Good morning, world, and happy Tuesday!
We skipped a beat last week, when yours truly enjoyed enough smokes and late night travel tech conversations at PhoCusWright in Florida — on that below.
Non-Travel Starters
Square and Tinder IPO-ed, both surging 45% and 23% on market open, thus leaving some cash on the table by pricing the offering at a lower end. The cautious approach, which valued Square lower than its private valuation, might be what we see in the future, should the countless unicorns ever get to the public markets in the midst of concerns about the paper market caps recently. Link.
Pfizer and Allegran, two behemoths in pharma, agreed to merge in a $155 Billion transaction, creating the biggest pharma by market cap, sitting at $321B. It is so big that Pfizer is considering splitting it right after the deal goes through. Why is this even important? Consolidation in pharma opens pockets of opportunities, where smaller players that create live-saving drugs are pushed out of the market due to the unbearable cost of R&D in the sector. For those of you not following the story, the newest kings on the market are hedge fund managers, buying licenses on the cheap and increasing their price — just look at the most hated man on Wall Street, Martin Shkreli, who created Turing Pharmaceuticals after buying a drug, previously retailing at $13.50 and immediately putting the price at $750. That’s per tablet. Link.
Concerns about Yahoo!’s future continue, after a campaign to spin-off the main business and not Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba. In a strong piece by Forbes, we follow the departures of senior executives, some of which had been only for a couple of months before they left. A strong prediction is a graceful exit around New Year’s, when Marissa Mayer expects her twin babies. Link.
London’s Deliveroo raised another $100M to spread the service internationally, topping the total amount raised at nearly $200M for the two year-old startup. The food delivery company focuses on ‘premium’ food outlets, which previously didn’t do delivery — the difference from JustEat is that they count on their own bike fleet of delivery people. Let’s see — I’d argue, in a long shot, that either Uber buys them or Uber creates a similar service for bikes with better unit economics. Link.
Snacks
PhoCusWright
A great conference, as usual, featuring the best and brightest on stage and around the bar. Clearly, it is hard to capture all strong moments, but do sign up at their video-on-demand site to watch the sessions — it is free.
- Our dear leader G talked on stage about NDC, international growth and how founders can never be conservative.
- Glenn Fogel of Priceline said ‘More money is better’ — raise as much as you can, because it might be the last round you have.
- Dara talked about competition with AirBnB in the future, in light of the recent Expedia purchase of HomeAway.
- Google covered a new initiative, called micro-moments, which captures information about the city you are planning to visit. They also had a micro-moment on their own, when their live demo didn’t work. I am sorry, but ‘the dangers of a live demo…’ is applicable for startups and not for an Alphabet company. :)
Clearly, the most important piece of news is that we went live with BA via NDC on Skyscanner — a huge milestone in the initiative, which we supported from the very beginning. Happy and humbled to have been heavily involved and pushing for the new standards — Montie will be proud. Link.
AirBnB revenue topped $340M in the last quarter and the shared accommodation startup is raising another $100M at valuation $25.5B. Skift does a good comparison with hotel chains and their revenues — one thing to keep in mind is that while AirBnB is still losing money, they haven’t started monetizing the horizontal services of cleaning, Food and Beverage and the rest. Link.
Speaking of hotel chains, Marriot goes into takeover mode with Starwood to create the largest hotel chain the world in a transaction valued at $12.2B. Consolidation in travel continues. Link.
Lastly, a bit of air — why buy new planes when you can get a B777 for $10M? And also — LH’s CEO apologizes for direct booking tech and commits to get it right, while Dana from eDreams Odigeo says LH is losing bookings to other carriers due to the EUR 16 charge for indirect, OTA bookings.
Dessert (Stats)
9: Number of consecutive wins in The Game, where my alma matter kicked Yale’s behind 38–19 again.
2: Months of paternity leave for Zuck. Male CEO’s — take a note.
54: Median age of NPR’s radio listener. Old people listen to the radio, but here’s a catch — those are the guys that have the credit cards, travel the world and are a perfect audience for long-haul leisure travel.
1,111: Carats of the largest ever found diamond. Just that (+ two other, smaller ones — 374 and 800+ carat ones) added about $150M to the value of the company that owns it. Diamonds are forever.
1. 1 Billion: Number of Uber and Taxi trips analysed this data dude. Great stats here.
Some Cool Reading
Inside Zuck’s brain — ‘A 31-year old with a 40 year runway’ or how the man set to connect the world thinks hard about the hard things (10 min). Link.
One of my fav brands, Nike, is run by CEO Mark Parker, an old-timer who’s changed the company — a great overview of the brains and passion behind the growth in recent years (10 min). Link.
A bit of a sad story, covering the suicide clusters in Palo Alto high schools — Hanna Rosin digs deep in a concerning trend, gaining the cover page and story for The Atlantic (12 min). Link.
//Expressed views and opinions are my own.
Photo Credit: National Geographic is amazing. Please share and give credit to their photographs and photographers. Here’s the link for your daily inspiration: http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/