SKIMS Pressure and Self-Funded Companies

a $4 billion valuation and the US loves startups

Author

Sammi Cohen
July 20, 2024

Happy Saturday to my favorite readers in the world! We’re back with another issue of Social Currency - giving you the latest news & insights across business, culture, social and startups.

Biz & Culture: Articles of the Week

Skims raised $270 million at a $4 billion valuation in 2023. Over the last few years, larger institutional investors have piled in, including Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, which invested at a billion-dollar valuation, and ​​Daniel Sundheim’s D1 Capital Partners. Participants in the most recent round, in particular, are looking for an eventual I.P.O. to realize a significant return on their money.

Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021 to reflect its virtual reality ambitions in the so-called metaverse. Now it’s slashing funding for those ambitions. The social media company told its Reality Labs division that houses AR and VR projects including the metaverse it needs to cut spending by nearly 20% by 2026.

Women in finance have a different “uniform” than finance bros do. One of the key items to this uniform is a $140 Laksen water bottle, per the WSJ. Other staple items include a Veronica Beard blazer, a Cartier watch, and a Goyard bag. Check, check, check.

The shares of Gen Z adults (28%) and millennials (26%) who report interest in acquiring a “dumb phone” are much higher than U.S. adults (17%), Gen Xers (13%) or baby boomers (9%). Current ownership levels of these devices are highest among young people, too.

The Milwaukee-based company is selling less than half as many bikes as it did during its 2006 peak. Harley’s portion of the U.S. large motorcycle market recently dropped to its lowest level since the 1980s. In 1990, when the Harley boom was just getting started, The Wall Street Journal reported that the typical buyer was 35. Today, the company says the average age is 49.

Nearly two-thirds of people who live with a spouse or significant other hid a purchase from their partner over the past year, according to a survey in October of more than 1,000 Americans by Circuit, which makes route-planning software for package deliveries. A quarter of them hid a clothing purchase and one-in-10 manipulated financial records to conceal their spending.

The US Post-Pandemic Startup Boom: Bootstrapping Businesses

We’re back with week two of our deep dive on all things startups & funding… The Covid-19 pandemic triggered an unexpected boom in entrepreneurship, as Americans opted to start businesses at record rates. Just as unexpected has been the boom’s durability. What is so interesting about this is the fact that there has been widespread consumer negativity about the economy due to inflation, but more people than ever are taking the risk to start their own companies (counter-intuitive, no?).

Entrepreneurs have proven to be undaunted by recession fears, labor and supply-chain constraints, the highest inflation rates in a generation, and rapid interest rate hikes. In October 2023, over 3.5 years after the pandemic’s onset, Americans were still filing 59% more applications to start new businesses than they were before the pandemic (!!!).

And the vast majority of these businesses are bootstrapped. Bootstrapping refers to the process of starting a company with only personal savings, including borrowed or invested funds from family or friends, as well as income from initial sales. Self-funded businesses do not rely on traditional financing methods, such as the support of investors. We’re seeing a reckoning across the entire startup ecosystem; there’s been a renewed focus on asking the simple (& very important) questions such as “can this business actually make a profit or is it a business that we will pour bajillions of dollars into without it having a viable business model?”

It’s a Video World - We All Just Live in It

Chartr

Indeed, the average daily video watch time has increased from 2.12 hours in 2022 to 2.48 hours this year on TikTok, according to data from Media IDentity Graph supplied to Variety. We know that TikTok has been the video leader for the past few years, but Instagram Reels has made a pretty impressive leap in the last year. At this pace of growth, will Instagram outperform Tiktok next year in video?!

In fact, 58% of respondents aged 13-24 reported that they were spending less time watching regular-old TV because they were watching “non-premium” online videos (i.e., videos on social media). Just as cable TV was quickly swallowed by on-demand streaming at the turn of the century, it was inevitable that an even bigger fish — and, in this case, a smaller screen — would eventually come along. You can read this full article here.

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P.S. - If you see any typos in this newsletter, just know that I did it on purpose in order to make you giggle.

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xx Sammi

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