1. Sea Ltd is the $50 billion dollar company you might not know about. Based in Singapore, with operations across SE Asia, the company has business units across gaming, e-commerce and digital payments. The stock has tripled since its March low.
Julie Young does a deep-dive in her post
Thoughts on Sea Ltd. The business is executing brilliantly, with amazing growth in all divisions. However, they face competition in both e-commerce (from Alibaba) and payments, whilst their gaming division is mostly a single game. One to watch, but expect volatility.
2. What do Agora, nCino and Lemonade all have in common? Their respective stock prices grew over 100% on the first day of trading.
Jamin Ball discussed these IPO "pops" in a long
tweet storm on the old school process of taking a company public. In short, it involves a two-week roadshow of selling to institutional investors before the bankers and board members come together to decide a price themselves. It's manual and often leaves money on the table for founders, employees and early-investors who are selling their shares which is why some people are calling for change.
3. Zoom has been the standout stock in a lockdown world and its current valuation, almost $70 billion, has some people confused.
Alex Hinch discusses in his post
Reasoning Zoom's Valuation. He questions the viability of the growth required to justify the valuation, pointing to Zoom's challenges acquiring security focused clients and limitations in the Chinese market.
4.
Matt Cochrane has an
excellent interview with
Puru Saxena in which they discuss the current market (frothy?), e-commerce and FinTech. Puru sees e-commerce as the major internet trend growth investors should be buying into. FinTech companies are the infrastructure that supports this digital commerce revolution. Companies mentioned include Shopify, Sea Ltd, PayPal, Adyen, Square, Datadog and Alteryx.
5. Unlike other tech companies, Slack's stock hasn't soared in the last 3 months.
Ben Thompson, the popular tech strategy thinker, discusses Slack's strategy moving forward in his essay
The Slack Social Network. Slack so far has connected individuals within a company. But its latest feature release, Slack Connect, allows Slack to connect teams across companies. This move makes the service less competitive with Microsoft's Teams product and could lead to stronger network effects.
