Catch Up Quick

• AMD is set to buy rival U.S. chipmaker Xilinx ($XLNX) for $35B in stock

• SAP shares fell 20%, wiping $35B off its market cap after Q3 2020 earnings

• Irvine, CA is evacuating 60K residents due to rapid spread of the Silverado Fire

• The President of France imposes fresh nationwide lockdown as virus cases surge

• Tesla’s Autopilot is a “distant second” to GM’s Super Cruise (Consumer Reports)

• The Justice Department is actively considering a lawsuit to block PayPal’s acquisition of Plaid

• Yesterday, Reddit announced permanent remote work allowance for employees

• Facebook launched cloud gaming on its desktop website and Android app

• NASA’s SOFIA discovers water on the sunlit surface of the moon

• The Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court

Wednesday Insight

• Recently, Facebook and Twitter were fast to limit the reach of a sketchy foreign affairs story published by The New York Post about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden— this event tangibly displayed aggressive misinformation policing, and, despite the need the regulate social media to some degree, much of the world didn't like what it saw

Thought of the Day

• Recently, short form video streaming startup Quibi announced plans to shut down by December of this year

• After garnering the attention of many, raising nearly $2B in funding, and launching only 7 months ago, Quibi’s failure will likely go down as one of the most high profile flops in startup history

• While its downfall was aided by pandemic related circumstances, its likely they wouldn’t have found much success even in a world free of COVID-19

• Three takeaways from Quibi’s failure:

• 1) Successful companies aren’t built inorganically through injecting money and seasoned leadership, but through starting small, validating a concept, finding product-market fit, failing early, and if need be, pivoting to focus on an offering in high demand that is actually protected by some form of competitive advantage

• 2) Given the massive upfront investment required to a) produce content b) create a platform & c) attract users, entry barriers to the streaming industry are increasing, in which demonstrated successful content lends runway for additional growth

• 3) Contrast to Quibi, short form video platform TikTok exploded during the pandemic, highlighting that less centralized content generation environment more heavily reliant on recommendation algorithms might curate a more personalized feed (often while users don't event realize it), which is indeed effective in reducing churn

The Bottom Lines

• In expansion to the latter, it appears as if the content landscape in general is holistically shifting away from high profile "Hollywood" influence, and towards content of everyday creators who use platforms such as Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, etc

• Previously, the internet only allowed few to bring content to many, while now, many can bring content to many!