⚔️ Texas VS California, the Metaverse quest… The Seed #2
« Growing ideas through seeds of information »
🌱 Welcome to the second issue of “The Seed” and welcome to our new subscribers ! We are almost 200, thank you!
⚙️”The Seed” is a weekly newsletter with easy-to-read content focusing on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.
🚨This week’s big news : “The Seed” is now on Medium. There you will find in-depth articles on the themes covered in our newsletter.
💡 This week’s concept
Startup sectors’ names
Zoom on the different startup sectors’ names:
Simple guide: Take the name of your industry, abbreviate it and add the word "Tech" at the end. E.g.: "I work in a FoodTech startup".
💸 FinTech: contraction of "Finance" and "Technology". Startup that uses technology to improve the financial sector.
E.g.: Stripe, an American unicorn building an "economic infrastructure for the internet". They provide software for companies, allowing them to accept payments and manage their business.
🥦 FoodTech: contraction of "Food" and "Technology". Startup that uses technology to improve the food sector.
E.g.: Too Good to Go, a French startup fighting against food waste.
🧬 MedTech: contraction of "Medical" and "Technology". Startup that uses technology to invent tomorrow's medicine.
E.g.: Recornea is a Singaporean startup that has developed an implant to restore the physiological curvature of the cornea and fight against keratoconus, a progressive eye disease that causes vision disorders.
🎓 EdTech: Contraction of "Education" and "Technology". Startup that uses technology to innovate in the world of education.
E.g.: American Unicorn Quizlet and Belgian Wooflash startups are revision platforms for teachers and students based on principles of spaced repetition and memory anchoring.
🎥 MediaTech: Contraction of “Media” and “Technology”.
E.g.: Netflix is the perfect example (as opposed to the traditional Hollywood studios). We will talk more about this fantastic industry in a future newsletter.
But also FashionTech, GreenTech, BioTech, PropTech, CleanTech, AgriTech etc. Do you know any other? If you wish to know more about the subject, you can read this article.
📈 News and Trends
Some news:
🍄 Fy, the fungi protein
Nature’s Fynd, a FoodTech company that has raised over $150M in fundings, released this week its first products: a dairy-free cream cheese and meatless breakfast patties. The company’s secret ingredient? Fy, a fungi-based protein. Nature’s Fynd can produce more protein per acre of land, emit less greenhouse gases, and use 87% less water than traditional animal protein. The two products were sold out in less than 24 hours.
💰 Public raises $220M - reaching the unicorn status
Public, the social investing network competing against Robinhood, announced this week a $220M Series D round of fundings, raising its valuation to $1.2 billion.
🤠 Facebook removes news articles from its platform in Australia
Facebook users in Australia can no longer find or share news articles on the social media, as a result of the fight between the company and the Australian government. The government would like the tech companies (such as Google or Facebook) to pay the publishers for the content on their platforms.
Trend:
🌉 Are Tech companies really leaving Silicon Valley?
For a few years now, many Silicon Valley companies have announced their relocation to different cities in the US. Lately, Oracle moved their HQ in Austin, Texas, and Palantir in Denver, Colorado. Indeed, living in the Bay Area is extremely expensive, and California state taxes are amongst the highest in the US.
Data provided to Geekwire from LinkedIn show that last year, the "inflow-outflow-ratio" (i.e. the number of incoming workers divided by the number of outgoing workers) was below 1, versus 1.48 in 2019. Seattle, WA is the city that benefits the most from this "exodus".
However, as stressed by Crunchbase, the largest exits of 2020 are still those of Silicon Valley startups, and unicorns such as Stripe or Robinhood remain in the Bay Area. Is it just a matter of time before they leave? Possibly, but it is most likely that they will keep a presence the Bay Area, and expand elsewhere in the US, as it is generally the case of successful companies like Apple, Google or Intel, that have less than 25% of their employees in Northern California.
What is certain, though, is that the culture of remote work will have a great influence on the choice of location for start-ups, and will hopefully make it easier for them to succeed outside the Valley.
❤️ Weekly Crush
Ui Path, the unlikely Romanian unicorn
🤖 The week's spotlight couldn't be any other than Ui Path, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform that closed a $750M Series F round. This recent fundraising raises the valuation of Ui Path to $35B, bringing it into the closed circle of the 5 largest unicorns by the valuation that have not yet made an exit.
📆 RPA consists in entrusting to a software solution repetitive, time-consuming and irritating tasks, which are usually assigned to an employee. Its final goal is to help employees to avoid repetitive tasks allowing them to better schedule their working time.
🇷🇴 This round strengthens Ui Path's hegemony in this market. However, there was no reason to expect such a success. The company was founded in 2005 by inexperienced entrepreneurs in an apartment of Bucharest, Romania, a country not known for its tech culture.
🎓 Fifteen years later, the Ui Path's first investors are on the track to make a 220,000% return on investment... enough to kick themselves for VCs that would not have believed in them, but a glimmer of hope for those who are starting up from their student room.
🔎 Focus
The Metaverse quest: How? What? Who? ⚔️
Photo by Lux Interaction on Unsplash
🍿Have you seen Steven Spielberg movie, Ready player one?
The Oasis, a cyber world with economics and social interactions, in which you navigate trough an avatar, is a Metaverse. But the idea of a Metaverse isn’t so recent, in 1992 Neil Stephenson created the first known Metaverse in his book Snow Crush. ❄️
🧐 But, in fact, what’s a Metaverse?
It is “a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users” as defined on the Internet.
Moreover, such cyberspace needs to create social and economical interactions.
⌛️ Does it already exists ?
Yes. Second world, the Metaverse, Active World... and recent Facebook Oculus VR experience. Many companies already tried to create a Metaverse. But actually, the new Metaverse may not appear where we would expect it.
I’m thinking about Fortnite 🔫 which became the most played game in History (in terms of active users), Minecraft with a tremendous community and easy world making tools, or Roblox, maybe the one the most advanced in the quest.
📆 Why now ?
Two events accounted for the Metaverse comeback: video games becoming mainstream and a worldwide lockdown pushing us toward online social life.
😶 What’s next ?
Many issues come from the idea of Metaverse, in fact it is first a technical challenge, as no current technology enables this amount of users and this amount of data processing. And the social and legal issues should also be highlighted.
🔮 The future of the Internet ?
Let’s imagine a unique and centralized virtual place where you can play games, buy on marketplaces, go to cinema, talk with friends, create and commercialize content. In fact, the true quest for the Metaverse stands here.
Who will create the alternative to our way of consuming online experience?
Learn more about the Metaverse quest in our latest Medium article.
That’s it for this week! Hope you enjoyed it and see you next Friday 🙌
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