Jan 26, 2024 · 1h 1m · more-or-less
#31: Fintech Struggles, Netflix Rises and 'Big' is Winning · More or Less Podcast
Sam Lessin · 21m spoken Jessica Lessin · 15m spoken Brit Morin · 8m spoken Dave Morin · 8m spoken Paul Sawaya · 44s spoken
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In this episode of More or Less, tech investors and media founders Dave Morin, Britt Morin, Jessica Lessin, and Sam Lessin debate the fintech valuation reset, analyze Netflix's subscriber resilience and streaming rebundling, and explore emerging trends in crypto rails, beauty robotics, and startup defensibility.
Statements from this episode (20)
Sam Lessin lost millions of dollars backing a new football league
“Listen, I burn, I lit millions of dollars on fire investing in a new football league, so I get it.”
Jessica Lessin: LA Times Has Laid Off One-Third of Its Newsroom
“A third of the LA Times' newsroom has been laid off over the past year. A quarter of this week, that was the news.”
Dave Morin: One-third of portfolio companies used Brex, one-third used Mercury
“I remember when we were auditing our entire portfolio, like something like a third were using Brex and the other third were using Mercury and then everybody else was with”
Jessica Lessin: Brex laid off 20% of workforce, replaced key executives
“So the news this week was Brex, 20% layoff, replaced, I think CTO and COO, two members of the management team, all broken in the information.”
Sam Lessin: Startups cannot sustain long-term value on single growth hacks
“And like you ride that hack for a while, but it's not going to last. And so at some point you have to say like, okay, my hack that I used to initially acquire customers or grow the, you know, the way AWS is valuable is not any one service. It's basically low l…”
Sam Lessin: Metropolis used private equity to acquire incumbent parking operators
“And, you know, that's what we did with this Metropolis deal, which is pretty interesting. We're like, we had better, you know, the Metropolis team had better software for operating parking garages, but it just turned out that for a bunch of structural reasons,…”
Lessin: Future Tech Value Creation Will Hybridize VC and Private Equity
“And there's going to be new capital approaches and new approaches kind of hybridizing tech and VCE and PE. That kind of say, yes, there is leverage in software, but we're not going to unlock it the way we've unlocked it over the last two years.”
Brit Morin: Brex serves less than 1% of its overall market
“And to Sam's point, they only serve less than one percent of the whole market. So it's like, even if you have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, that's tiny in this market and you just don't have the distribution advantage.”
Sam Lessin: Converting MAU or GMV into enterprise value is difficult
“I think that in some of these industries that are regulated or highly complicated health and fintech being probably the best examples, but there are others. It's just a lot harder than it looks to go from having a big headline MAU number And some revenue or li…”
Brit Morin: Brex's $12.3 billion valuation is at least 3x overinflated
“I think their valuation is like at least three X Overinflated, like, 12.3 billion.”
Sam Lessin: Believing fintech startups can outscale incumbent banks is silly
“So you basically have to have this theory that for some technological reason or customer acquisition reason, you can basically overcome all of that and scale so big and so fast that it doesn't matter. And I think that's like, again, is it, if you want to dream…”
Dave Morin: Crypto rails are beginning to attack Stripe's cross-border transaction costs
“A lot of the transaction costs that are part of the Cost of these companies like Stripe providing their services, particularly cross border and internationally are like, you know, very real parts of the crypto stack are starting to actually attack at.”
Dave Morin: Latin American payment providers are clearing payments with stablecoins
“I've been hearing that in Latin America and other areas, there's starting to be payment providers that are doing their cross border, you know, settling, clearing, like payments related stuff. They'll do it on chain with a stable coin and then just convert it b…”
Sam Lessin: Venmo has become a broken user experience under PayPal
“It is still big, but it's like, kind of shitty. The app's kind of broken now. It's been, you know, owned by PayPal for the last decade, and they've kind of like, I don't know, I wouldn't say it's not usable. I certainly use it, but it's like, pretty terrible e…”
Brit Morin: Netflix leverages dubbed international libraries to maintain perceived supply
“I think one of their strategies has been to figure out how to utilize their content library more efficiently so that the volume of content does make the consumer feel like there's just a plethora of supply, even in these new markets they're opening up.”
Dave Morin: Netflix is losing nearly 100 million users per year
“They've gone from below two percent in January of 19 to two percent per what? Per month to now they're approaching four percent. So it's to me that looks like they're losing anywhere from, I don't know, fifty million users per year in 2019 to close to a hundre…”
Sam Lessin: Streaming churn is fundamentally different from enterprise software churn
“The other strategy is you charge more per month and accept more month-to-month churn, but it's not actually like, it's not like software churn, where like, you're like, I'm done using Figma forever, right? It's like a different type of churn.”
Sam Lessin: YouTube TV will surpass Dish subscribers by year-end
“YouTube will definitely have more subscribers than Dish by the next time we check in on this.”
Sam Lessin: Never compete against businesses whose workers avoid paying taxes
“The thing my dad taught me when I was a kid, he said, Sam, never, ever, ever compete in a business against people who don't pay their taxes. And my sense is that the lash people and the nail people do not pay their taxes. So it's going to be an uphill battle, …”