🦄 SVN: Blame It On The Roadmap

Welcome back to Silly Valley News. I know many of you are here for the Financial Freedom Calculator and I tried to hold back on this week’s release as long as I could… But alas, it isn’t quite ready yet! Blame the engineering team. I promise I will drop it as soon as I can. As they say, “It’s on the roadmap!!”

The Silly Valley

• 🤯 Startup founder lies about company performance to secure millions in funding and everyone is sooo shocked. Amira Yahyaoui, founder and CEO of the student aid startup, Mos, claimed they helped nearly 400,000 students get financial aid, but according to internal company documents the real number was closer to 30,000. But, that didn’t stop Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global from investing another $40M into the company. When asked if she had concerns about Mos’s future, Jess Lee, a Sequoia investor and Mos board member said that while it’s unclear what Mos’ product will be, “the most successful founders are the ones who have grit and are willing to test new hypotheses and adapt. Amira (Yahyaoui) is the embodiment of these qualities.” The takeaway? The valley is still very silly.

• 🦄 Do you have Unicorn Founder DNA? The Unicorn Founder DNA Report by Defiance Capital studied 845 unicorn companies (companies valued at or over a billion dollars) and their founders. The study produced a lot of interesting statistics including the fact that 62% of unicorns have at least one immigrant founder. Also, the VCs with the largest unicorn market shares are Y-Combinator (10%), SV Angel (6.4%), and Sequoia Capital (2.8%), which suggests that the potential unicorn market is more fragmented than it’s ever been. It also found that the 3 dominant factors in the DNA of a unicorn founder are that they have “no plan B,” “a chip on their shoulder,” and “unlimited self belief,” which my dad misinterpreted as “irresponsible,” “stubborn,” and “delusional” during my formative years of 11 to 34.

• 😈 Andrew Huberman is a Stanford professor, podcaster, and author who rose to fame during the pandemic by telling people to do more cold plunges and drink less coffee (I clearly did not take his class). It turns out, he’s also really good at weaponizing therapy in order to convince a woman that he wants a long term, committed relationship. The one flaw in his plan was that he told this to 5 different women at the same time. When his ladies realized what was happening, they started a group text which led to a New York Times Magazine article that completely exposed his rizz-game. Fortunately, the not-toxic-at-all male side of his fanbase is sticking by his side claiming the article hit piece is “trash clickbait journalism” and that haters wish they could juggle 5 girlfriends at once like the 48 year-old Huberman. To be fair, I can barely take care of a single succulent.

• 💔 Microsoft Teams and Office will now be unbundled and sold separately thanks to new regulations. This is good news for Salesforce who owns Slack and alleged “that the Windows-maker forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite.” For current users of Teams, you’ll be grandfathered into original pricing, but will receive just as many annoying pings from your manager throughout the day.

• 🪤 Let’s take a moment to acknowledge SBF receiving a 25 year sentence for stealing $8B from FTX customers.  Sources say he’s already cooking up his next big idea with my girl Lizzie Holmes:

Outside the Bubble

• 🗣️ “Loud Budgeting” is taking over 2024. Comedy writer and social media entrepreneur, Lukas Battle introduced the term on TikTok as a way to save money without feeling embarrassed about it. Feeling pressured to go to an expensive dinner with friends? Simply say, “Can’t make it. I’m loud budgeting this week,” and put that $53.33 Venmo request in your high yield savings account instead.

• 📈 Trump Media’s stock ticker DJT launches to the moon… but now appears to be crashing back down to earth 📉. Despite the company reporting less than $3.5 million in revenue over the first three quarters of 2023, its market valuation spiked to $6 billion last Tuesday as the stock reached nearly $80. Haters said it was showing signs of a classic meme stock while supporters said “something something woke mind virus and free speech.”  Then after the company revealed a net loss of $58M with only $4M in revenue for all of last year, the stock closed below $50 on Monday and might not be done crashing? As DJT loves to say, “we’ll see what happens.”

• 🏎️ Has anyone Netflix’d and chilled harder than Formula One? The sport exploded after the Drive to Survive series first aired in 2019 with 2x the viewership in the U.S. and global market cap. No one has reaped the benefits more than Toto Wolff, who owns 33% of the Mercedes racing team and his story is a fun one. Wolff was once a driver himself before he left the sport to become a successful VC. He returned as team president to lead the lowly Williams racing team to a Spanish Grand Prix victory in 2012. Mercedes said “this guy has great hair and we should hire him”* because they hadn’t won a race since re-entering the sport in 2010. He negotiated a 33% stake in the team which was valued at ~$30M. 8 Championships and 1 Netflix series later, the Mercedes racing team is now valued at $2.7B. In addition to his $20M annual salary, Wolff is now the only billionaire who shares a name with the dog from Wizard of Oz.

  _{*not a real quote}

  

  Photo credit: Ben McShane/Web Summit via Sportsfile

Sales Tip of The Week

• 🤝 Want to negotiate like a kidnap negotiator?  15 year kidnap negotiating veteran Scott Walker shares tips in his new book Order Out Of Chaos:

  • If the conversation derails, ask yourself, “What can or can’t I control right now? What am I not seeing here? And what opportunity am I missing?”

  • Don’t fill the silence. Keep a stress ball on your desk that features the acronym W.A.I.T. — which stands for “Why am I (still) talking?”

  • Pretend that you’re negotiating with a kidnapper and you’ll find that “focuses the mind a little bit.” hmm…

Last Week’s Tent

corporate.bro

View more on Instagram

• ☕️ March S.A.D.N.E.S.S. Continues. Vote for the best sales team in the world here. Salesforce took down Hubspot in the round of 32 to setup another juicy matchup in the Sweet 16 vs. Snowflake while AWS defeated newcomer OpenAI. We’re down to the Elite 8, check out the entire bracket HERE!

Resources

Coming Soon: Corp’s “Won & Done” Financial Freedom Calculator. Stay tuned! 🙏