Morning Glory < 30 Seconds
September 15, 2020
By Cliff Oxford
Daily Deal—1942 quote above describes where we are today with COVID-19 fury. Not out of woods but with vaccines on table and hardly anyone listening to Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo’s plea to stay in place and watch them on TV, we are on the trail back home.
Time to think post-pandemic. Two big ones:
1) Investments—stay out of banks and real estate stocks and load up on health care, cloud companies, and e-commerce.
2) Remote work, unless it was already of your culture or you’re in a cubicle at Coke, I’m not seeing any outcomes from it that I would write home about. For the birds. Bring them back 12 hours after vaccine hits market. Senior team with masks yesterday.
Side Deal—High fives! NBC Sports ad sales team sold out the Texans-Chiefs opener a week in advance of Thursday’s broadcast.¹
If there is a blue ocean, the NFL is the blue whale, feeding 12 adjacent industries for every game played.
What didn’t jive was ratings for game down a surprising 11%. Some thought it had the chance to be the most watched football game ever other than Super Bowls. Of course NFL blames it on Lebron. Nice try Roger.² Real reason—the league has confused the customer on what they are selling: social justice? fanatics? fun?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
IPO Glow—Academy Sports and Outdoors, a Katy, Texas-based sports and outdoor equipment retailer, filed to raise $100 million. KKR backs the firm.
IPO market gears up for busiest week since May 2019—Uber’s IPO week—with 12 deals on tap.
Cloud company Snowflake expected to raise up to $3.08 billion in biggest-ever software IPO and biggest deal of the year to date.
TikTok is a wasted opportunity and watered-down deal. Oracle will be equivalent of a reseller,³ hall monitor, and minority partner. Don’t know which is worse: politics in sports or deals.
Entries/Exits—Kaitlyn Dever to star opposite Michael Keaton in “Dopesick,” Hulu limited series. Dever is an opioid-filled coal-mine patient to Keaton’s Dr. character. Record.
David Franco will serve as new chief financial officer for San Diego Zoo. Franco's last position was with Vulcan Industries. He brings more than two decades of financial management experience to the position and replaces Paula Brock, who retired around February. I plan to see Franco next February to discuss a CRM system for zoo visitors. Members. Remember Members Only jacket?
Cliff Notes
1 Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne: How to create uncontested market spaces and make the competition irrelevant
2 Lebron James and Los Angeles Lakers had a playoff game with Houston Rockets the same night. Roger Goodell is the NFL commissioner.
3 A reseller is more of a partnership with another company than an M&A transaction