GZV #12: How's your month long AirBnB rental?
Startups. Trends. Markets. All from a Gen Z view.
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Themes of the week:
Brick and Mortar 🏬
Communities 🧑🏻🤝🧑🏻
Universities and Covid-19 🎓
Long term rentals 🏠
Recently Funded Startups
Scale: Gen Z won’t/may/will like <Company Name>.
Gen Z will like Cashdrop.
Who are they?
CASHDROP is a mobile commerce platform that helps businesses create and manage an online storefront from a smartphone.
Note: Gen Z will be a user of Cashdrop’s product.
Why the rating (Pros)?
Gen Z always will appreciate products that revolve around making a frictionless economy. (frictionless economies use products and services that make getting from A to B frictionless)
Although Gen Z does a good portion of shopping online, we still occasionally visit brick & mortar stores.
Transitioning some of the store features onto our smartphone will drive more sales through Gen Z.
Why the rating (Cons)?
Amazon
💡 Investment Idea 💡: The brick and mortar business is changing right now. Products like CashDrop will help the surviving business thrive. Look for startups that are disrupting the brick and mortar business with great product innovations.
Gen Z may like Circle.
Who are they?
The modern community platform for creators.
Why the rating (Pros)?
Gen Z likes interacting with the creators that they follow on a personal level.
With Covid-19, Gen Z started engaging with others online more and picked up new hobbies. Along the way they also followed creators and communities.
Feeling engaged with a community is a lot better than just feeling like a part of the audience. (ex. We are more likely to follow Dave Portnoy if he has interacted with us on a personal level)
Why the rating (Cons)?
This platform seems like it may be for more sophisticated communities that don’t target gen z.
💡 Investment Idea 💡: Look for a startup that allows for popular creators/influencers to connect with their audience. This makes the audience more valuable because it will help develop a cult-like audience. Look at Barstool as an example.
Gen Z Trend of the Week - College’s trying to control Covid-19 🎓😷
So are you back at school?
As of now my school, Elon University, is back doing a hybrid of in-person classes and online classes.
What have they done to help combat Covid-19?
So far every student has taken a Covid test, done a health check visit, completed health training modules, and downloaded a health screening app.
Anything going well?
As far as testing, out of 6,050 students and faculty testing, only 9 positive cases came back. The issue here is a good portion of these tests were done at home, meaning students still had to travel to Elon.
Any problems?
The big issue I see is the health screening app. Every morning student have to check a box if they have had any of the Covid symptoms. If students have ANY symptoms, they must contact health services and stay in their room.
On paper this makes sense, but not all students are actually going to check a box if they have a symptoms. If someone wakes up with a headache, they’ll take an Advil and say they’re fine. No student wants to be confined because their head hurts or they have a sore throat.
Do you have any recommendations?
This is a really tough problem to solve, so props to any school trying to tackle it. Personally, I think the answer lies in pro sports. The NHL and PGA have been doing a great job keeping things in check. One thing both have in common is a large amount of testing. Of course, testing on that scale isn’t very possible at universities.
Another solution would be some type of Covid band that monitors your health conditions. For example, the PGA required players and essential personnel to wear a Whoop band after it was found that it can identify 80% of symptomatic cases.
Read more about Whoop and the PGA here: https://www.golfdigest.com/story/pga-tour-players-covid-19-whoop
💡 Investment Idea 💡: Watch for startups that will help universities stay open. This could be a wearable tech company like whoop, or maybe an iPhone app that students don’t really have to interact with that much.
Why I love AirBnB’s IPO
On Tuesday, AirBnb announced that they are confidently filing for an IPO in August. This means that they will be trading on the stock market within the next few months.
Personally, this is one of my favorite unicorns and I will be buying shares as soon as I can. Why? Well, I think the future of AirBnB lies within long term rentals.
Since this pandemic started, AirBnB has obviously seen a dramatic drop in their short term rentals. No one wanted to travel for the first few months of Covid and people are still resilient now. Although, there has been a recent trend that I’m sure AirBnB is aware of; Long term rentals. After being stuck at home for months people wanted to get away, so instead of a nice week vacation people visited places for a few weeks at a time. For the most part, I believe people loved this experience. I personally had a friend reach out to me in July and ask if I wanted to join a few guys for a month at an AirBnB in Park City. Of course, I had school so I had to decline, but the idea was interesting. Being able to see a new city for a pretty reasonable price seemed very exciting.
With WFH becoming more and more common I have to guess that AirBnB’s long term rentals are up dramatically. This won’t make up for the loss in short term rentals, but flash forward 1-2 years and I believe that long term rentals will still be fairly common. With the power of short term rentals coming back too, I would have to imagine revenue over the long hall looks pretty good.
As for Gen Z, when we go on trips like spring break, most of us use AirBnB because it’s cheaper. When looking at long-term rentals though, most Gen Z’ers don’t have enough money to afford a trip like that. If WFH remains in place for a few years though, I can definitely see Gen Z being a very mobile generation moving from city to city in different rentals.
💡 Investment Idea 💡: Check out AirBnB stock when it IPO’s.
Feel free to email or text with any questions or comments about the newsletter, Gen Z, or startups.
thomas@genzvoice.com
203-628-6006