Hey Snackers,
Amazon’s Alexa is coming to your eyeballs: smart-contact-lens maker Mojo Vision announced plans to test Alexa Shopping List on its contacts interface. Blink twice for bell peppers.
Stocks continued their downward trend for the week as investors digested Fed chair Powell’s hawkish comments from Wednesday. Speaking of hawkish, yesterday the Bank of England made its biggest interest rate hike in 33 years.
From soccer cleats to term sheets… Dick’s Sporting Goods just joined the big leagues of a new sport: venture capital. Yesterday the retailer launched a $50M VC fund called DSG Ventures. Dick’s plans to use the in-house fund to invest in new sports products and tech.
Everyone’s a (venture) capitalist… An old-school sporting-goods chain might seem like an unlikely source of VC funding, but corporate venture capital (aka: CVC) has a long history. Chemical giant DuPont became the first big CVC when it invested in fledgling automaker General Motors in 1917.
VC can act as discounted R&D… Instead of spending big to develop new products and tech, corporations can invest in smaller companies that’ve already created them. That could yield financial benefits like IPO returns and strategic wins like product partnerships. General Mills’ VC arm helped launch Beyond Meat, and Google Ventures backed GitLab, Slack, DocuSign, and Toast. Dick’s hopes to do the same with sporting goods, but it’ll be up against Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour — all of which have VC divisions.
Decentralized pain… Crypto financial services firm Galaxy Digital is reportedly considering cutting one-fifth of its staff as crypto winter's freeze sets in. Galaxy is seen as a bellwether for the industry because its business services bitcoin miners and crypto traders, and it invests in blockchain projects like polygon. Galaxy's not alone in its cuts:
Misery loves coin-pany… and this party's crowded. It's not just crypto fintechs feeling the squeeze of record inflation and spiking interest rates. Stripe announced yesterday that it'll lay off 14% of its workforce. Layoffs are often forward-looking — a sign that companies expect more slowing growth or falling earnings. This week the cofounder of Tezos, a proof-of-stake blockchain, said crypto winter is "only going to get worse." More cost cuts could be coming.
The future of finance is still tied to the present… Crypto companies want to revolutionize the financial system with decentralized finance (DeFi). In the meantime, those companies are still accountable to investors, boardrooms, and centralized finance (CeFi) realities. Since crypto is still viewed by many primarily as an investment opportunity (not a transactional currency), the industry has to deal with today's rising interest-rate reality that’s dampened demand.
Authors of this Snacks own: bitcoin and matic and shares of Apple, Amazon, Google, GM, Moderna, Twitter, and Starbucks
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