095: Money Talks #19: Twitter Hacked | Ant Goes Marching | Instagram Goes Shopping | Robinhood Goes Home

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.

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n this episode, Eoin and Pete dig into pieces of content from this week that are relevant to the cosmic cloud of startups, tech, finance and enterprise in which they live and work, remixed with sports, hip-hop and whatever else is on their minds this week. Mostly, these are a few of the things that happened in the past week where our collective interest in these stories outweighs our respective interests in sleep (we usually record late-night).

The stories covered in this week’s episode include:

Everything we know about this week’s big Twitter hack so far — The Verge (17-Jul-20)

• Eoin’s summation: “In some ways this could have been way worse for Twitter if it had been a coordinated attack by someone really looking to do some damage.”
• Eoin on Kanye West’s inclusion in the hack: “People probably looked at Kanye’s tweet like ‘this is just him, like normal. Having a crazy day.’”
• How Coinbase and others stepped in to prevent more damage: Twitter Hackers Could Have Stolen A Whole Lot More Bitcoin
  Pete’s shout-out to Noelle Acheson’s Crypto Long & Short Newsletter — Why the Twitter Hack Was Good for Bitcoin (and It’s Not the Media Attention) and how the traceability of cryptocurrency transfers surpasses that of fiat currency transfers.

Jack Ma’s fintech giant Ant starts IPO process in Hong Kong and Shanghai — TechCrunch (20-Jul-20)

• Ant operates the Alipay wallet used across Alibaba’s e-commerce networks” and Alipay has 1.3bn users globally.
• Ant Group will IPO at around a $200bn valuation, around the same valuation as PayPal. This makes you think — for all of us in fintech that sing the praises of Ant and their e-commerce ecosystem, it’s only really as valuable as PayPal, which is no small feat, but still, it’s not Amazon.
• Eoin’s take: “Bloomberg had a really good description of Ant Group the other day, which is ‘an online mall for everything’. To me, it’s a funny combination of JPMorgan, Paypal and Amazon that’s only going to get bigger.”

Instagram launches its redesigned Shop, now powered by Facebook Pay — TechCrunch (16-Jul-20)

• From Sarah Perez, author: “The company is moving forward with its plans to promote Instagram as a place to shop with the launch of its new Instagram Shop, a place to shop from inside Instagram Explore, as well as the launch of Facebook Pay for purchases and donations in the U.S….Instagram’s ability to connect users to brands was often due to the massive amount of time users spent inside the Instagram app scrolling through photos — eventually, they’d see something they liked.”
• Eoin’s take: “There’s a view that Instagram is going to become America’s favorite shopping mall because it’s allowing a certain generation to hang around, interact with their favorite people and make shopping more of a social experience rather than transactional.”
• Pete commented on how effectively he’s seen startups work with Instagram influencers to generate app downloads, compared to the scattergun approach that businesses sometimes take with Twitter and LinkedIn.

Robinhood scraps UK plans — CNBC (21-Jul-20)

• Robinhood has decided to shut down their plans to launch in the UK market, telling waitlisted users that they’re focusing on strengthening their business in the US market for now.
• Pete’s take: “I thought that this was equivalent to N26 deciding recently to scrap their plans for the UK, because with Brexit, the UK becomes what is in effect a closed economy with only 65 million people — if you’re going to make bets, go make them somewhere else.”
• Pete and Eoin talked through the context of a crowded market in the UK and Europe for free online trading, and how the pandemic combined with an increasing gap between stock market valuations and economic growth has influenced a rush for new trading accounts for the gambling masses left with limited professional sports to bet on.
• Pete’s thoughts on a somewhat unrelated shut-down back in April of the thematic investing app Motif: “You can’t just build an investment business around Generation Z. You can’t. It’s just totally undiversified — demographically, risk appetite — you need a good mix.”

Secretive data startup Palantir has confidentially filed for an IPO — (TechCrunch 7th July)

• Peter Thiel as co-founder aligned himself with Donald Trump in 2016 and the business has been the subject of controversy and boycotts at conferences due to its work for US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE).
• Pete talked through his experience in 2014 where a senior executive of a big European bank returned from a tour of Silicon Valley with a huge smile on his face talking about Palantir and “seeing the future in Lord of the Rings”.
• Pete’s tongue-in-cheek take: “Sometimes, It feels like some of these businesses solely exist to excite CEOs of other businesses that have crap technology.”

Other topics covered:

• Is Mark Zuckerberg a Ghost? by Nap Eyes — not a parody, a real song!
• My Mind Playing Tricks on Me by the Geto Boys — random reference to one of Pete’s hip-hop favorites from the 1990's.

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