Thursday Mar.28, 2019

Lulu's New Mantra: Manleisure-wear

"I breathe better in breathable khakis"
"I breathe better in breathable khakis"

Hey Snackers,

What justice looks like: 4 US robocallers just got surprised with multi-million dollar fines.

Enjoy that. Markets meanwhile barely budged as the quarterly corporate earnings season slows down.

Wear

Lululemon surges 11% on man-pants focus

Set an intention... The Vancouver-based team over at Lululemon did for 2018. And it worked. Quarterly sales surged 26%, making last year one of its "strongest yet." Lulu's focus for the future is to blossom into a "dual-gender" brand.

Man's best friend... is a pair of sweat-wicking, technical khakis with a hidden back pocket. Lulu's CEO straight up called out guys as its "most exciting" area of growth:

  • Turns out "men's bottoms" have become "extremely profitable."
  • So Lulu signed NFL QB Nick Foles to be its first male ambassador of squat-worthy pants (FYI, he prefers the title "elite ambassador" and is now really into the hashtag #thesweatlife).
  • And since Lulu only owns 20% of the male workout market currently, it's very, very into this.

"Work-leisure-wear" is now a thing... Goldman just rolled out a “firm wide flexible dress code” JPMorgan's been tie-optional since 2016. So Lulu's thinking beyond its vinyasa gear to daily uniform options of a suit-free office future.

Coverage

Obamacare health insurers announce $15B merger

Healthcare's back in play... on markets and in DC. First, the Trump admin announced it's taking another shot at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Then one of the plan's largest providers, Centene, revealed it's acquiring WellCare for a healthy $15B.

Want key details on the deal?... We've got you fully covered:

  • One side booed, the other cheered: Shares of Centene fell 5%, likely because it paid 32% more than the share price of WellCare. For the same reason (but from the other side), WellCare shares jumped 12%.
  • Now the Justice Dep't gives a second opinion: Since the combined company would control a huge part of the Medicaid market, regulators will likely only bless the deal if one side hands off millions of enrollees to another provider. That would keep competition for health insurance strong. And that's what regulators want.

Politics = Business... WellCare and Centene's enrollment benefited hugely from the Affordable Care Act's expansion of Medicaid, the government health insurance for the poor. If the Trump admin completely upends the Affordable Care Act, at least WellCare and Centene will have a shoulder to cry on.

Sleep

Casper grows unicorn feathers with $100M fundraise

What's in the box?... A $1.1B queen-size. That's how much the OG direct-to-consumer mattress icon's worth thanks to a $100M injection of money from new, private investors. And we learned from a slide deck obtained by The Information that Casper Sleep might not be private so long — It's interviewing banks to advise a future IPO.

Some woke highlights from the slide deck... (which was intended for investors only):

  • Profitability isn't there yet: But losses are shrinking. Plus, Casper's expecting profits in 2019.
  • Growth is happening. Fast: Revenues rose 50% in 2018, and are expected to jump the same amount in 2019 and 2020.
  • Amazon's a non-factor: "Dog bed" through "King size" Caspers are all available on the everything store, but just 4% of sales last quarter were on Amazon. That means customers are going straight to Casper or its investor/retail partner Target. That helps the CEO sleep nice.

Brick and mortar retail's not dying... bad retail's dying. Casper's created a bunch of dreamy stores selling mattresses and 45-minute naps (for $25). It costs $650K to build each location, and according to the deck, the whole investment pays off in less than 2 years on average. That's fast. And it's why it wants 200 Casper stores by 2021.

What else we’re Snackin’

  • Awkward: Grindr is up for sale by its Chinese owner because the US just declared the app a "national security risk"
  • Fresh: Walgreens will sell CBD creams, patches, and sprays at 1,500 stores
  • Chilled: Yeti shares just hit their all-time high — Up 70% in a month
  • Self-fired: Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May promises she'll resign if her Brexit deal passes Parliament
  • Abate-hate: Facebook's banning white-nationalist and white separatist content

Thursday

  • Earnings from Accenture
  • 2-day US/China trade negotiations kick off

Corrections: Yesterday we mentioned the Boeing 787 Max – It's the 737 Max that was grounded and discussed at a Senate hearing. Disclosure: The author of this Snacks owns shares of Lululemon.

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After posting subscriber numbers that beat expectations today, Netflix says it’s no longer going to share those numbers starting in the first quarter of 2025. That’s a big deal since subscriber numbers have long been one of the main metrics that investors have looked at.

“In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential,” its shareholders letter read. “But now we’re generating very substantial profit and free cash flow.” The company said that it will focus on revenue and operating margin as its main financial metrics, while it will look at time spent on the platform to gauge customer satisfaction.

Another way to read this? They’ve hit market saturation and just aren’t going to be growing that much anymore, and they thought they’d end on a good note. Going forward they’re focusing on how to get more money out of the customers they do have.

They’re doing so by cracking down on password sharing and charging for extra members. They’re also pushing people to ad tiers, which are more profitable than non-ad tiers.

“Scaling ads to become a more meaningful contributor to our business in ‘25 and beyond,” Netflix said.

Netflix’s ads membership grew another 65% in Q1 over the previous one, after rising 70% the quarter before, and 40% of signups in ad markets continue to be for those ad plans.

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Meta’s not telling where it got its AI training data

Today Meta unleashed its ChatGPT competitor, Meta AI, across its apps and as a standalone. The company boasts that it is running on its latest, greatest AI model, Llama 3, which was trained on “data of the highest quality”! A dataset seven times larger than Llama2! And includes 4 times more code!

What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from “publicly available sources.” Which sources? Meta told The Verge’s Alex Heath that it didn’t include Meta user data, but didn’t give much more in the way of specifics.

It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: “we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.” There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it’s liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

AI companies are turning to such data because there’s not enough good, public data on the entire internet to train their increasingly greedy AI models. (Meta had reportedly floated buying a publisher like Simon & Schuster to satisfy its insatiable data needs.)

Meta, of course, isn’t the only company that’s tight-lipped about where its AI data is coming from. In a now infamous interview with WSJ’s Johanna Stern, OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati was unable to answer questions about what Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, was trained on. YouTube? Facebook? Instagram — she said she wasn’t sure.

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now

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What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from “publicly available sources.” Which sources? Meta told The Verge’s Alex Heath that it didn’t include Meta user data, but didn’t give much more in the way of specifics.

It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: “we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.” There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it’s liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

AI companies are turning to such data because there’s not enough good, public data on the entire internet to train their increasingly greedy AI models. (Meta had reportedly floated buying a publisher like Simon & Schuster to satisfy its insatiable data needs.)

Meta, of course, isn’t the only company that’s tight-lipped about where its AI data is coming from. In a now infamous interview with WSJ’s Johanna Stern, OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati was unable to answer questions about what Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, was trained on. YouTube? Facebook? Instagram — she said she wasn’t sure.

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The 30-year fixed rate mortgage is back above 7%, according to weekly numbers from the Mortgage Bankers Association, the highest level in four months. High borrowing costs are creating havoc for would-be buyers, as affordability lingers at the low levels not seen consistently since the late 1980s.

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Amazon’s spy ops on rivals: shell companies, printed docs, and a fake Japanese streetwear brand

Some companies check out rivals’ websites, stores and public filings to stay abreast of the competition. Amazon made its own fake shell company and brands, transacted hundreds of thousands of dollars per year undercover on competitors’ platforms, and kept its intel operation a secret for nearly a decade even from others at Amazon, according to a fascinating investigation by the Wall Street Journal.

Working as a seller called Big River, a secret group of Amazon employees gained access to rival platforms, including Walmart, FedEx, and Alibaba. They used Big River email addresses and went to seller conferences as Big River employees. They even stayed hidden within Amazon itself. These employees would take screenshots of competitors’ systems that they would then show others at Amazon in person to avoid an email paper trail.

Perhaps most strange of all, the company created a fake Japanese streetwear brand called “Not So Ape” (clearly a play on A Bathing Ape) and continues to sell products from the brand on a Shopify store, presumably as an attempt to learn the inner workings of the shopping platform. Of course, copying is old hat for Amazon.

In meetings where they’d use this clandestine information to inform Amazon’s own business practices, the group resorted to literal paper. “[T]he team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies."

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Working as a seller called Big River, a secret group of Amazon employees gained access to rival platforms, including Walmart, FedEx, and Alibaba. They used Big River email addresses and went to seller conferences as Big River employees. They even stayed hidden within Amazon itself. These employees would take screenshots of competitors’ systems that they would then show others at Amazon in person to avoid an email paper trail.

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In meetings where they’d use this clandestine information to inform Amazon’s own business practices, the group resorted to literal paper. “[T]he team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies."

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But it’s run into trouble: the orbs have been banned across Europe and Africa, and the associated WLD crypto token has plunged 50% over the past month.

For project insiders, who reportedly received a token allocation of 25% of supply, that could equal significant losses. 

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For project insiders, who reportedly received a token allocation of 25% of supply, that could equal significant losses. 

Which is what may make World Chain attractive. Crypto exchange Coinbase launched its own L2, Base, last year. Base has since seen rapid user growth — activity that’s generated the exchange millions of dollars in weekly fees. 

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