major automaker’s AI investment fund have in common?
They all worked together at the December CB Insights Council meeting to create a market map that revealed new sources of competition.
Councils is limited to SVP+ strategy, innovation, and corporate development leaders at $1B+ revenue companies. Learn more here.
Amazon has its reasons
Brandless Founder Tina Sharkey and Comcast Ventures’ Rick Prostko had an interesting exchange at the A-ha! conference.
Sharkey founded Brandless, an online retailer, to eliminate the “brand tax” from consumer products. Prostko led Comcast’s investments in big e-commerce deals like Dollar Shave Club (sold to Unilever for $1B).
So it was a surprise when Prostko rang in with, “Only 10-15% of commerce is online, so 80-85% is offline. There’s a reason why Amazon is going to physical [brick-and-mortar stores].”
Sharkey then shared her views on personalization and the changing dynamic in direct-to-consumer relationships.
P.S. Today is the last day to get your Future of Fintech ticket at early bird pricing. We’re currently offering a killer group discount, too (21 of those tickets remaining). Save your spot here.
