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Yum Brands is designing its stores for iPhones

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KFC-owner Yum Brands just made its biggest move in a year. It acquired Tictuk - no, it's not a typo. Tictuk is a Israeli startup that lets you order food from social media and messaging apps. You can't use it to order from TikTok yet.  Back story: Yum bought Tictuk to capitalize on “conversational commerce," which makes ordering a Chalupa Supreme as easy as sending a text (or a FB message). Yum's digital sales in 2020 hit a record of $17B, up ~45% from 2019. Now it's doubling down on tech for its futuristic makeover. Tictuk is Yum's second tech acquisition in less than a month and it help revamp Yum Brands' ordering strategy and make it more digital focused. Tictuk will enable Yum Brands to achieve a truly omnichannel presence and provide frictionless ordering for customers in just a few clicks. It's very much inline with Taco Bell's announcement earlier this week to expand its "Go Mobile" restaurant remodel nationwide. "Go Mobile...
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SPAC: Why many unicorns won't hop on the SPAC wagon

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2020 has certainly been the year of blank check acquisition companies - or SPACs.  That's how Nikola- the sexy electric truck shop-, Utz - the iconic snacks company- and Virgin Galactic went public earlier in the year. Plus, it's also how electric vehicle makers Fisker, Canoo, and Lordstown Motors announced they will go public. Plus Plus, famous investor Bill Ackman recently took his SPAC (Pershing Square Tontine) public in the largest-ever blank-check IPO (it raised A whopping $4B). The objective is to buy a mature unicorn. Ackman actually said Pershing might buy a “mature unicorn” 6 times in the filing. However not all private companies are psyched about merging with SPACs to go public. Airbnb reportedly turned down an offer to merge with Bill Ackman's SPAC, saying it prefers going public via traditional. Airbnb isn't alone. Snowflake, Slack, Shopify and BigCommerce are other flashy SPACs that declined the backdoor to going public and opted for the front door through...
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The business of calm

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Last week was a long one. The stress of the election coupled with the pandemic has a lot of us looking for ways to relieve anxiety and invest in wellness from the comfort of home. Increasingly, many are resorting to mental health and meditation apps. Calm, a meditation app, topped Apple's health and fitness category on Election Day — and other mindfulness apps like Headspace weren't far behind.  Why are these apps popular? The anxiety-inducing times, along with poor access to mental healthcare and high smart phone penetration are big contributing factors. However, these are not the only ones. For me, the biggest factor is that the companies making these apps have finally figured out that they are content creators and not just app makers. The features that were available through these apps 5 years ago were a lot more rudimentary compared to what we have today, and so was the content. These apps have heavily invested in improving their content. It's telling that the biggest a...
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Bad signs for the epic market rally

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In the previous post, I discussed reasons that the stock market is rising despite the economic devastation of the pandemic. In this post, I’ll discuss ominous signs from the market rally: Top 1% account for most of the gains: The market is very top-heavy. 1% of the stocks in the S&P 500 - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft - account for more than a fifth of the S&P 500’s market value. While those tech giants have gained around 40 percent so far this year, the 495 other stocks in the index have collectively lost a few percentage points. This is bad because the US workforce is concentrated in the other 99% of the stocks. Insider selling is booming: Some leaders of corporate America are skeptical about the sustainability of this rally and are rushing to cash out. According to CNN Business and TrimTabs Investment Research, insiders have dumped more than $50 billion worth of shares since the start of May. The same source also notes that August is on track to be the thi...
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