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🍋 Spotify Launches Bookstore

🍋 Spotify Launches Bookstore

Short Squeez
September 21, 2022

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"It doesn't take money to make money. It takes leverage to make money." — Naval Ravikant

Good Morning! Fed is expected to hike rates by 75bps this week in their attempts to stave off inflation. Credit Suisse sees the number of global millionaires growing by 40% over the next four years. Peloton is desperately trying to reinvent itself after a disastrous year and announced a line of rowing machines, prices starting at $3,195. SPAC King Chamath threw in the towel on two SPACs after his deal hunt failed, and New York City plans to install security cameras in all subway cars by 2025.

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1. Story of the Day: Spotify Launches Bookstore

If you’re one of Spotify’s 433 million active users, you can add audiobooks to the list of streamable media. Spotify wants to become a one-stop-shop for all audio, and the company bets it can transform the audiobook industry in a similar way that it transformed music streaming.

Spotify sees an opportunity to tap into a burgeoning market. The audiobook industry grows by nearly 20% a year, though only encompasses about 7% of the wider book market. In bringing audiobooks to its user base, Spotify aims to build a new audiobook customer base through its current à la carte audiobook offerings.

Spotify is positioned to challenge Amazon (Audible) and even Apple and Google in the digital audiobooks space. Audible was the market leader in 2018 with 41% market share.

Spotify launched 300,000 audiobook titles yesterday and believes, through data and improving the user experience, the company can impact the ways in which users interact with audiobook content.

Short Squeez Takeaway: Spotify wants to become the hub for all things audio streaming. Despite Spotify’s popularity and ability to stave off competing tech giants, the company has nevertheless never turned a quarterly profit, and its stock is down 60% so far in 2022. Spotify is betting it can revolutionize a fast-growing audiobook industry and, through taking a slightly different pricing model, continue traversing the path to profitability.

Now on to the important questions...

Should we add a Short Squeez audio version?

2. Markets Rundown

Stocks closed lower on Tuesday as investors anticipate the Fed hiking interest rates on Wednesday.

Movers & Shakers

(+) Cognex ($CGNX) +6% after machine-visions maker raised revenue outlook.
(–) PayPal ($PYPL) -4% after Susquehanna downgraded PayPal to neutral from positive.
(–) Ford ($F) -12% after 3rd quarter expenses totaled more than $1 billion over expectations due to inflation and supply chain issues.

Private Dealmaking

Deer, a Chinese circuits and optical fiber manufacturers, raised $291 million
Swiftly Systems, a retail technology platform, raises $100 million
GRNGrid, an environmentally friendly and stable blockchain, raised $50 million
Zopper raises $75 million to solve India’s insurance problem
HICX, a software supplier management platform, raises $30 million
Tres raises $7.6 million to help web3 teams manage financials and crypto data

3. Top Reads

Wall Street is on a knife’s edge until Jay Powell speaks (CNN)
What’s behind the collapse of growth stocks (Axios)
European businesses are rethinking their plans for a ‘closed’ China (CNBC)
Why homebuilder confidence plunged to lowest level since beginning of Covid (Fox)
Ford shocked investors just like FedEx - here’s what Wall Street is saying (YF)
The potential missing link to why September is hitting stocks hard yet again (MW)
Anxious investors are piling into hedge funds (CNN)
Wells Fargo makes a case for 150bps hike (CNBC)
UnitedHealth beats Justice Department on $13 billion merger (Axios)

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4. Book of the Day: Don't Trust Your Gut

Big decisions are hard. We consult friends and family, make sense of confusing “expert” advice online, maybe we read a self-help book to guide us.

In the end, we usually just do what feels right, pursuing high stakes self-improvement—such as who we marry, how to date, where to live, what makes us happy—based solely on what our gut instinct tells us. But what if our gut is wrong? Biased, unpredictable, and misinformed, our gut, it turns out, is not all that reliable. And data can prove this.

In Don’t Trust Your Gut, economist, former Google data scientist, and New York Times bestselling author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reveals just how wrong we really are when it comes to improving our own lives. In the past decade, scholars have mined enormous datasets to find remarkable new approaches to life’s biggest self-help puzzles.

Data from hundreds of thousands of dating profiles have revealed surprising successful strategies to get a date; data from hundreds of millions of tax records have uncovered the best places to raise children; data from millions of career trajectories have found previously unknown reasons why some rise to the top.

Lively, engrossing, and provocative, the end result opens up a new world of self-improvement made possible with massive troves of data.

“A sixty-year-old start-up founder has a roughly three times higher chance of creating a valuable business than a thirty-year-old start-up founder.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

The trick to regaining your childlike wonder
Inside Kanye West’s mysterious new private school
How to make small talk when you hate it
Are no eyebrows the new eyebrows?

A Message from Bright Cellars

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6. Daily Visual: Roger Federer's Legacy

Source: Statista

7. Daily Acumen: Stay Hydrated

“We know we should drink water because it's good for us -- it's good for our skin and our immune system, and it keeps our body functioning optimally. But staying hydrated is also key to our cognitive abilities.

Drinking water can actually make us smarter. According to one study, students who took water with them to an examination room performed better than those who didn't.

Dehydration, on the other hand, can seriously affect our mental function. When you fail to drink water, your brain has to work harder than usual.”