Financing the Future

Joe Montana is best known for winning four Super Bowls during the 1980s as the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, but he’s now cementing a new legacy as a top-tier investor.Montana tops the list of celebrity VCs, recently released by CB Insights, with a whopping 569 deals since 2020, and he’s also managed to back 10 unicorn companies during that time frame. Montana is the founder and managing partner at Liquid 2 Ventures, a San Francisco-based VC fund. Actor Ashton Kutcher was a distant second place, with 118 deals…

Meme coins were all the rage during the early years of the pandemic, but since then their (relatively) high prices have come crashing down to earth. In recent days and weeks, however, meme coins have seen their prices rise again. As of the time of this writing, Doegecoin is up over 12% in the last day and over 100% in the last month. Shiba Inu is up nearly 200% in the last month. But why?The spike in meme coins in recent days likely has nothing to do with the coins themselves. Instead, the spike in Doge and Shiba Inu…

After reports earlier this week that Reddit is planning to allow 75,000 of its power users to buy its upcoming shares at its initial public offering (IPO) price, we now have more details about the platform’s plan to go public. That’s because yesterday the company published the prospectus for its public offering. Here’s what that prospectus does and doesn’t reveal.What we knowClasses of Reddit stock: The company will have three classes of common stock, each with different voting power. Class A shares entitle the holder to…

Reddit is seemingly leaning further into its community of users as it closes in on its public offering. The Wall Street Journal reports that the social media site plans to reserve an undetermined number of its IPO shares for its most active users when it IPOs next month. While the number is not yet set, the Journal said it is “a big chunk” of the offering.Some 75,000 power-users of the site will reportedly be able to buy shares at the IPO price, a privilege that’s normally reserved for the top investors in a company. That…

Investors in cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase are waking up to some welcome news. As of the time of the writing, shares of Coinbase (ticker: COIN) are up over 12% to above $186 per share. That’s a price COIN shares haven’t seen since March 2022.Shares rose on the reporting of Coinbase’s Q4 2023 financial results, which were announced yesterday after the bell. The main headline from Coinbase’s Q4 was that the company reported its first profit in two years. The company generated $905 million in net revenue for the…

Instacart forecast, on Tuesday, its first-quarter gross transaction value (GTV) and core profit above estimates due to an uptick in grocery orders, and said it plans to cut 250 jobs, or 7% of its workforce, to focus on “promising” initiatives.Shares of Instacart reversed course to be down about 5% after the bell following Instacart’s lower-than-expected fourth-quarter revenue on slowing advertisement business.As of June 30, Instacart had 3,486 employees, according to a regulatory filing.“We are seeing in pockets, but it…

Love might be blind, but it’s not fiscally irresponsible. At least not if a new dating app has its way. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Score, a new app (and website) for the financially minded, hopes to attract people with “good to excellent” credit who know the importance of monitoring their finances. No one with a credit score of less than 675 is allowed to join. (A score of 850 is considered perfect, though very few people are near that level.)Score is the creation of Neon Money Club, a Black-owned fintech company…

Shares of Arm Holdings skyrocketed over 50% on the Nasdaq Thursday following the release of its fiscal Q3 earnings report. The U.K.-based designer of central processing unit (CPU) chips reported adjusted earnings per share of 29 cents, compared to the expected 25 cents, and revenue reaching $824 million against an expected $762 million.Investor excitement is likely also being fueled by the company’s boosted sales guidance for fiscal 2024, which it raised from roughly $3.08 billion to as much as $3.21 billion, in addition…

Snap investors are in a world of hurt this morning after a few whirlwind days that saw the company lay off 10% of its workforce and report worse-than-expected Q4 financial results. As of the time of this writing, shares in Snapchat’s parent company are down over 32% to $11.74 in premarket trading. Just yesterday, SNAP stock was trading at $17.45 per share.The catalyst for Snap’s massive stock pummeling was the company’s disappointing Q4 results, which were reported after the bell yesterday. While Snap’s revenues were up…

One undeniable truth about the current stock-market boom is that a big chunk of the market’s rise has been the result of outsized gains in a very small number of stocks, including most notably the so-called Magnificent Seven mega-cap growth companies (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, and Tesla). Those companies collectively account for almost 30% of the market capitalization of the S&P 500, and that concentration shows no sign of diminishing: Last week, after it reported better-than-expected earnings,…