As the sparkling firecracker news of acquisitions, plans, and partnerships in the BNPL space fizzle, oversight reporting has sprung up. A Credit Karma survey found that of those who used BNPL, more than half of the younger crowd missed at least one payment.
This week, we cover these ideas:
Klarna’s $640 million raise and its $45 billion valuation, and how its business model arbitrages the payments revenue pool to build a lending business
Pinduoduo’s growth path to a $150B marketcap, and the links between shopping, media, and financial mechanisms that help it compete with Alibaba
A comparison of approaches to growth and economics
Implications for crypto assets for capturing “the real economy”
Klarna is raising $640 million on a $45 billion private valuation, with over $1 billion in net operating income. The buy-now-pay-later company has over 90 million active customers and 250,000 merchants. It was founded in Sweden in 2005.
On the other side of the ocean, Chinese ecommerce company Pinduoduo is beating Alibaba with 820 million active buyers, generates over $3 billion in revenue per quarter, connects buyers to 12 million farmers, and has a market capitalization of $150 billion. It was founded in China in 2015.
This week, we look at:
How the medical reality is accelerating remote work and digital commerce, including the success of buy-now-pay-later companies like Affirm and Klarna
The emergence of virtual worlds and video game environments that generate $ billions in revenue and have millions of participants, with examples of Zwift, Fortnite, Tomorrowland, Roblox, Genshin Impact
How to connect digital environments to digital communities and their economic activity, including through mechanisms like non-fungible-tokens in Rarible and Async Art
Advice for shifting thinking from manufacturing financial product, to starting with the customer, to leveraging the community
We started the month with the huge news that Square was acquiring Afterpay and we ended with Amazon’s deal with Affirm.
It seems like every day there is more news coming out of this sector, it is white-hot right now.
This week, we cover these ideas:
How market structure determines the types of companies and projects that succeed
A walk through Marqeta’s economics and business model, and how Square’s Cash App and DoorDash were needed for success
The emerging $10B transaction revenue pool on Ethereum, MEV, and the changes to mining and gas
