gm. If it feels like you spend half your day fumbling around your computer looking for the right document, you are not alone. A report from Coveo found that the average employee spends 3.6 hours daily just searching for information. 

Screw all these one-click checkout companies, we need some one-click information retrieval companies. 

CYBERSECURITY

Quarterly vibe check

Are we in a bull market? A bear market? A hamster market? Who knows! We’re gonna put our macro hat on today to check in on how the public, crypto, and startup markets are doing as Q1 comes to a close. 

Public markets

Pandemic gains are dead and gone. Peloton is down 25% since the new year. Same for DocuSign at  -29%. Etsy and PayPal are down 40% and 37% respectively. Demand has cratered, people are venturing outside again, and the “new normal” may have been more “new” than “normal” after all. 

FAANG has splintered. There is a reason why FAANG companies have a tidy moniker—the companies usually move in lockstep with each other. That hasn’t been the case in Q1. Apple and Amazon have managed to squeak into the green despite the broader tech selloff, but Meta and Netflix have lost a combined $400 billion in market value since January 1. 

Startup market

Vibes are iffy. In the wake of the Information’s exposé on Fast and its absurd employee-to-revenue ratio, there seems to be a looming sense of angst over valuations. As the wild fundraising bonanza of late 2020 and 2021 begins to wind down a bit, we’re about to find out how many startups have the growth numbers to back up the lofty valuations they commanded. As always, time will tell, but as Alex Wilhelm of TechCrunch notes, the rising number of startup layoffs could be an early warning sign that some companies got out in front of their skis. 

Crypto market

Crypto is (almost) back. After a teensy tiny crypto winter following the all-time highs of November 2021, most cryptos are up double digits over the last few weeks. Of course, as of writing this last night, Bitcoin and Ethereum gave back some of their gains, but overall ETH is +13% and BTC is +6% over the last month. Yes, both are still more than 30% off ATHs, but momentum seems to be building in anticipation of the ETH merge in June/July. 

Bottom line: Overall, vibes are decently high. We’ll check in again with ya next quarter.

FINANCE

Apple eyes a slice of fintech pie

If there is one thing Apple is good at, it’s dongles finding ways to draw customers deeper into its walled garden. The next arena it's set its sights on? Financial services. 

According to a Bloomberg report, Apple is working on building its own in-house tech and infrastructure for financial services. Codenamed "Breakout" Apple is going to focus on “payment processing, risk assessment for lending, fraud analysis, and credit checks” initially, per Bloomberg. 

The logic

Apple is all about controlling the user experience—once you buy one Apple product or service, the experience only gets better when you layer in more products and services. 

• Grabbing a piece of the financial services layer makes a ton of sense for Apple as it continues to look for more consistent subscription revenue sources. 

• Also, by freeing itself from partners, Apple insulates itself from their mistakes or failures. Case in point: ditching Intel last year to make its own chips.  

Bottom line: Armed with its 50 million Apple Pay users in the US, Apple's finance ambitions should cause more than a fintech or two to quake in its boots. 

QUICK HITS

Seed round

Stat: There's a reason why there have been so many hacks in the news recently. Nobody is trying to stop them. CyberSeek shows nearly 600,000 unfilled job openings in the US  cybersecurity industry right now, compared to 1 million filled roles. Put another way, 38% of jobs in cybersecurity are open for the taking. 

Startup: Everyone wants to save the bees, but Beewise is actually makin’ the moves to do so. The buzzy startup (sorry, had to) makes robotic bee hives equipped with solar-powered enclosure monitors and climate control that are basically the luxury apartments of the bee world. With “thousands of orders placed in the US” the team just raised an $80 million Series C led by Insight Partners. (TechCrunch)

Rabbit Hole: How to transition from Web2 to Web3. (Li Jin)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Chief, a leadership network for women, reached unicorn status after announcing its $100 million series B yesterday. 

• Apple and Meta revealed that they accidentally shared data with hackers impersonating law enforcement officials in mid-2021.

• President Biden announced the largest ever release from the US strategic oil reserve to help combat rising gas prices.

• A Facebook bug has accidentally been boosting misinformation rather than reducing its over the past months.

TRIVIA

How are your estimation skills? We’ll give you an object, you have to guess what its price was 50 years ago.

• Cost of a new home 

• Median Household Income

• Cost of a first-class stamp

• Cost of a gallon of regular gas

• Cost of a dozen eggs

• Cost of a gallon of milk

FUNDRAISING FRIDAY

Today, we're offering a look into the fund fundraising process from some of the top managers in the world.

FOUNDERS CORNER

Three resources we came across that will make you a better founder, builder, or operator.  

🤝 What you should do with your best employees. 

💵 On the flip side, some advice on how to maximize your equity as an early startup employee.

⚡️ Examples of things being accomplished very quickly, from Patrick Collison. Trust us, it's worth a read. 

SHARE HOMESCREEN

We are dangerously close to 500 subscriber mark. Would be really neat if we hit it by Monday, right?

Hit the button above to get us to the promised land. 

TRIVIA ANSWER

• Cost of a new home: $30,500 

• Median Household Income: $9,697 

• Cost of a first-class stamp: $0.10 

• Cost of a gallon of regular gas: $0.36 

• Cost of a dozen eggs: $0.52 

• Cost of a gallon of Milk: $1.20