Various and Sundry

Finally some loose ends and other notes like an after-dinner amuse-bouche:

  • A PE deal caught our eye, namely that the Williams Formula 1 team has been sold to Dorilton Capital. We had two thoughts: First, who is that. And second, it’s all good so long as they make the car faster but still slower than Haas F1, the official team of this newsletter, I’ve just decided. (Note to F1 lawyers: I am kidding, please don’t sue.)
  • The folks at Sensor Tower sent over some fintech data this week that we tucked into our pocket for this newsletter. According to the data and analytics firm, “the five largest mobile payment apps saw their average monthly active users grow 41.5% year-over-year in 1H20 when compared to 1H19” for “Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Google Pay.”
  • Now, we’ve covered fintech often on The Exchange because it matters. But we’ve mostly been covering the startup/unicorn side of things. The above growth rates for some of the incumbent-led apps was a surprise, with faster growth than we would have guessed.
  • If momentum from the majors is good or bad for startups, we leave to you to decide.
  • Robinhood raised more money on the back of its huge revenue gains.
  • Until the Palantir brouhaha, the lead story of our missive today was going to be about BlockFi, which we’re still working to understand. The crypto outfit just raised more money, so we got curious. I wound up chatting with the CEO on Twitter about, you know, what BlockFi is. Turns out it’s like a credit union, but in the crypto space. That seems fair enough. Credit unions work! Maybe this will, too! We have some questions into the company, the answers to which we might post if they are interesting. (The company has detractors, as well.)
  • I made a bad bet.
  • The Exchange chatted with a number of VC firms this week, including Tribeca Venture Partners for the first time. We caught up with Brian Hirsch from the firm, who told us a bit about the SaaS market (doing better than anticipated pre-COVID thanks to “rocket fuel” from the accelerating digital transformation) and the future of New York and cities in general (going to be fine long-term). We’ll cut out the best bits from the chat for next week if we have time.

And we’ll wrap with a tiny note from Greg Warnock, managing director at Mercato via email about the late-stage venture capital market. We asked for “notes on current valuation trends, in particular re: ARR/run rate multiples.” Here’s what we heard back:

I think valuations are correlated with economic activity and certainly something like COVID would qualify, but it’s very much a lagging indicator. It takes a while for entrepreneurs’ expectations to shift. Once they feel like the economy has moved in a permanent way, they begin to rethink. The first thing that they experience a little bit more urgency. They start from a belief that they can raise money any time they want, from anyone they want. Soon they realize there are fewer investors in market, that those opportunities appear less frequently, and each one should be managed more carefully. From there they go to thinking about terms. They might have to be flexible around some terms or some construct. Finally, they go to just fundamentally thinking about valuation in terms of multiples.

Going back to my first comment about economic factors being a lagging indicator, COVID related shocks haven’t moved through the system yet. It will take something more like a year for all the expectations to shift. My experience is that a shift in the economy from an investor standpoint creates a flight to quality. Companies with lackluster performance are first to feel lack of options in fundraising and exits. High performing businesses are the last ones to experience a change in valuation multiples. It disproportionately affects average businesses more quickly and more dramatically than high quality businesses which may feel no significant effects.

Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,

Alex