🍋 Banker Quits & Becomes Billionaire

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Good Morning! Some wild news coming out of Finland. 36-year old Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, was out clubbing in Helsinki till 4am, shortly after coming into contact with someone who had Covid. She left her work phone at home and so was unreachable to get a text telling her she need to quarantine (she really pulled a "sorry babe my phone died and I slept for 16 hours :(" to an entire nation. Better.com CEO apologized and promised to be better after firing 900 employees over Zoom in one of the worst PR moves of all time. The empty apology came after several top execs resigned amid backlash over the move. TWoods is making his comeback 10 months after his horrific car crash, all is well in the world again.

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1. Story of the Day: Banker Quits & Becomes Billionaire

Cristina Junqueira is really out here living every banker's dream. She quit her banking job in 2013 at Brazil’s Itau Unibanco, where she was overseeing a portfolio of credit cards. Apparently, she was sick of selling people stuff they didn’t want. Nubank, the digital bank she cofounded, goes public today at a $44 billion valuation, and her 2.6% stake in the company is worth $1.1 billion.

Junqueira joins a very small group of self-made female billionaire bankers. Self-made women comprise less than 3% of the world’s 500 richest people and the situation is even worse in Brazil. Only 1% of the companies that make up Brazil’s benchmark stock index have a woman as CEO, compared to 6% for S&P 500.

Junqueira is a mother of two with another on the way and stands out in the finance community for openly discussing work-life balance. Her Instagram boasts 173k followers and filled with stories of her personal life.

She co-founded Nubank with David Valez, a Columbian private equity guru who was looking start a digital bank in Brazil and wanted someone with insider knowledge. Today Nubank has more than 48 million customers in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Kudos to Cristina Junqueira for leaving her sad banking job and going on to found one of the most successful start-ups in the world. Let’s hope she inspires more sad bankers to quit their jobs and do something more worthwhile with their time. (@GoldmanAnalysts there is still hope pls hang in there)

Source: Bloomberg

2. Markets Rundown

• S&P 500 ended at a near record and Nasdaq closed higher on hope that omicron won’t send the stock market back to the Gulag.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Roku ($ROKU) 18% after announcing it has reached a multiyear agreement with Google to keep YouTube and YouTube TV on its service.

• (+) PagerDuty ($PD) 11% after reporting strong quarterly financial results.

• (–) Stitch Fix ($SFIX) -24% after reporting disappointing guidance for the fiscal second quarter and the full year.

3. Top Reads

• Fewer people are driving downtown since COVID (Axios)

• Exploding demand for laboratory space (Axios)

• Rethinking equity: From lottery ticket to financial wedge (a16z)

• When hiring nobody is better than hiring just anybody (Future)

• How do I talk to my partner about money? (WFM)

• You may love your work but it doesn’t love you back (TonyIsola)

• Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ (NYT)

• The Ugly Truth About Market Bubbles Is That Everyone Loses (Bloomberg)

• Instagram CEO leaves option open for kids’ version of the app (CNBC)

A Message from Polymarket: Coinbase NFT Launch

NFTs have exploded in popularity this year. Currently, OpenSea is the largest marketplace for NFTs and had around 236k unique users interacting with it in October. Coinbase, America’s largest crypto exchange, has plans to open its own NFT marketplace and has received more than 2.5 million emails looking to sign up for the marketplace since it was first announced in October.

Coinbase has not given a timeline for the exact launch date, but it is expected to be in the coming few months.

Will Coinbase’s NFT marketplace launch before 2022?

Polymarket traders are currently forecasting a 15% probability that Coinbase’s NFT marketplace will launch before 2022. Will Coinbase be able to get its NFT product out in time or will the launch slip into next year?

Trade now or follow the odds on Polymarket. Use code “OWS” to get reimbursed up to $100 on your first day of trading!

4. Medium of the Day: The Gist newsletter by Finny

Check out The Gist, a newsletter covering all the important stuff when it comes to your personal finances and investing. 

Our friends at Finny break down the top money trends so you don’t have to… all in a 5-minute read twice a week. Past popular topics: a 7% US savings bond hidden in plain sight, active managers aren’t shining, the crypto decision tree, and what the $68T wealth transfer means for you.

Check out the latest issue and join for free.

5. Short Squeez Picks

• ESG and Socially Responsible Investing have grown 10x in 2 years. Don’t miss out — learn about this growing market in just 5 min a week with the free weekly newsletter, For What It’s Worth

• Some of the best investment writing from 2021

• Dog-sitter turned business owner makes $5,000 to $9,000

6. Daily Visual: Young Dems Really Don't Like Republicans

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Web3

Web 1.0 refers roughly to the period from 1991 to 2004, where the vast majority of Internet users were solely consumers of content. Most websites were static pages that displayed content from the server filesystem rather than a database.

Web 2.0 is based around the idea of "the web as platform". Far more users of the Internet produce content, which they upload to social networking services, blogs, or video or image sharing websites. Many web pages are dynamic and serve content from relational databases, or are full-featured web applications. Web 2.0 is generally considered to have begun around 2004, and continues to the current day.

Web3, short for Web 3.0 is the next version of the internet, where services will run on blockchain. Majority of the Web 2.0 operations are controlled by tech giants such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft but Web 3.0 is de-centralized, where data is distributed across networks and no single entity owns the information.

8. Crypto Corner

• Visa launches crypto advisory unit (Block)

• Ubisoft becomes first major gaming company to launch in-game NFTs (Decrypt)

• Web traffic to crypto exchanges in November reached second-highest level for 2021 (Block)

• SushiSwap's CTO resigns amid infighting (Block)

9. Memes of the Day

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