🍋 Can't Stripe, Won't Stripe


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Good Morning

Quote to Ponder

“Success is doing what you want to do, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want.” –Tony Robbins

Headline of the Week: Can't Stripe, Won't Stripe

Stripe founders: Patrick and John Collison.

On Sunday, Stripe raised a $600 million series H round, valuing it at $95 billion, nearly tripling its valuation from a year ago, and making it the highest valued "unicorn" (a start-up worth more than $1 billion).

Stripe was founded in 2010 by the Collison brothers (pictured above), who sought to make accepting online payments easier while still in college. Fast forward eleven years, Stripe is all around us – if you bought something online recently, chances are the payment was processed by Stripe. Stripe has been a big pandemic winner with the surge in online shopping, perfectly summed up by Dhivya Suryadevara (Stripe CFO): “We’re bigger now than the entire e-commerce market was when we first started Stripe."

Short Squeez Takeaway: The fundraise comes at an interesting time for Stripe as other Fintech unicorns (Coinbase & Robinhood) prepare to go public. The Collisons have historically been tightlipped about their financials and strategic plans but this smells like an incoming IPO to us.

Career Advice of the Week: Technical Questions – Keep 'em Short

“Walk me through a DCF?" –Every IB Associate Ever

The talk of technical questions in Investment Banking interviews makes many undergrad hearts skip a beat. Being able to answer technical questions well does not impress any one but one bad answer and you can get booted from the process.

The key to answering technical questions is to keep them short. Don't try to impress your interviewer by giving a detailed answer because the more you speak, the more follow-up questions you risk getting asked. You should also aim to minimize your time spent on answering technical questions and maximize time spent on more "fun" questions like your interests.

When you inevitably get asked the question: "Walk me through a DCF?" Say: "DCF is a way to value a company intrinsically. Project out a Company's cash flows: forecast for the first 5 years and a terminal value for the time period after that. Then discount the total cash flows based on the Company's WACC to get the DCF value." That's it. If your interviewer wants more details, they will ask you.

Book of the Week: Atomic Habits by James Clear

We would recommend Atomic Habits to anyone trying to build or break a habit. Failure to build good habits is not your fault but rather the fault of your system. "You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems." James Clear draws on ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create a four-step framework for making good habits. "Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement."

Stock of the Week: $ABNB

Airbnb stock is up 43% since its closing price of $144 on its IPO in Dec '20. This past week the stock was up 15% on positive vaccination news – 255 million American adults will be eligible for vaccines by May 1.

An Airbnb survey found that traveling is the activity Americans miss the most, even more so than going to restaurants and bars. In Israel, where more than half of the population is vaccinated, Bookings.com has reported double digit growth in bookings. A vaccinated population desperate for travel is great news for $ABNB.

Short Squeez Takeaway: While the pandemic looked like a disaster for Airbnb at first, it looks like a blessing in disguise now. Other than the pent-up travel demand, we think the pandemic has created a permanent trend of work from home. A number of companies such as Twitter have told employees they can work from home permanently, and young people are already taking this opportunity and working from remote locations. If this trend lasts, this will be a huge win for $ABNB, even more so than hotels since it offers kitchens and accommodates longer stays.

WSB Trending Stocks

Source: CapitalIQ & Swaggystocks; Market data as of 3/12/21.

Unfettered Story of the Week: Holy NFT

Digital Assets also know as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) got a stamp of approval last week as a JPG collage (pictured above) by artist Mike Winkelmann aka known as Beeple sold for $69 million.

NFTs are a way to monetize digital assets such as tweets, NBA highlights, music and tweets, that had previously been free but now blockchain technology can prove authenticity and ownership while permanently linking a digital file to its creator.

Beeple couldn’t have said it any better himself: