🍋 WFH Forever

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Good Morning! Another day another wild inflation report. The consumer price index rose 7% in December from a year earlier, the fastest pace since June 1982. That was in-line with estimates and did not send the stock market back to the gulag, like it had done in previous inflation reports. Private equity giant, TPG goes public today under the ticker... $TPG. It's raising $1 billion at a valuation of $9.1 billion. A woman in Florida won the same jackpot at the same casino twice in 18 days ($2.3 million in total earnings). Some of us are just built different.

If you haven't done so already, please fill out this Wall Street Comp Survey that we are running to give y'all some transparency. We need more data so the intern get started on his poorly formatted charts, which we'll distribute ASAP.

Today's sponsor, Polymarket, allows you to trade on real life events including when Donald Trump will launch his rival to Twitter.

1. Story of the Day: WFH Forever

Work from home is here to stay. Companies across the country are telling their workforce to work from home indefinitely. Investing app, Robinhood became the latest tech company to announce its new working policies.

Robinhood announced yesterday most of its 3,400-person workforce will continue to work remotely going forward. The policy is characterized as a “primarily remote approach.” Most employees will have no location or in-office requirement. 

Companies have become used to scrapping their reopening plans as the virus keeps mutating and won’t go away without a fight. Tech companies, in particular, have been slow to bring back employees to the office. Apple delayed its return indefinitely. It has also given out $1,000 stipends to employees to pimp out their work-from-home rigs.

Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, tweeted yesterday that last quarter 74% of Stripe’s hiring was outside the Bay Area/Seattle compared to 39% in Q1 2019. “I think the rate at which tech industry is going global is still under-appreciated, and that this will be a big tailwind for the world over the next decade.”

Brian Armstrong responded that the numbers for Coinbase were even further apart. Q1 2019: 30% outside the Bay Area. Q4 2021 89% outside the Bay Area. “Tech is definitely decentralizing. Silicon Valley is now in the cloud,” he tweeted.

Brain Chesky also got in on the action: “Yup, the place to be was Silicon Valley. It feels like now the place to be is the internet (which is everywhere). I expect this trend to only accelerate.”

Short Squeez Takeaway: It seems truly wild that we had been working from the office for centuries and never took a second to appreciate how inefficient it was. Yes, there are some benefits to working-from-office but I don’t think many employees out there would willingly go into the office 5x a week.

The movement is also great news for companies. It now means they are not restricted to hiring from where they are located but can hire across the globe.

P.S. If you are in the market for a fully remote job, our newsletter provider, beehiiv is looking for a growth marketer, with unlimited PTO days & a 2-month sabbatical every 3 years! Apply here.

Source: Protocol

2. Markets Rundown

US stock indexes closed with modest gains Wednesday, after a reading on inflation came in-line with estimates.

Movers & Shakers

• (–) Crocs ($CROX) +7% after Piper Sandler named the stock a top 2022 pick.

• (–) Take-Two Interactive ($TTWO) +5% after BMO Capital Markets upgraded its rating on the stock to outperform.

• (–) Quest Diagnostics ($DGX) -7% after reporting Covid testing volumes in the fourth quarter declined compared with the prior year.

3. Top Reads

• What the violent rotation out of Growth stocks means for Value (ST)

• A Harvard-trained economist shares his top 21 money rules (CNBC)

• The worldle movement (WSJ)

• Road to retirement (HD)

• Southern California ports struggle to trim cargo backlog as omicron surges (WSJ)

• Demand for anime content soars (Axios)

• Why does Disney keep sending Pixar movies straight to streaming? (Variety)

• Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the metaverse (CNBC)

• The AI software that could turn you into a music star (BBC)

• Elizabeth Holmes is set to be sentenced on Sept 26 (NYT)

A Message from Polymarket: Truth Social to Launch Next Month?

After being banned from Twitter, former President Donald Trump is launching a social media app. The app, called Truth Social, appears to be launching in February, according to a listing on the iOS App Store.

Like Twitter, Truth Social users will be able to follow people and trending topics, as well as chat privately with other users.

The iOS App Store listing states that Truth Social is expected to launch on February 21, 2022 – Presidents’ Day in the U.S. However, there is belief by some people close to the effort that the app is actually months away from being fully operational.

Polymarket traders are currently forecasting a 51% probability that the app will launch by the expected date. Will it actually happen? Follow the odds now on Polymarket!

4. Book of the Day: The Wisdom of Crowds

In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

With boundless erudition and in delightfully clear prose, Surowiecki ranges across fields as diverse as popular culture, psychology, ant biology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence, military history, and politics to show how this simple idea offers important lessons for how we live our lives, select our leaders, run our companies, and think about our world.

“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.”

5. Short Squeez Picks

• Have a new years resolution to learn something new like cryptocurrencies? Udemy is offering up to 85% OFF its courses as part of its New Year's sale

• When distorting reality doesn’t change the world

• Goodbye upside

6. Daily Visual: US Consumer Price Index

Source: Axios

7. Daily Acumen: Path Dependence

Path dependence, in simple terms, explains how history really matters – where we have been in the past determines where we currently are and where we can go in the future.

Nassim Taleb writes in Skin in the Game –

“Assume that your capital is around one million dollars and you are involved in speculation. Apply path dependence to the reasoning.

Making a million dollars first, then losing it, is markedly different from losing a million dollars first then making it.

The first path (make-lose) leaves you intact; the second (lose) makes you bankrupt, insolvent, maimed, traumatized and more generally unable to stay in the game, thus unable to benefit from the second part of the sequence. There is no ‘make’ after the ‘lose.’

8. Crypto Corner

• OpenSea competitor LooksRare exceeds $394M in sales

• Coinbase announces acquisition of derivatives exchange FairX

• Clothing retailer Gap launches NFT collection on Tezos

• Zero Hash raises $105 million in series D round

• Jack Dorsey announces Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund

• Meta poaches staff from Microsoft and Apple for metaverse plans

9. Memes of the Day

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