🚀 Amazon drops $ on healthcare

Plus, where is Instagram headed with searchable maps?

Jul 24, 2022

trending 📈

👩‍⚕️ Amazon buys One Medical. Amazon is truly becoming a “one stop shop” for all consumer needs: physical products, streaming, groceries, and now healthcare! This week, the company announced its acquisition of One Medical for ~$3.9B. One Medical is a subscription-based primary care service that combines brick-and-mortar practices (188 offices nationwide) with telemedicine. The company IPO’ed in 2020 - Amazon offered a 43% premium to the latest public valuation.

You may remember that Amazon also bought prescription delivery company Pillpack for $750M in 2019 - and launched its own Pharmacy in 2020!

🎮 FaZe Clan goes public. Big news in the esports world: FaZe went public via SPAC at a $725M valuation. FaZe started in 2010 as a “Call of Duty” clan / YouTube channel, but is now a global entertainment company with 11 esports teams and 500M fans worldwide. The company brought in $52.9M in revenue last year, almost half of which came from brand sponsorships.

💸 YouTube x Shopify. YouTube is doubling down on video shopping, partnering with Shopify on new features for creators to sell their products. You can see what this looks like here - imagine a “product shelf” under a video (with links to buy the featured products), or a livestream with pinned products. For select U.S. merchants, you may be able to fully check out without leaving YouTube 👀

📊 Earnings updates. Tech earnings season has officially started! This week’s news:

Tesla outperformed analysts’ expectations with 42% YoY revenue growth despite factory shutdowns in Shanghai limiting production. The company also reported that it sold 75% of its Bitcoin holdings over the past quarter, contributing $936M in cashflow.
Netflix lost 970k subscribers last quarter, significantly beating its own expectations of a potential 2M loss. The company’s letter to shareholders noted that launching an ad-supported plan and cracking down on password sharing will be areas of focus in the coming quarters.
Snap missed analyst expectations for both revenue and EPS due to a slowing ad market - ARPU (average revenue per user) saw its first YoY drop since the company’s IPO. Snap also suspended Q3 guidance, though it noted that revenue growth would “meaningfully slow” in the coming months.
Twitter also missed expectations for revenue and user growth. The company’s Q2 revenue dropped 1% YoY, which it blamed on both weakness in the ad industry and “uncertainty” related to the Elon Musk acquisition.

what we’re following 👀

Amazon is cracking down on FB groups that coordinate fake reviews.

Why auction house Christie’s is getting into tech (and crypto) investing.

Apple released a 60-page report on how its devices are impacting health.

Clubhouse’s former head of community on what she learned at the company.

Instagram Launches New Searchable Map Inspired by Google Maps - The Teal Mango

This week, Instagram launched searchable maps, allowing users to discover nearby businesses. It’s like a combination of Snap Maps’ heat map feature and Google Maps! Users can filter by what they’re looking for (cafes, hotels, bars, etc.), check out content made there, and click to call or message the business.

The launch comes a week after Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan said at a conference that younger users are increasingly searching on platforms like Instagram and TikTok instead of Google, as they’re drawn to more “visually rich” content. The company later confirmed Raghavan’s statement that almost 40% of users age 18-24 start on one of these other platforms when looking for places to eat.

Where might this be headed? Instagram has long been used as a “discovery” tool for all kinds of services, outings, experiences, and even longer trips. We would guess that the platform has inspired billions of dollars of spend - if not more. But until now, Instagram’s involvement has largely stopped at the discovery phase. It’s difficult to attribute bookings or other revenue to Instagram when you find a restaurant on the app, but go to make a reservation on Yelp or OpenTable.

IG’s new searchable maps don’t have bookings…yet! But the feature is opening the door for the platform to get more involved with brick-and-mortar businesses, many of whom: (1) have already invested in building an IG presence; and (2) are “hacking” together tools (DMs, link-in-bio, etc.) to drive bookings on Instagram. Now that consumers can more easily find business on IG, it feels like a win-win to add features that enable reservations, appointments, and other transactions.

Right now, this is all speculation in terms of the company’s future roadmap 🤔 But at a time when Instagram’s identity is already in-flux, it makes sense for the company to double down on a clear advantage for them - data and content around where people are going, and what they’re doing there. We’ll be curious to see what, if anything, comes next to searchable maps!