January 2021 Tech and Marketing Updates

Your monthly updates all condensed into bite-size amounts

Here's your weekly wrap-up to this month of everything exciting around tech and marketing.

Don't forget, please share this newsletter with others if you found it interesting!

Robinhood vs. Reddit (Also, they raised another one billion dollars)

With Robinhood announcing their IPO was going to be in 2021, the recent fiasco of events will be interesting for the company. To summarize, Redditors from the stock trading subreddit "wallstreetbets" gathered together to buy $GME stock, which has historically been a heavily shorted stock.

Shorting means investors put in positions against the company, essentially anticipating that its stock will go down. Instead, Redditors helped push the stock price incredibly to a high of $469 from the low teens. 

This meant a lot of hedge funds lost A LOT OF MONEY. However, Robinhood recently got into a lot of trouble, limiting people's ability to buy stocks like $GME, $AMC, $BB, and more.

Oh, they also raised another billion, so there's that as well. It will be interesting to see what will happen to Robinhood with all the heat it's been getting.

Coinbase is going public with a DPO

Coinbase, the cryptocurrency broker, is about to IPO through a direct public listing. The company has raised over $540 million in funding as a private company.

A Direct Public Offering means the company won't need to go through some traditional IPO elements and means they can go directly onto the markets. This was also done by companies like Spotify and is usually only done when the company is already cash-rich and well known.

Qualtrics goes Public at $21 Billion

It was announced last year, but after SAP acquired Qualtrics a few years back, it has decided to let Qualtrics go public.

"We decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the experience management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy and continue building the best talent," SAP CEO Christian Klein said in a July statement. 

It finally went public on January 28th and started trading on the NASDAQ at $41.85 a share.

Twitter buys Revue—A newsletter startup

Ironically, I am writing about this (since Substack is a direct competitor of Revue), but Twitter recently bought this startup for an undisclosed sum.

In a new growing vertical in the marketing space, newsletters are now a way for content creators to create new value for their subscribers while getting paid (not all the time).

Twitter has most likely done this to capitalize on the growth and integrate its services for writers and content creators. It will be interesting how Revue will grow compared to Substack, but only time will tell!

Google might pull out of Australia

Yeah, it might sound weird, but I wanted to highlight this moment as an Aussie. Basically, the Australian government wants Google to pay news organizations for linking to their content.

In return, Google threatened to pull its search engine out of Australia. Either way, it sounds silly to me, but I thought it was something fascinating to look at.

Here's some more information if you're interested.

Final Note

Well, here's the first edition of the tech and marketing wrap up for this month. Of course, please don't forget to share this with others as it helps me reach a wider audience and allows me to push more content out.

If you have any suggestions or like to talk to me about anything, please email me at me@richardfliu.com.