👋 Back to school!
While enjoying the (quite unique) summer we’ve helped ITV to set up an incubator to create radical new businesses (🚀🚀🚀), developed thinking on where companies should sit their innovation teams in the new normal, and kept a beady eye on what’s going on in the tech & innovation universe.
Stay well,
Rob & the Founders Intelligence Team
PS: Â Enjoy this newsletter as much as we do? Forward it on for good karma!
💡Launching ITV’s Studio 55 Ventures💡
We’re partnering with ITV to launch Studio 55 Ventures - a programme of investment, mentoring, training and support for the next generation of media entrepreneurs. The programme aims to create radical new businesses and experiences that will shape the way the next generation consumes media. It will do this by breaking down the barriers to starting a media company in order to unlock a vast and diverse pool of talented people.Â
Seeking entrepreneurial teams to join:
ITV is looking for eight teams of entrepreneurs, who will be given £10,000 per team for joining the Studio, and then an intense programme of training and mentoring. This will culminate in a pitch for long-term investment to ITV CEO Dame Carolyn McCall, alongside top UK entrepreneurs Graham Cooke and Brent Hoberman CBE.
If you’re interested and would like to learn more, please visit the Studio 55 website. Please feel free to forward this to anyone in your network who might be interested!
🗞 What's grabbed our attention this month 🗞
Brought to you by Ezra Konvitz, Hendrik Jandel, Ana Sofia Almagro and Flora PatersonÂ
Let it snow – Cloud computing company Snowflake went public with the largest-ever software IPO and the biggest public offering since Uber. And then the share price rose by 160% on its first day of trading, partly driven by impressive SaaS metrics - 121% YoY revenue growth and a 158% net retention rate.
So what? That top line growth is impressive, but the (big) bottom line is getting eaten up by AWS fees - which Amazon could use to invest in competitor Redshift.. At present, there’s also the minor detail of a net loss of $350m on $265m in revenue - a casual multiple of 110x, assuming it continues to progress on its (improving) trajectory - more than double that of Zoom and Shopify, making it an unexpected play from Warren Buffett. SaaSy.
For the longest time – Lean start-up guru Eric Ries went live with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), a venture backed stock exchange challenger that vows to only list companies with long term strategies that focus on sustainable value creation. Wanna list your company? For starters, publish your ESG goals’ strategy and show how exec pay is tied to it.
So what? Short-term thinking not only creates incentives to prioritise quarterly profits over long-term sustainability (boo), it’s also a key innovation inhibitor with the potential to damage long-term valuations. This approach - hopefully the first of many - might help big listed US/EU firms battle Chinese contenders on the long-game while doing something to help hit sustainability targets. Speaking of, have you developed your strategy for sustainable growth?
(Half as) elegantly wasted – The Consumer Goods Forum (oh yeah!) launched a CEO-led Coalition of Action on Food Waste with 14 major retailers and manufacturers (big up Kellogg, McCain, Tesco, General Mills, Nestle, Barilla, Walmart, Metro AG..) committing to halving food waste in their operations by 2030. Meanwhile, China launched the ‘Clean Plate’ initiative and clamped down on popular mukbangers (‘eating broadcasters’) who live-stream themselves eating as much as they can.
So what? A third of food is wasted, with huge economic losses and a vast carbon footprint. We incubated a venture taking on the challenge, but no one company can fight the good fight alone: coalitions and cooperation along the value chain and across competitors is key to making a dent in these big, hairy problems (oh hi climate change). While talk is cheap, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward recovery - and this coalition’s commitment to measurement and publication by 2021 suggests it might just make it work.
Leading the charge? - Car makers are coming under increasing pressure to diversify revenue streams: Nissan is experimenting with electricity as a currency, with its Yokohama Pavillion space now accepting electricity from your car battery as payment for parking; a (somewhat basic) riposte to Toyota building a Sims-esque ‘Woven’ smart city, but still a step up from drone delivered car keys and car vending machines.Â
So what? Car makers have been trying to become mobility providers to remain relevant as the industry heads toward commoditisation, but these EV plays speak to a more fundamental integration into the urban fabric, with cars-as-mobile-batteries potentially allowing for more flexible, democratic and temporary physical structures. Lugging your power source around isn’t the most efficient way to get power where you need it, but at least it’s a decent use-case for blockchain. As we move toward pay-per-use and a rent-everything society, expect the trend toward concentrated wealth and power to accelerate.
In Data We Trust – The EU is experimenting with public data trusts to monetise citizens’ data and reclaim some power over this ephemeral asset we’ve been just handing over to those nice guys in Silicon Valley all these years. No more: the big new shift in thinking is toward data sharing rather than privacy, with the EU Commission rolling out policy measures (yowza) and investments (badaboom) over the next 5 years. The upshot? A data trust that’ll collect and oversee citizens’ personal data, manage who can access it (and at what price), and pay out dividends to citizens.Â
So what? This could spell the end for data monetisation as a business model in Europe; recent antitrust hearings indicate that’s probably a good idea. So are data trusts going to fix our democracy, provide something like universal basic income and make the economy more innovative by lowering barriers to entry for new ventures? Sign us up - but first let’s talk governance and a native tech infrastructure that can’t launch test & trace apps without Big Tech support (oh and the current budget is 7m EUR.) And what are the incentives for legislators to push the privacy agenda when voters get $$$ from sharing every breath they take & every move they make?Â
One Platform to Bank them All – Google ‘teamed up’ with eight US banks (and some international ones) to add Google Pay on top of banks’ infrastructures, unlocking white-labelled digital checking accounts with physical and virtual debit cards. Google’s infrastructure play, catering to BBVA, Citi, Bank Mobile, and First Independence Bank, is a different approach from Apple, who recently acquired payment company Mobeewave, and Amazon, who are gathering together a growing portfolio of fintech solutions.
So what? Banks have clocked they’re losing the battle to get their hefty IT infrastructures into the modern era, and have decided to sign their souls to GAFA rather than die or be consumed by Ant Group. Could this be the end of challenger banks and consumer fintech as the bank + big tech space heightens the barriers to entry? Big Tech players are still all still a step behind Alibaba and Tencent’s grasp on our financial lives, but this will no doubt prove a moment of reckoning as fintechs scramble to identify the opportunities to move the needle.
📸 In focus: Where to stick your innovation team 📸
Revamping your innovation efforts to prepare for the 'new normal' everyone is talking about but not sure where to put the 'innovation people'?
Founders Intelligence partner, Robert Haines, speaks to us about how to avoid a protracted debate on where in the organisation the innovation team should sit so you can focus on the things that really matter. Read more here.
Any thoughts or feedback? Get in touch!
PS: We’re also contributing insights to Founders News, a new personalised tech newsletter with info on your network and lots of this content too hatched out of Founders Forum - subscribe here!