Happy Friday. Welcome to The Chaos Coordinator! We are Brain Candy's snarky little sister, delivering carefully curated news happening across the industry (that you should probably care about) right to your inbox, with an almost too healthy dose of irreverence.
In this issue, we dive into:
Female Founders in VC
Virtual Cards
Government Price Controls
The Ethereum Merge
Is it Time for a New Wave of B2B Marketing?
Wall Street Takes TikTok
What's happening in.....
PE/VC
Female Founder Fundraising Flourishes
Try and say that three times fast.
For female founders, San Francisco and New York City have established themselves as the places to be. However, this week PitchBook reported that while these two cities, along with Los Angeles and Boston, remain major players in startup fundraising, other U.S. cities have seen significant growth in capital raised among female founders since 2020. According to the report, the Southwest, specifically Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix, is making a run for the top with Washington, DC, and Denver not far behind. Female-founded startups in these cities have raised at least the same amount of capital since the start of 2020 as they did between 2008 and 2019, says PitchBook, with the increased amount of capital raised in these metros not just due to an increase in the number of deals, but an increase in the average value per deal for female-founded startups. Slay.
Read more on where female founder fundraising is growing fastest in the U.S. here.
ENTERPRISE SaaS/FINTECH
Spend Management Elevated
In the words of Doja Cat, what a time to be alive.
In the past few years, there have been an immeasurable amount of advancements in how businesses tackle spend management. Up until 10 years ago, keeping track of business spending was what we would now view as an archaic and extremely manual practice, with processes traditionally ruled by an accounting department. Fast forward to today, an abundance of tools and technologies have addressed some of the most commonly seen pain points and streamlined these processes. Today, new softwares, such as Airbase, can stimulate better collaboration between finance and other parts of the business, ensuring bills are all accounted for and paid.
Will business owners be quick to embrace newer, virtual options or will they hesitate? PYMNTS breaks it down further here.
CAPITAL MARKETS
A New Meaning to Cap
As unprecedented times rage on, will the government step in and control the prices of everyday commodities?
While the investing landscape and valuations over the last several years made some of our heads spin, we may soon have another new hard-to-grasp reality to live with (because we definitely need more of those): free market governments getting serious about price-controls. When Liz Truss became the U.K.’s 56th prime minister, she all but confirmed that freezing energy bills will be her first big policy move, capping bills and compensating energy firms for their losses. Leaders across the EU are now similarly discussing energy-price caps, especially in the wake of Russia's cutdown of natural gas supply to the rest of Europe - Spain and Portugal have already limited the cost of gas in wholesale auctions, and this week a Spanish minister suggested intervening in the price of food, according to the WSJ. For our economist friends, the concern remains that spending money cannot fix the underlying problem of it all. As we all learned in freshman year Econ 101, capping the price of a scarce resource lessens the incentive to buy less of it—in this case of energy, risking winter blackouts.
Will the economic impact of soaring energy bills be worse than the unintended consequences of freezing them? Read more on both sides of the debate here.
CRYPTO/BLOCKCHAIN
Our favorite thing about this merge is that it feels like a merge
Is Ethereum going to save the planet? Probably not, but they're heading in the right direction.
Cryptocurrencies are often criticized for being terrible for the planet. Every year, bitcoin mining consumes more energy than the entirety of Belgium, according to the University of Cambridge’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, while Ethereum’s consumption is usually slated at roughly a third of Bitcoin’s. Regardless, the industry’s carbon footprint is generally viewed as unacceptable. However, Ethereum is about to swap proof-of-work mining, which requires computers running through jaw-dropping amounts of electricity, for an alternative system known as proof of stake, which does not require said energy-sucking computers. The Ethereum Foundation says the shift will reduce the network’s energy consumption by 99.5 percent. The switcheroo, known as the Merge, is set to take place in a few days on September 14th.
To learn more on how proof-of-stake will work, read here.
MARKETING TRENDS
Is It Time to Spice Up B2B Marketing?
Yes, it is possible to use the word spice not in relation to pumpkin.
LinkedIn is on a mission to prove that B2B marketing is just as important — and can be just as sexy — as B2C marketing. Insiders in the elusive B2B marketing space aren't holding back when it comes to convincing the industry that, just like B2C marketing, emotion and creativity are required to succeed in B2B marketing, and it’s time for businesses to shake up content and explore more creativity in campaigns. In his keynote at the 2022 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, LinkedIn CEO, Ryan Roslansky, encouraged the industry to raise a new generation of creatives, assuring that there is money to be made. He stated: “The advertising industry understands so well how households buy detergent or cereal. But to grow they’ll need to learn to understand how IT managers buy CRM software or cyber security systems. They’ll need to learn how businesses think and make decisions. It’s not easy but it is worth it. For the advertising industry, B2B is where the money is going to be.” As Division 1 B2B marketers here at the Ricciardi Group, we couldn't have said it better ourselves.
Wall Street hits TikTok - or should we say FinTok.
As we know very well in the financial services world, Wall Street firms prioritize portraying strong, consistent images to the public, and unsurprisingly, social media presence is no exception. However, this week DealBook reported that those strict guidelines are running up against two forces: a tight labor market and a talent pool of potential recruits/social media pros who want the ability to freely express themselves, which has caused the usually social media-shy finance giants to dive into creating their own social media content. In recent news, we learned BlackRock joined TikTok this year, and Goldman Sachs is reportedly planning to follow, most likely in the hopes of reaching potential hires and the next generation of clients. But what we cannot forget is that younger generations are looking for authenticity on social media - can Wall Street meet that standard? Currently, the industry’s most junior employees are the ones who are winning on TikTok, for example, posts showing what a day in the life of a "corporate girlie" looks like, remaining extremely popular, with videos reaching the millions when it comes to likes and views.
Read more on Wall Street's exploration into TikTok here.
Other Things You Should Care About
If you start to notice all the products in your Apple ecosystem starting to slow down, it isn't a coincidence: the Apple fall fest is here. From the iPhone 14, to the Apple Watch Ultra, check out everything Apple just announced at their September 7th event here.
Hold on to your Skims. Kim Kardashian makes moves to expand her business empire, with her newest business venture - private equity. SKKY Partners will make investments in sectors including consumer products, hospitality, luxury, digital commerce and media as well as consumer-media and entertainment businesses. Read more here.