🍋 Casper's Nightmare

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Good morning! It’s Thanksgiving week and airports are bracing themselves for the 20 million people expected to fly this week. President Biden is expected to announce this week whether Jerome Powell will renew his term as Fed chair or if Lael Brainard will take over. With inflation popping off, add Christmas trees to the list of items that are mooning. According to experts, buyers should expect to pay between 10% - 30% more for both live trees and artificial trees and also have a smaller selection to choose from.

If you are looking to put some money to work, check out today's sponsor, NowRx that is revolutionizing the $480B retail pharmacy industry. Here's your chance to invest in it.

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1. Story of the Day: Casper's Nightmare

Casper that set out to revolutionize the mattress industry has gone quickly from a successful unicorn to a nightmare in 2 years.

Casper agreed to be taken private in a transaction that values Casper at less than $300 million, half of what it was worth when it went public two years ago. It had also been valued at $1.1 billion in a private funding round in early 2019.

Casper couldn’t solve the economics of its business model and turn a profit. Casper was started in 2014 as an online brand inspired by eyeglass seller, Warby Parker’s success.

So what went wrong? Competition and lots of it. Dozens of internet sellers such as Purple Innovation popped up, driving up the competition for shoppers and the costs of online advertising to reach them. Incumbents such as Tempur Sealy started selling bed-in-a-box concepts and Amazon started making its own mattresses, undercutting prices. (another business KO’d by Amazon?)

Casper responded to increasing online advertising costs with its own physical stores, moving away from a brand known for its mattresses-in-a-box to a place to buy all types of sleep products.

Casper is being bought by Durational Capital Management, a private equity firm that has previously invested in food companies such as Bojangles.

Short Squeez Takeaway: While Casper faces a nightmare, other online brands such as Warby Parker (recently went public, valued at $6.5 billion) and Allbirds (went public this month, valued at $3 billion) have been doing well. There is still a large portion of population that wouldn’t buy a mattress without sleeping on it first. Anyone who has ever gone mattress shopping knows how hard it is to get the right mattress on the first try. RIP (for now) Casper, we hope the private life is kinder to you.

Source: WSJ

2. Markets Rundown

• Stocks struggled on Friday as concerns over a resurgence of Covid-19 weighed on global markets, though tech shares pushed higher.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) Intuit ($INTU) +10% after strong growth in online accounting revenue fueled a beat on the top and bottom lines for Intuit’s fiscal first quarter.

• (+) Moderna ($MRNA) +5% after the Food and Drug Administration authorized Moderna and Pfizer’s Covid vaccine booster shots for all US adults.

• (–) Foot Locker ($FL) -12% after the company said it expects global supply chain constraints to persist through this quarter.

3. Top Reads

• Elon Musk wants to show Germans how to build cars (Bloomberg)

• UPS partnering with Waymo (Verge)

• Bill Gates-backed nuclear venture will launch first project near Wyoming (Fortune)

• Does ‘dogsomnia’ keep you up at night? (NYT)

• Teacher burnout leaves schools scrambling (Axios)

• Ping. Ding. Chirp. Notifications are driving us crazy (WSJ)

• Why the internet is turning into QVC (NYT)

• Archaeologists dig into digital data (Axios)

• Airplane fights are surging. The industry wants to stop them before the holidays (WSJ)

A Message From NowRx: The Future of Pharmacy

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4. Book of the Day: Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut in Math and Life

We are often told that hard work is the key to success. But success isn’t about hard work – it’s about shortcuts. Shortcuts allow us to solve one problem quickly so that we can tackle an even bigger one. They make us capable of doing great things. And according to Marcus du Sautoy, math is the very art of the shortcut.

Thinking Better is a celebration of how math lets us do more with less. Du Sautoy explores how diagramming revolutionized therapy, why calculus is the greatest shortcut ever invented, whether you must really practice for ten thousand hours to become a concert violinist, and why shortcuts give us an advantage over even the most powerful AI. Throughout, we meet artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs who use mathematical shortcuts to change the world.

"Why waste time climbing the mountain, when you could go around it much faster"

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Derek Thompson talks with Kevin Roose about the metaverse, crypto, NFTs Podcast

• Brett Steenbarger on three ways to overcome trading FOMO YouTube

• Laurie Santos talks with Dan Harris, of 10% Happier fame, about how to be happier at work Podcast

6. Career Portal

We currently have 70+ roles curated for you on the Overheard on Wall Street Career Portal. From investment banking internships to private equity roles to strategy/development jobs in crypto. No more spammy jobs on LinkedIn and annoying emails from headhunters. Your one stop shop for finding a job.

If you are looking to hire a candidate and want to post a job, just click on "Hire Talent" button on the top right corner of the Career Portal.

7. Daily Visual: Most Misspelled Brands

Source: Statista

8. Daily Acumen: Imagination

Everything starts in your head and your imagination. Next year's vacation; then your new car; then your new computer; it's created in your imagination in real life before you get it. And so are your goals and your ideal life.

Imagination is a very powerful weapon of mass creation. If you imagine a positive environment or use your imagination to go back to the most wonderful moments in your life, you can create this happiness in the present.

If you use your imagination to see your coming vacation, to see yourself there, you create happiness in the moment. If you want to reach a certain goal, use your imagination to visualize it and take inspired action to materialize this goal.

9. Memes of the Day