1. Who would invest their own money to take on Amazon in retail as Jet.com is? A bunch of big name VCs as well as Google Ventures and Alibaba. Makes total sense for the last two. The Art of War.
2. AshleyMadison, the “original extramarital affairs site” (which I swear I just learned about) has really poor marketing. If they had just called themselves a “spouse-sharing” app, they would have avoided all sorts of problems and had a higher valuation.
3. UPS is buying Coyote Logistics for $1.8 billion. Echo Global Logistics down the street has about 85% of the revenue of Coyote, but has a market cap of half that. Someone who is interested in that space should do some digging. (It’s not me.) Bonus Question: Can you name three other successful companies started by the same mind that started Echo?
4. Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures (one of my favorite bloggers) points out that Series A and Series B raises are now larger on an inflation-adjusted basis than in 2000. This is nearly true even in Enterprise Software. Yet we know it is much cheaper (from a technology standpoint) to build an enterprise software company in 2015. There are a lot of “winner-take-all” dreams that are going to be crushed.
5. First Data Files To Go Public and PayPal spins out. If you are a payments nerd (as I am) it was a big week. The First Data S-1 should have some real goodies in it. First Data processes 40% of US e-commerce volume, 10% of US GDP or $1.7 Trillion. Is it a dinosaur or an 800 lb gorilla?
The PayPal saga continues. First separate from Ebay and battling them (see the incredibly overlooked book PayPal Wars). Then bought by Ebay, now spun off. Platforms ultimately long to be set free from specific applications (AWS?).
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