This week, let's dive into the Apple augmented reality glasses leak, the Magic Leap $350 million financing, and the uncanny imagery created by Epic Games' Unreal Engine. We summarize and pull apart the thesis of the Metaverse -- a virtual world as realistic and economically important as our own -- and how media and financial companies should think about the opportunity.
I presented earlier this week at the Ally Invest virtual conference, and the prompt asked for a description of what happens to finance from Fintech to Crypto / Blockchain to Augmented Reality / Virtual Worlds and finally to Artificial Intelligence.
Finance is everywhere, and everywhere is finance. Smart city supply chains, self driving car insurance, video game real estate markets -- no matter which frontier technology you touch, it will have embedded implications on the delivery of financial services. And why wouldn't it? Like the use of language, finance is a human technology that allows societies to coalesce and compete with one another (in the Yuval Harari sense). It lifts people out of poverty and into entrepreneurship through microloans, providing generational sustenance for their families. And of course it also throws them into pits of corruption and greed, as they drink too deeply from the rivers of securitization and political power.
But enough poetry! I want to talk about augmented reality, attention platforms, and the re-formulation of payments and lending propositions in a global context.
In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
Assurance came on my radar courtesy of Financial Technology Partners, which was the investment banker on Assurance's $3.5 billion sale to Prudential. Notably, the company is just 3 years old -- which comes out to a cool billion of enterprise value per year, likely a record comparable to the very few Ant Financials. Depending on the details, this is about $25 million of value per employee. So what does the company do? Simple, really. It is a destination website licensed to sell all types of insurance product (e.g., life, health, auto), with a clean onboarding questionnaire like any other roboadvisor, which then matches against policies on offer from third parties. AI and data science are used as the recommendation engine. It is a Kayak or Money Supermarket of insurance, simply designed, cleverly wired, with killer founders.
In this conversation, we talk with Jamie Burke of Outlier Ventures. This is a fascinating and educational conversation that covers frontier technology companies and protocols in blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence, and the convergence of these themes in the future. Jamie walks us through the core investment thesis, as well as the commercial model behind shifting from incubation to acceleration of 30+ companies. We pick up on wisdom about marketing timing and fund structure along the way.
We’ve had this write-up in some various mental states floating around for a while, and better done than perfect. So treat this as a core idea to be fleshed out later.
Payments and banking companies should be looking at how people purchase and store digital goods and digital currency in video games. That experience has been polished over 40 years, and is what will be the default expectation for future generations.
For those interested, here is a website that collects user experiences of shopping across hundreds of designs.
We look at some of the recent Fintech bundling news that boggle the mind. Neobank Chime just raised a mammoth round from DST Global, valuing it at $6 billion. Figure raised another $60 million round. Goldman is launching a retail roboadvisor. Revolut is offering pensions. Wealthfront is offering mortgages. The world is upside down. We cool down with pictures showing augmented reality implementations in commerce and finance, and finish with an elevated thought about the future.
I examine how $6.4 billion real estate brokerage Compass stacks up against the digital wealth and lending companies with a similar go-to-market strategy, and provide some ideas as to why it is successful. Compelling questions also emerge when looking on how technologies like AR/VR are commoditizing the property brokerage experience. Compass, a residential real estate startup that built out a platform for brokers -- proprietary and external -- and has recently raised $370 million at a $6.4 billion valuation. I found the language and positioning sort of eery, in how similar it was to the story in industries I closely follow. It even bought a CRM earlier this year, not unlike AdvisorEngine buying Junxure, or Salesforce getting into financial verticals. What I did find unusual, was the absolutely massive valuation.
