Why America has so few carpenters
By Mark Dent
/ May 20, 2022
When Desmond Collins was in his 20s, he cycled between low-paying jobs at places like McDonald’s and Taco Bell, grasping...
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Google’s plan to disrupt higher education |
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Need new job skills, but short on time and money? Last week, Google announced the details of its professional certification program. Among the highlights, per Inc.:
The programs take up to 6 months to complete and cost ~$240… slightly less than the $38.3k average total tuition for a 4-year public college. Google started testing the concept in 2018…… when it rolled out an IT support certificate on the ed-tech platform Coursera (where these new certificates will also be hosted). That program attracted workers from nontraditional backgrounds:
While Google wants to place as many people in the jobs pipeline as possible, the courses — unlike this author’s sociology minor degree — are not meant to be a “walk in the park.” Each one will have 100+ “rigorous” assessments. Feeding their own funnelThis announcement is more than just positive optics for a company on the cusp of an antitrust case: Google will purportedly look at the certifications as the equivalent of a 4-year degree in their own hiring process. Other corporations — including Bayer, Deloitte, Verizon, SAP, Accenture, Intel, and Bank of America — will also consider the certificate in lieu of a traditional degree. This news comes at the intersection of 2 big trends:
The opportunities could make a huge difference: median salaries for project managers ($93k) and UX designers ($75k) are far higher than the national median income of $36k across all jobs. Crucially, Google’s moves tend to echo across tech — from their infamous interview questions to their OKR framework. If the certification program catches on, we may see other tech titans follow suit. |
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Coins made of bit (Source: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images) |
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Blockchain funding bonanza |
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Bitcoin just keeps Bitcoin-ing. With President Biden signing the $1.9T COVID relief bill into law, expectations for rising inflation (and the $1.4k stimulus checks as a new source of demand) sent BTC over the $60k milestone. The cryptocurrency is now up ~12x in the last 12 months. Crypto companies are boomingThe biggest fish, Coinbase, is headed for a $100B+ public debut, while last week saw 2 big funding rounds in the space. First up: BlockFi, which raised $350m at a $3B valuation, per TechCrunch. Billed as a financial services startup for crypto, BlockFi offers products for:
Today, the startup has 265k+ retail and 200+ institutional clients, while monthly revenue has hit $50m (vs. $1.5m a year ago). Next up is FalconX…… another crypto trading platform that aims at institutions, and which raised $50m. As Bitcoin surged over the past year, the platform saw its revenue increase 46x. These funding moves come as crypto is becoming increasingly mainstream. Established players such as PayPal, Visa, and JPMorgan all rolled out crypto-related services in 2020. Whether or not Bitcoin keeps Bitcoin-ing, crypto looks like it’s here to stay. |
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| Asia Tech | ||||
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This Coupang fulfilment center is the part of the company that IS like Amazon (Source: Bloomberg / Getty Images) |
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Coupang is the ‘Amazon of South Korea.’ But there is a key difference. |
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In South Korea, there is no Amazon. There’s Coupang, which has captured the country’s market with:
Last Thursday, Coupang went public and rocketed 40% to a valuation of $80B+. It’s the largest Asian company to IPO since Alibaba in 2014 and the largest IPO to date (sorry, Roblox). Founded by Harvard dropout Bom Suk Kim in 2010…… Coupang is in the business of “rocket delivery,” specializing in retail sales and last-mile logistics, much like Amazon. It has created further innovations in the space, allowing delivery to custom door-side boxes and letting customers leave boxes on doorsteps for returns. Rapid delivery is wicked expensive, though. Amazon uses profits from As noted by Protocol, Coupang doesn’t have an AWS-equivalent to offset its logistics costs — which ballooned to ~$10B last year. Right now, Coupang is betting that online retail is enoughSouth Korea is projected to become the 3rd-largest ecommerce market in the world this year, behind only China and the US. Coupang is already #1 in South Korea ecommerce, and with the fresh IPO cash, they’re hoping to pull far ahead of its “uptight” competitors. Although it’s not all sunshine and same-day delivery. The human toll of hyper-speed ecommerce is starting to show. In the recent pandemic-fueled delivery craze, 14 delivery drivers have died of overwork in South Korea. |
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P.S. You don’t need a huge following or hundreds of referrals to have a shot at winning. Based on the numbers so far, it’s anyone’s game. Get ideas on how to share your referral link here. |
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| Investor of the day |
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Masayoshi Son checking out the iPhone with Steve Jobs (Source: Bloomberg / Getty Images) |
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Masayoshi Son is on a roll. The billionaire Japanese investor put $3B into Coupang through his Vision Fund — good for a 37% stake. After Coupang’s IPO, that position netted a paper gain of $33B. Less than 2 years after the WeWork debacle, Masayoshi is sitting on a massive unrealized gain of $50B+ on just 4 investments: Coupang, Uber, DoorDash, and Guardant Health. The WeWork deal itself may also be salvaged, with the company looking to go public via a SPAC. For a man that once lost $70B — or 99% of his wealth — during the dot-com bubble, this is just par for the course. |
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