🍋 The Future of Fast Food

Together With

Good Morning and Happy Friday! Longest short week ever, amirite? Elon Musk is single-handedly keeping the earth's birth rate up after news broke that he is the father of twins born to a senior exec at his Neuralink start-up. Musk tweeted "Doing my best to help with the underpopulation crisis." Not procreating is Elon's takeover target Twitter, which laid off a third of its recruiting team, as business pressures grow in advance of Elon's potential purchase.

Across the pond, Rafael Nadal withdrew from his Wimbledon semi-final due to a torn abdominal muscle. Also feeling some pain is Sunny Balwani, former President & COO of Theranos and ex of founder Elizabeth Holmes. Balwani was found guilty of 12 counts of conspiracy and fraud against investors and patients.

1. Story of the Day: The Future of Fast Food

FCVC is back! Long time readers of Short Squeez (shoutout to y'all, blessings) may remember when we coined the term FCVC: Fast Casual Venture Capital. While the acronym may not have stuck yet (I'm HODLing), the model definitely has.

Chipotle launched a $50 million corporate VC fund in April, with the goal of taking on the various challenges the restaurant industry faces. This has been a long time coming for the company. Back in 2016, CTO Curt Garner took the first steps into the future by creating the Chipotle app, so that employees would be able to quickly serve in-store and online customers simultaneously.

Now, especially now as the restaurant industry is battling tons of economic headwinds, the goal is to become even more tech forward. "There's restaurant growth, there's growing and scaling our digital business and there's also continuing the mission of cultivating a better world and changing the way people think about where their food comes from," said Garner.

Some of the types of investments 'Potle is looking at include Nuro, a company that uses autonomous vehicles to make deliveries. The SoftBank-backed start-up was Chipotle's first venture investment. Another investment Chipotle is looking at is Chippy, a robot that makes tortilla chips, saving time and money on repetitive work.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Increased efficiency at a fast-food restaurant is great. That's the whole point right... it's food that should be fast. My stomach is wondering though. How will I tell a robot to add more guac, and then some more, if my bowl isn't looking as guac-y as I'd like?

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks continued to extend gains and crypto, which has been battling rough headlines, seems to have found and come off a bottom.

Movers & Shakers

• (+) GameStop ($GME) +15% after a 4-for-1 stock split was approved by the company's board.

• (+) Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY) +22% after the company disclosed some insider purchases, including interim CEO Sue Gove's 50,000 share buy.

• (–) Helen of Troy ($HELE) -9% because the company lowered its sales and EPS outlook for fiscal year 2.

Private Dealmaking

• Aidoc, an AI healthcare start-up, raises $110 million in funding

• Blackstone invests $400 million in green credit platform Xpansiv

• Sharebite, a NY-based food delivery platform, raised $41 million in funding

• Apollo and New Fortress Energy bought eleven natural gas tanks for $2 billion

• Finalis, a NY-based broker dealer, raised $10.7 million in funding

3. Top Reads

• California couple gets mega-rich off Cliff Bars (Forbes)

• Antitrust authorities challenge PE Healthcare Deals (WSJ)

• Bosses swear by the 90-day-rule (WSJ)

• Voyager Digital customers feeling the pain (Axios)

• Start-up funding falls the most it has since 2019 (NYT)

• Volkswagen CEO says EV outlook is very good (CNBC)

• The Big 4’s tax problem (NYT)

• Hybrid work is doomed (Atlantic)

• HSBC head of responsible investing quits after controversial climate remarks (Reuters)

A Message from Polymarket: June Inflation

Consumer prices surged 8.6% in May from 12 months earlier. On a month-to-month basis, prices jumped 1% percent from April to May, a sharp increase from 0.3% from March to April.

With gas prices still on the rise, will inflation for June (expected reading on July 13th) continue to break records?

Will US inflation be more than 0.9% from May to June 2022?*

Polymarket traders are currently predicting a 58% probability that inflation will be more than 0.9% from May to June. What do y’all think? Follow the odds now on Polymarket!

4. Book of the Day: Cloud Money: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets

The reach of Corporations into our lives via cards and apps has never been greater; many of us rarely use cash these days. But what we’re told is a natural and inevitable move is actually the work of powerful interests. And the great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.

In Cloudmoney, Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash.

He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash.

He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back.

“The great battle of our time is the battle for ownership of the digital footprints that make up our lives.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Who invented the weekend?

• You only have so much time. Are you using it right?

• Science provides tips for post-Covid flirting

• Chilean man disappears after accidentally paid 300x his salary

6. Daily Visual: Slight Decline in Mortgage Rates

US 30-year fixed mortgage rate

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Market Bubbles

Graham & Dodd’s description of how investors became willing to passively invest in 1929 – without regard for sky high valuations – might as well have been written yesterday.

“During the latter stage of the bull market culminating in 1929, the public acquired a completely different attitude towards the investment merits of common stocks… Why did the investing public turn its attention from dividends, from asset values, and from average earnings to transfer it almost exclusively to the earnings trend, i.e. to the changes in earnings expected in the future? The answer was, first, that the records of the past were proving an undependable guide to investment; and, second, that the rewards offered by the future had become irresistibly alluring.

Along with this idea as to what constituted the basis for common-stock selection emerged a companion theory that common stocks represented the most profitable and therefore the most desirable media for long-term investment. This gospel was based on a certain amount of research, showing that diversified lists of common stocks had regularly increased in value over stated intervals of time for many years past.

These statements sound innocent and plausible. Yet they concealed two theoretical weaknesses that could and did result in untold mischief. The first of these defects was that they abolished the fundamental distinctions between investment and speculation. The second was that they ignored the price of a stock in determining whether or not it was a desirable purchase.

The notion that the desirability of a common stock was entirely independent of its price seems incredibly absurd. Yet the new-era theory led directly to this thesis… An alluring corollary of this principle was that making money in the stock market was now the easiest thing in the world. It was only necessary to buy ‘good’ stocks, regardless of price, and then to let nature take her upward course. The results of such a doctrine could not fail to be tragic.”

– Benjamin Graham & David L. Dodd, Security Analysis, 1934

8. Crypto Corner by Bonkalytics.com

• NFT’s enter baseball field

• Underwater bitcoin miners turn up the pressure on crypto

• Ethereum takes step closer to major merge

• Crypto tumult highlights lack of investor protections

• Uprise lost 99% of client funds while shorting Luna

• Crypto owners banned from working on US Government crypto policies

For more crypto-focused content, sign-up here.

9. Memes of the Day

*****

*****