🦄 SVN: Tinder For Founders?

What a week! On Friday we hosted our first ever Live Demoted podcast and no one died! More importantly though, I went 3-5 with 3 RBIs in my men’s league baseball game. NBD. For the rest of the world’s updates, let’s dig in…

This Week’s 🥵⛺️ (Hot ‘Tent)

• Tinder for Founders

• Tough Times for Snowflake

• $22B Startup Now Worth… $0?

• Roaring Kitty Returns

• More morsels of big brain news for the week

The Silly Valley

❤️‍🔥 Tinder For Founders. A new app called House of Pitch is trying to solve the frustration of founders and entrepreneurs who send out pitches to investors and get ghosted. After creating an account, users complete a pitch card with key details about their company. The pitch card is then sent to a selected VC or journalist who reviews the pitch and swipes right if they want to connect further with the founder. The app could be a great way to level the playing field so founders from all over the world can get better access to investors. Let’s just hope no one gets catpitched.

🔓Snowflake Says Massive Data Breaches Are Not Their Fault. Recently, TicketMaster was the victim of one of the largest hacks in history. After an investigation, Ticketmaster deemed the issue came from their cloud data provider, Snowflake Computing. Weeks later, LendingTree suffered a similar hack, and also blamed Snowflake. This led to a cascade of other companies placing the blame on Snowflake for data security breaches. Snowflake however, says it’s not their fault, and instead blames the customers for not using 2-factor authentication. Regardless of fault, the security concerns have led to a 21% drop in Snowflake’s stock price over the past 2 weeks. With the stock price continuing to fall, it might be time to store cloud data under our mattresses.

📉 Investment in India’s Most Valuable Startup Is Now Worth… Zero? Once valued at $22B and on the path to raise $1B in funding just one year ago, Blackrock’s investment in Byju’s is now valued at $0. Things were looking oh so good until Byju’s (named after its founder/CEO, Byju Raveendran) fell 50% short of revenue projections in 2023. Facing various governance issues, they then abruptly lost their auditor as well as multiple board members, before being publicly slammed by one of its largest investors. Today, the company’s future is very much in the air as it attempts to fundraise for survival. Let this be a lesson, if you’re going to name the company after yourself… it better not fail…

Sales Fact of the Week

Outside The Bubble

🙀 Roaring Kitty Is Back and GameStop Stock Goes Crazy. Keith Gill aka “Roaring Kitty” aka “Deep F***ing Value” has stayed out of the public eye after playing a pivotal role in the GameStop stock frenzy of early 2021. Known for his YouTube and Reddit posts that led to a run on the stock, subsequent congressional hearings, and the blockbuster film, Dumb Money, Gill made his first post in 3 years on May 13th which led to a 20% surge in GME stock. Then last Friday, Gill did his first YouTube live that at one point reached 600K viewers and halted the stock multiple times. Unfortunately for Gill, who still holds a massive position in GME, the stock went down 40% during his stream. What happened to diamond hands people?

😮 Conspiracy Theorist, Alex Jones, Forced to Liquidate His Company. Alex Jones falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012 was “a hoax” and he encouraged his followers to harass the victims’ parents. In 2022, Jones was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay $1.4B in damages to the families. Since the ruling, the InfoWars Host and Internet Psychopath has tried to stymie efforts to collect, but now, he’s being forced to liquidate his assets that are worth $10 to $12 million. This will net the families $500K each, not including legal fees, but since he’d still owe over $1B, the families are able to pursue Jones for the rest of his life for the money they’re owed. Who knew you could get a life sentence without going to prison?

🏢 Commercial Real Estate Losses Are Growing. With the ‘Return to Office’ movement not really catching on, people who own big buildings might be f***ed. Nearly 30 office buildings in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. are in foreclosure. Up from a dozen in early 2023. Property owners that managed to sell before foreclosure are doing so for a fraction of what they originally paid. The bigger issue is a lot of these buildings were purchased with loans from local banks and if commercial real estate companies can’t pay up, the banks could be f***ed as well. Not to mention, cities will lose out on property tax revenue used to pay salaries and provide public services… Yikes.

Last Week’s 🥵⛺️ (Hot ‘Tent)

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