Strictly Curious Newsletter №65
Happy Monday! Hope you had a wonderful weekend! Busy News day!
News
Leadership: CEOs’ compensation climbs if they appoint CFO, research suggests. Some finance chiefs might be pressured to tweak earnings to boost the stock price, researchers say. Link
Flying cars: Electric air taxis could lure investors away from ground-based services according to the 2020 Emerging Technology Outlook from investor website PitchBook. Link
EU: The next silicon valley won’t be in the US. European investor, Joe Schorge, makes the case for why Europe is an attractive market. Link
Venture Capital: Family office investment into European startups jumps fivefold. The money invested in European startups by family offices or rich individuals has risen fivefold in the past five years. Private wealth is also now the biggest source of funding for venture capital funds. Link
Ride-hailing: Uber’s first-ever safety report discloses 3,045 sexual assaults and nine murders in the US last year. Link
UK: The scary things that UK tech is solving. Link
Entrepreneurship ecosystems: Tech startups gravitate toward cities with strong social networks. The presence of technology startups can drive economic growth for their home cities. So how can cities better appeal to entrepreneurs? A new study shows the connections they can offer matter more than big money. Link
Banking: More than one in five UK consumers, and one in three millennial Brits, say their primary banking relationship is with one of the host of challengers to have emerged over the last decade, according to a report from AT Kearney. Link
Micromobility: An interesting report by McKinsey & Company on micromobility: Industry progress, and a closer look at the case of Munich. Link
Artificial Intelligence: The Global AI Index. The first index to benchmark nations on their level of investment, innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence. Link
Sustainability: Ford and McDonald’s are building car parts together. Wait, what? (Spoiler: It’s not for the cupholder). Link
Retail: Vogue Business on why the UK high street isn’t dead but that It needs curating. London’s high streets are being rebuilt with a clear vision, diversification and data. Link
Blog Posts
Interesting ideas: 200 researchers, 5 hypotheses, no consistent answers. Just how much wisdom is there in the scientific crowd? Link
2019: 52 things I learned in 2019. Link
Interesting Numbers
Social news aggregation: Reddit’s monthly active user base grew 30% to reach 430M in 2019. Link
F&B: Interesting Deloitte study on restaurant delivery and dark kitchens. Food delivery is growing rapidly across Europe. Existing estimates suggest that the market is experiencing double-digit growth rates and could be worth $25bn by 2023. This study looks at how technology is contributing to that growth and measures the resulting impact on the overall restaurant sector. Link
Video: Why modern art is so expensive
Detours
Space: Start a company…Applications for the Astropreneurs Accelerator are currently open. Link
Restaurants: How restaurateurs choose the perfect dinner playlist. Link
Retail Therapy
Board games: Vintage bookshelf games. The days of hiding those beat-up board game boxes are no more. Stored in a linen-wrapped book, these Vintage Bookshelf Games give the Hasbro classics a display-worthy upgrade. The sophisticated styling doesn’t stop on the exterior. Inside each Clue, Scrabble, or Monopoly book are premium pieces inspired by the original game that include silkscreen boards, wood tiles, zinc die-cast tokens, and printed cardstock playing cards. Each game is sold separately. Link
Contemplation
“I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
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Have a great week,
Costas
