Hey Snackers,
Tweet of the week: "Did I miss anything?" A man just emerged from a 75-day solitary retreat in the woods of Vermont. Logs onto Twitter. Promptly slinks back into the woods.
Markets inched up Monday, with Big Tech companies leading the charge.
The Rebel Alliance... Shopify's corona-conomy MO: keep your friends close, and your would-be enemies closer. The out-of-the-box ecommerce platform partnered with Facebook in May to power Instagram "Shops." Now Shopify is teaming up with Walmart to integrate with its 3rd-party seller platform, Walmart Marketplace.
Own the market, not the booth... Amazon and Walmart provide sellers a platform to hawk goods on â but they don't actually have to source/provide all the goods you see on their websites. It's like owning a Farmers Market lot, then taking a cut of each booth's food/bev sales:
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend"... It's The Art of War, applied to business. Ecommerce platforms that aren't Amazon are teaming up with one goal in mind: fight Amazon together. Standing up against the forces of Darth Bezos might lead to more surprising partnerships.
Shine a light... on racial bias. Like many other platforms, Airbnb has not been free from implicit (and explicit) discrimination. The rental booking platform connects guests and hosts. Unfortunately, some users get turned down for no other reason than their name and the color of their skin.
Airbnb's problem is harder to solve... Hotels are required to accept any paying customer if there's a vacancy. Hospitality platforms like Airbnb can't force hosts to accept a person into their house.
If Airbnb can help solve this, other gig companies could too... Bias is also a problem for other gig-like platforms (where users can accept/reject a person for no reason). Airbnb has pledged to publish the data and policies that come out of Project Lighthouse. We're thinking this could help Airbnb's buddies like Uber, Wag, and TaskRabbit reduce discrimination, too.
Not the Will Smith movie... iRobot is a rare publicly-traded, consumer-facing robot company. It's famous for birthing the Roomba (aka, the world's 1st self-driving vacuum). And it just rolled its way across the floor to give us a casual update:
Time is more valuable than money... That's the philosophical conclusion we extrapolated from Roomba sales. The premium $900 Roomba Series is selling better than the $250 basic version. People are working from home, caring for kids, and cooking 10 meals a day â that's a reason to splurge on the most efficient automated vacuum option. The one task you can delegate.
Hot takeaway â iRobot should get itself acquired... Its $2.3B market value is 1/4 of a Lyft. While the stock is up 70% for the year, it's still down 35% from its all-time iRobotic high. iRobot's business revolves around a single, popular product line that could be easily tossed into a corporate shopping cart. An Amazon-owned iRobot could throw in some Alexa to entertain you while it cleans.
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