We discuss the latest phenomenon of retail investing that caused GameStop stock to go up more than 2,000% in a few weeks. 

We discuss Tesla's origins (spoiler alert - Elon Musk is not the founder) and its evolution.  We also debate its current valuation of ~$800B. 

Happy New Year! We are back with our new biweekly and shorter episodes schedule. We start the year with reviewing the history of Virtual Reality (VR) and discussing its barriers to mass adoption. 

In our season 2 finale, we review the 2020 trends we had identified in Season 1 finale. See the trends here.

You can find the Morgan Stanley report on Private Equity here. 

We will be back on January 14th, 2021 on biweekly basis. 

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year! 

We have a guest on the podcast this week, David Krieger, who is back with us after a year.  David and I discuss fundamentals of embedded systems and his experience in designing them. 

Useful links:

1. David Krieger on LinkedIn

2. Embedded Systems

We discuss the recent S1 (a required document to be filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a private company to raise money in the public markets like NYSE or Nasdaq) filing by Airbnb to public in the US.

Useful link:

Airbnb S1

S1 definition 

This week, we are delighted to  have a guest on the podcast, Joanna Jones, Founder & CEO of InterQ Research. Joanna and Chander discuss User Research and why the qualitative methods are necessary to complement quantitative methods.

Useful links:

1. Joanna's LinkedIn profile

2. InterQ Research 

We discuss how the US elections have caused the tech stocks to go up. We get deeper into California Prop 22 (a ballot measure by ridesharing and food delivery companies to change the law about classifying their drivers as employees and stopping them from forming a union).

Useful links:

1. Prop 22

2. Direct Democracy

We discuss the unique nature of Ant Group IPO which is going to be the world's largest IPO ever. Ant Group which has 700M+ users is raising >$34B in the IPO at a valuation of >$300B. Ant Group is a spinoff of Alibaba and has a special relationship with the Chinese government.

Useful Links:

1. Ant Group

2. Ant Group IPO filing documents 

This week, Depart of Justice (DOJ) and 11 State Attorney Generals in the US filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. We discuss the intricacies and history of these type of lawsuits.

Useful Links:

1. DOJ Workshop at Stanford 

2. DOJ Google Lawsuit press release 

We discuss a new IPO market in Norway and other innovative IPO strategies. 2020 has turned out to be the most innovative year for finance. 

We discuss Google's launch of new smartphones - Pixel 4a 5G and Pixel 5,  new video streaming device - Chromecast, and new smart speaker - Nest Audio. 

We experiment with a shorter episode ( < 30 minutes). Spotify co-founder, Daniel Ek, made an announcement last week that he will invest ~$1.2B in deep tech in Europe. This prompted us to discuss what deep tech investing is and how it is different between the US and Europe.

Useful links:

1. Daniel Ek announcement at Slush 

How we develop products continues to evolve as new technologies get commercialized. Products that work with Machine Learning (ML) models require a new way of thinking to launch and improve products. The agile/lean approach does not work with ML. We discuss how product managers will have to develop products differently with ML.

We discuss the recent Snowflake IPO and the possible reasons for its sky high valuation.

Useful links:

1. Snowflake website: https://www.snowflake.com/

2. Snowflake S1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1640147/000162828020013010/snowflakes-1.htm

We are honored to have Matt Papakipos as our guest of honor on this episode. Matt is an entrepreneur and an angel investor who has spent a lot of time with nVidia, Google, and Facebook in their early days in Silicon Valley. Chander and Matt talk about Matt's startup ecosystem experiences in Silicon Valley, Seoul, and Amsterdam. Matt is currently living in Amsterdam with his family. 

Useful links:

Matt on LinkedIn

We discuss Unity Unity Software Inc. and their plan to go public. They filed S1 last week.

Useful link:

Unity S1

We are back after summer break. A lot has happened in the tech world in the last six weeks. We discuss the following highlights: 

1. Tech driven stock market 

2. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple's CY 2020 second quarter earnings

3. Special Purpose Acquisition Companies or SPACs

4. Tech CEOs testimonies in congressional hearings 

5. California government battle with Uber and Lyft