Timing & trends

‘Airbnb for pools,’ just raised $10m

Posted by Mary Ann Azevedo

on Friday, 7 May 2021 6:09

 

Don’t have a private pool to float around in this summer? Join the club.

Thanks to Swimply, that reality is quickly becoming a thing of the past — the company is basically Airbnb for private pools.

And it’s growing like there’s no tomorrow

Founded in 2018, Swimply booked just ~400 reservations that year but raised $1.2m from friends and family. In 2020, Swimply made an appearance on Shark Tank but left without a deal.

In the best kind of Shark Tank revenge, Swimply grew revenue 4,000% that year.

Today, Swimply sees 15k-20k reservations per month averaging $45/hour. The startup’s employee count has grown from 2 to 20+ (with plans to double to 40).

Next up, Swimply plans to launch Joyspace — basically Airbnb for things like basketball courts and home theaters.

Swimply is a classic case of ‘see a problem, build a solution’

CEO Bunim Laskin was the oldest of 12 children. As entertainer-in-chief, he asked his neighbor if his family could use their often empty pool, and offered to cover some of the costs. That’s when the lightbulb turned on.

Laskin used Google Earth to find his first customers, identifying houses with pools and doing some old-school door-knocking sales pitches.

Today, Swimply operates in 125 US markets, 2 in Canada, and 5 in Australia.

Some pool owners have made up to $10k a month on Swimply. Unfortunately for them, 40% of American adults have urinated in a pool.

 

Ranking U.S. Generations on Their Power and Influence Over Society

Posted by Carmen Ang

on Thursday, 6 May 2021 6:41

 

Which U.S. Generation has the Most Power and Influence?

We’re on the cusp of one of the most impactful generational shifts in history.

As it stands, the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) are America’s most wealthy and influential generation. But even the youngest Boomers are close to retirement, with millions leaving the workforce every year. As Baby Boomers pass the torch, which generation will take their place as America’s most powerful?

In our inaugural Generational Power Index (GPI) for 2021, we’ve attempted to quantify how much power and influence each generation holds in American society, and what that means for the near future.

Generation and Power, Defined

Before diving into the results of the first GPI, it’s important to explain how we’ve chosen to define both generations and power.

Here’s the breakdown of how we categorized each generation, along with their age ranges and birth years.

Generation Age range (years) Birth year range
The Silent Generation 76 and over 1928-1945
Baby Boomers 57-75 1946-1964
Gen X 41-56 1965-1980
Millennials 25-40 1981-1996
Gen Z 9-24 1997-2012
Gen Alpha 8 and below 2013-present

The above age brackets for each generation aren’t universally accepted. However, since our report largely focuses on U.S. data, we went with the most widely cited definitions, used by establishments such as Pew Research Center and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

To measure power, we considered a variety of factors that fell under three main categories:

  • Economic Power
  • Political Power
  • Cultural Power

We’ll dive deeper into each category, and which generations dominated each one, below.

Read More

 

The “Miracle Recovery” Narrative: We’ll Just Print Our Way to Prosperity

Posted by Claudio Grass

on Wednesday, 5 May 2021 8:04

 

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been constantly bombarded by news reports and “expert” analyses celebrating an incredible global economic recovery. They’re not even presented as projections or expectations anymore, but as a fact, as though the return to vibrant growth were already underway. Stock markets certainly seem to agree, going from record high to record high while all the political and institutional leaders congratulate themselves on a job well done.

Although this is largely the consensus in most Western economies, this jubilant, victorious mood feels most bizarre in Europe. Celebrating a recovery during a third round of total lockdowns, closed shops, travel bans, and millions out of work seems like cognitive dissonance at best, or barefaced political hypocrisy at worst. France, Italy, Germany, Austria, they’ve all launched yet another round of business shutdowns and heavily restricted social activities and freedom of movement. And they did that to combat what they labeled a terrible, deadly third wave of infections and hospital overcrowding. In fact, to convince the public of the dire need to go back into lockdown, they painted postapocalyptic visions of a virus-overrun nation and sounded the alarm on the imminent collapse of their public health systems. Under these extreme conditions, these existential threats, closely resembling a state of national emergency, it is really quite challenging to see how the economy might be flourishing.

One could argue that the trillions that were printed by the ECB and helicopter dropped on member states actually achieved their aim and successfully rescued and restarted the economy. However, it is still hard to fathom how injecting any amount of cash into a forcibly frozen economy can restart economic activity and jump-start productivity, given that it’s still largely illegal to be economically active and productive. In other words, you can pump as much fuel as you like into your car, but if the engine is dead, you probably won’t go very far.

Another common argument that we hear a lot these days to explain the roaring stock markets is about all the hopes riding on the vaccine. The idea is that since markets are forward looking, they’re pricing in the great news of a successful vaccination rollout that will allow Europe to reach the much-coveted herd immunity and finally reopen the economy. Again, we’re facing a reality check problem here: the EU has completely botched the rollout and delivered the poorest and slowest results among Western economies. Logistical chaos, insufficient doses, infighting, indecisive leadership, and scientific guidance that frequently flip-flops on crucial issues, like vaccine safety, have vastly damaged the credibility of the bloc, but also heavily clouded its economic outlook. That much-anticipated “reopening” and the return to normalcy is a hope that seems increasingly distant and elusive.

So how does that all fit together with the unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus wave?   Read More

 

Wealthsimple raises $610M at a $4B valuation

Posted by Darrell Etherington

on Tuesday, 4 May 2021 6:36

 

Canadian fintech giant Wealthsimple has raised a new round of $750 million CAD (~$610 million) at a post-money valuation of $5 billion CAD (~$4 billion). The round was led by Meritech and Greylock, and includes funding from Inovia, Sagard and Redpoint, Two Sigma Ventures, TCV, as well as individual investors including Drake, Ryan Reynolds and Michael J. Fox (basically, all the most famous Canadians).

Wealthsimple’s big new raise more than triples its valuation from its last round, a $114 million CAD (roughly $93 million) funding announced last October, which carried a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion CAD ($~1.22 billion USD). The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers.

The company says that it experienced significant growth during the pandemic, which is likely one big reason why its valuation rose so much between its most recent raise and this one. Its commission-free retail investment platform has grown “rapidly” over the course of the past 14 months, the company says, and the crypto trading platform that it launched last August has also seen strong uptake given the recent surge in consumer interest in cryptocurrency assets.

Full Article

 

Now is a great time to sell your old car

Posted by Peter Valdes-Dapena

on Tuesday, 4 May 2021 6:25

 

(CNN) If you’ve got a car you don’t use very much, congratulations. You’ve got gold in your garage.

 

With the auto industry thrown into disarray by shortages of computer chips and other components needed to build cars and trucks, shoppers are regularly paying nearly full sticker price for new vehicles. Thinning supplies of factory-fresh new cars have also made it difficult for some shoppers to find the new vehicle they want with the paint color and options they’re looking.
Accordingly, many are turning to used cars instead. That, in turn, has driven up used car prices.
Lightly used vehicles — those that are a couple of years old with low mileage — are now selling for 75% to 80% of their original sticker price, said Ivan Drury, an auto industry analyst with Edmunds.com. As recently as 2019, a more normal year, those cars would have been going for65% to 70% of their original price.
“If somebody has a second or third or fourth vehicle or whatever that they’re not using, they can definitely capitalize on that right now,” said David Paris, a vehicle valuation analyst with J.D. Power.