The Quick Punch
***Don't have time to read everything? This new section will provide a few bullet points about our generation z that are covered in this edition.
We are taking to social media to deal with social distancing
Dramatic increases in social media challenges such as drawing a carrot, doing 10 pushups, posting an embarrassing photo (more details below in Gen Z x Covid19)
Over 60% of us are spending CONSIDERABLY less money
I honestly haven't touched my wallet in two weeks
We are realizing how much we need social interaction. Group facetimes are becoming increasingly popular. The once-popular app, Houseparty, a platform where you FaceTime with your friends and strangers has reemerged and skyrocketed to #3 in the App Store.
What we are seeing in the news
You know what was Fast? The time between Fast's seed round and Series A round.
On March 26th, it was announced that Stripe would lead that $20M Series A funding round, only 5 months after the seed round.
"Fast, per its name, wants to make logging in far quicker, and also wants to help you check out at online stores more simply, and, as before, rapidly. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Domm Holland said that Fast wants “to be the intermediary for all consumer interactions,” which he broke down as a “fancy way of saying we want to give you one-click login, one-click payments, one-click data everywhere.”
- TechCrunch
Gen Z: We love this, and who wouldn't? It makes things that much easier for the consumer. I often hear Gen Z complain about password management, some people often use the same password variations for multiple websites. This is mostly because we cannot remeber all these passwords and are too lazy to keep them someplace. This tool will allow you just have the password and not have to worry about ever remembering it. That'll be a game changer.
Barstool X Government
Since the start of the coronavirus crisis in the US, we have heard the government praise the private industry for their efforts to help. One private company that the government has worked with now twice is Barstool.
So far we have seen Dr. Anthony Fauci appear on the most popular sports podcast, Pardon My Take. A week later we saw Foreplay's (golf podcast) host, Riggs, interview the VP's Chief of Staff, Marc Short.
By the way, this isn't because Barstool is reaching out to the government, this is government reaching out to Barstool.
The government realized that they needed to reach a younger audience and explain to them the seriousness of this pandemic. I have to give them credit, Barstool is one of the best choices to catch the eye of people between the age of 16-30. They have an audience of around 70 million "stoolies", and approximately 28 million of those are 34 years or younger; the exact demographic the government is looking for.
Gen Z x Covid19
Tom Lombardozzi
My good buddy sent me this text on March 9th. At 11:05am the market was down around 6.5%. Pretty perfect meme for the moment if you ask me.
What the hell is happening? 3 weeks ago I was wondering what golf courses I should play in Orlando on spring break. Turns out none, because I decided it was safer to come back to Connecticut where it f***ing snowed Monday. It was gone less than 24 hrs later so I decided against doing something irrational.
Similar thoughts are going through every college students mind as we all try to tackle online classes. After the first 5 days I've noticed a few things. These online video conferencing platforms are not too bad. I've used Zoom and Webex (Cisco) and I like Zoom more, and obviously so does the stock market with Zoom being one of the only stocks in the green on some of the recent downturns.
But what does this mean for our social lives? I think I speak for my generation when I say we never truly appreciated how nice it is to be living so close to friends, and now that we are stuck in our homes, we are just starting to.
One thing everyone has been seeing is a new trend of instagram story challenges. To name a few we have the pushup challenge, post your pet, girls post a positive photo, golf swing, drunk selfie, and many more. The point of these are to post your photo or video on your story, thank the person who nominated you and nominate 3 other people. Interesting trend, huh?
This entire situation may be good for us in a sense, we weren't old enough to understand 9/11 and most of us do not remember the details of the Great Recession in 08'. We haven't really been exposed to a setback or a scary time during recent years, and the coronavirus may be a nice kick in the ass from life. We may come out of this being more responsible, more aware of the good times, and less afraid of the bad times. Only time will tell. For now though we are going to continue to make up random social media challenges.
The Startup Scope
"Providing the Gen Z voice to today's business professionals."
Yes I know this is my startup.
I was going to feature Fast but I decided it was a better to write a larger piece on them. So, in turn I wanted to talk a little bit about what the next few weeks holds for GZV.
With the funding I received from Elon I plan to do a few things. One is to built a great website that customers will easily be able to interact with and find more information about what we are doing. I also plan to do a substantial amount of marketing, focusing on twitter, linkedin, and google Adwords.
Another idea that I am excited to start working on is our "investment arm". I am starting to build an "investment team" with other students who are qualified. In this investment arm we will work together and make a $100 investment in a startup each month. We will be utilizing the crowdfunding platform, republic.co, for this. We will cover why we made this investment and what we saw in it. Shoutout to Matt Snow for helping form this idea.
I'm excited for the next few months.
- T
Reach out to thomas@xxpartners.co with any feedback or thoughts. (need to change the email still)
-GZV