From Seattle's own GeekWire:
New data from Adobe puts a number on the huge pandemic-driven acceleration of e-commerce over the past year. Some key takeaways:
- COVID-19 gave e-commerce a $183 billion boost from March 2020 to February 2021, about the same amount spent online during the 2020 holiday season.
- The “Buy Now, Pay Later” payment method and “Buy Online, Pick Up In Store (BOPIS)” have both grown in popularity. Buy Now, Pay Later was up 215% year-over-year from January to February of this year; BOPIS was up 67% year-over-year in February.
- Online grocery shopping was up 230%, when comparing Feb.1 to Feb. 21 of this year to Jan. 6 to Jan. 26 of 2020, before the pandemic.
These trends are huge tailwinds for e-commerce companies including Seattle-based Amazon, which set a record with $125.6 billion in sales during the holiday quarter, as well as startups building tech to power online shopping services such as Stripe, Shopify, and a flurry of others (including many based in Seattle)....
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Speaking of Stripe, they just raised some money. From TechCrunch, March 14:
Stripe closes $600M round at a $95B valuation
Over the years we've commented on the phenomena of VCs squeezing every bit of growth valuation out of an investee company that they could before allowing the company to go public. Here's a post from 2015:
Mutual Funds In the Venture Capital Business: “Eye-Popping Valuations”
Maximizing expected future returns.
One of our favorite topics, along with agricultural commodities and production, materials science, really, really fast computers, advanced manufacturing technology, energy and Dogbert's schemes for world domination.
One of the most profound facts of investing is that the growth is in the new companies.*
Not small companies, new ones.
So the question is: How to capture that growth?
And while you're at it, maybe mitigate some of the risk inherent in new ventures?
This is probably not the answer....
There are quite a few more, use the 'search blog' box if interested.
