Big tech beats Wall Street's expectations, women in VC, and new unicorns 🦄
Welcome to Nº 22 of In The Money, your weekly newsletter on keeping up with all things finance, tech, and startups. As always, this week’s newsletter is filled with all the financy things. This week big tech companies reported their quarterly earnings, beating Wall Street expectations. ITM takes a deep dive into the numbers. Apple released a software update with new privacy policies that could affect other companies negatively. Sweden got yet another unicorn. Snapchat is on a shopping streak acquiring other businesses. The Oscars went to Netflix and the GameStop frenzy can’t stop, won’t stop. This and much more. I hope you enjoy this edition.
Women in VC 👩💻
2020 was the third consecutive year that the US venture industry deployed record-setting capital, more than $156 billion. Seems like great news for innovation in such a challenging year until you realize that funding to women-led and mixed-gender startups actually went down. For example, funding to female-led and mixed-gender founding teams fell to 14.4.% from 16.9%. And the situation is even more depressing for, Black and Latinx female founders who combined received just a tiny fraction, 0.64%, of the hundreds of billions of VC dollars. Despite industry-wide promises, 2020 was a setback year for women and non-binary individuals. The headwinds stalled years of progress. Women have historically been underrepresented in company and venture capital leadership. Women also experienced a disproportionate socio-economic impact from the pandemic. There’s never been a more critical time to put money in the hands of female check writers, a group of investors that invest in female founders at a 2x higher rate. This week AllRaise’s released its third annual report. Findings in the 2020 report include:
Female venture checkwriters grew just 1% in 2020, from 12.3% to 13.3%
64% of firms still have no female checkwriter
Only 10% of firms have more than 2 female checkwriters
And checkwriters are almost entirely white. Only 1 of the new checkwriters in 2020, self-reported as African American, and 0 as Latinx. Despite a lot of talk, promises, and study after study showing diversity equals success, the hires aren't there. Talk needs to be turned into action. Because you can’t change what you don’t measure. All Raise started as a call to action and today it is a community that arms female founders and funders with access, guidance, and support to exponentially accelerate their success and propel the entire industry forward. You can read the full All Raise Annual Report 2020 here.
FTSE100 CEO diversity data 👩💼
Equality Group collected the latest data on the diversity of CEOs in the FTSE 100. The Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index, also called the FTSE 100 Index, FTSE 100, FTSE, or, informally, the "Footsie", is a share index of the 100 companies with the highest market capitalization listed on the London Stock Exchange. In 2018, an INvolve report revealed there were more CEOs named Dave and Steve than there were women and ethnic minorities. Three years on, today, the data shows that the number of female CEOs has increased by one (from 7 to 8) and the number of ethnic minorities has decreased by one (from 5 to 4). Furthermore, there continues to be no Black or women of color CEOs in the FTSE 100. However, the diversity of white male names has changed in this time. Dave has almost disappeared, Steve has increased, and Andy has taken first place as the most common name of an FTSE 100 CEO. There are now more Steves and Andys than women and ethnic minorities. The Equality Group’s research indicates that the only diversity achieved in the last three years is that of white men. You can read the full report here.
Big tech beats Wall Street’s expectations 🤑
Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter reported quarterly earnings this week. Big tech, big deal, since those first five companies make up about 17% of the stock market's value. According to the earnings reported this week, the combined yearly revenue of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook is about $1.2 trillion. That is more than 25% higher than the figure just as the pandemic began in 2020. In less than a week, the five giants make more in sales than McDonald’s does in a year. If you want to dive deeper into the earnings reports, I’ve linked them all and you can find them by clicking on the respective company name in bold.
Alphabet Google’s parent company Alphabet reported better-than-expected earnings for its first quarter of 2021. The company also announced a new $50 billion stock buyback, which boosted the shares by more than 4% in after-hours trading.
Here’s how Alphabet reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected:
Earnings: $26.29 per share vs. $15.82 per share expected
Revenue: $55.31 billion vs. $51.70 billion expected
Google Cloud revenue: $4.05 billion vs. $4.07 billion estimates
YouTube ads: $6.01 billion vs. $5.70 billion, estimates
Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC): $9.71 billion vs. $9.25 billion estimates
Google’s revenue rose 34% from the first quarter last year, making it the fastest annualized growth rate in at least four years. The company reported advertising revenue of $44.68 billion for the quarter. Furthermore, Google’s YouTube is already the world’s largest online video platform. If continues growing the way it has the last several quarters, it could also match Netflix in revenues by year’s end. You can read more about YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki as the Woman of the Week in a previous edition of ITM.
Alphabet’s profits got a boost from its startup investments. Alphabet has become a force in venture capital in recent years, using its robust balance sheet to take stakes in companies across the internet and software as well as other industries where tech is playing a growing role. The company invests in start-ups through GV (formerly Google Ventures), and in later-stage and pre-IPO companies through CapitalG (formerly Google Capital). Overall, the value of certain equity stakes grew $4.84 billion during the quarter, offset by a loss of $86 million on other securities, creating a net gain of $4.75 billion. Alphabet didn’t specify in its earnings report which deals produced the gains. Equity investment gains are recorded in the other income and expense (OI&E) section of its report. The biggest single contributor was most likely UiPath, which went public earlier this month (you can read about it in a previous edition of ITM). CapitalG owns 30.5 million shares in UiPath, which corresponds to a worth of $2.3 billion as of Tuesday’s close.
Apple reported a blowout quarter on Wednesday, with companywide sales up 54% higher than last year. Apple reported double-digit growth in every single one of its product categories, and revenue from its most important product line, the iPhone, was up 65.5% from last year. Apple said it would also increase its dividend by 7% to $0.22 per share and authorized $90 billion in share buybacks.
Here’s how Apple did versus estimates:
EPS (earnings per share): $1.40 vs. $0.99 estimated
Revenue: $89.58 billion vs. $77.36 billion estimated, up 53.7% year-over-year
iPhone revenue: $47.94 billion vs. $41.43 billion estimated, up 65.5% year-over-year
Services revenue: $16.90 billion vs. $15.57 billion estimated, up 26.7% year over year
Other Products revenue: $7.83 billion vs. $7.79 billion estimated, up 24% year-over-year
Mac revenue: $9.10 billion vs. $6.86 billion estimated, up 70.1% year-over-year
iPad revenue: $7.80 billion vs. $5.58 billion estimated, up 78.9% year-over-year
Gross margin: 42.5% vs. 39.8% estimated
Thanks to the blowout earnings report, increased dividend, and share buyback program Apple stock rose over 4% at one point in extended trading. Apple shares were down on Thursday as investors worried about continued growth opportunities. Let’s dig a bit deeper into this and why companies buy back their own shares:
A share repurchase, or buyback, is essentially a decision by a company to buy back its own shares from the market. As such a share repurchase reduces the number of shares outstanding, and so increases earnings per share (EPS). A share repurchase simultaneously reduces the total assets of the business so that its return on assets, return on equity, and other metrics improve when compared to not repurchasing shares. A share repurchase shows the company believes its shares are undervalued and is an efficient method of putting money back in shareholders’ pockets. Companies tend to repurchase shares when they have cash on hand and the stock market is on an upswing. On the other hand, a share repurchase can give investors the impression that the company does not have any other profitable opportunities for growth to use its cash for.
Amazon shares climbed more than 3% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company released its first-quarter earnings. Sales surged 44% beating Wall Street’s expectations.
Here’s how the e-commerce giant did, relative to analyst estimates:
Earnings: $15.79 per share vs. $9.54 per share expected
Revenue: $108.52 billion vs. $104.47 billion expected
Few companies have benefited from the surge of online shopping during the pandemic as much as Amazon. Amazon’s guidance for the second quarter implies that it expects the momentum to continue. This should help allay investor fears that business could slow in a post-pandemic environment. One notable thing was that Amazon’s ads business grew at an astonishing pace in the first quarter. The company’s “Other” unit, which is primarily made up of advertising but also includes sales related to other service offerings, grew revenue 77% year over year to more than $6.9 billion. That’s almost seven times as much revenue as Twitter, which generates substantially all of its revenue through advertising and reported first-quarter earnings the same day (see more on Twitter’s earnings below).
Facebook stock price was up more than 6% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after the company released its first-quarter earnings, beating Wall Street’s expectations.
Here’s how the social media giant did relative to estimates:
Earnings: $3.30 per share vs. $2.37 per share expected
Revenue: $26.17 billion vs. $23.67 billion expected
Daily active users (DAUs): 1.88 billion vs. 1.89 billion expected
Monthly active users (MAUs): 2.85 billion vs. 2.86 billion expected
Average revenue per user (ARPU): $9.27 vs. $8.40 expected
Facebook attributed the significant increase in revenue to a 30% year-over-year increase in the average price per ad and a 12% increase in the number of ads delivered. Facebook said it expects its revenue growth to remain stable or accelerate modestly in the second quarter compared with slower growth a year prior due to the pandemic. The company, however, expects revenue growth in the third and fourth quarters to significantly decelerate sequentially compared with the fast growth experienced during those periods a year prior as a result of the pandemic. Additionally, the company is bracing for “ad targeting headwinds” as a result of regulatory and platform challenges. Most notably, Apple’s recent privacy changes in iOS 14 may make it more difficult for the company to personalize ads for iPhone and iPad users. Read more about Apple’s privacy changed below.
Microsoft shares dipped 3% in extended trading on Tuesday after the software maker announced fiscal third-quarter earnings that came in stronger than analysts had expected.
Here’s how Microsoft did:
Earnings: $1.95 per share, adjusted, vs. $1.78 per share expected
Revenue: $41.71 billion, vs. $41.03 billion expected
The software and hardware maker posted 19% annualized revenue growth for the quarter. That’s the biggest quarterly increase the company has posted since 2018. The increase is in part thanks to gains in PC sales resulting from pandemic-driven shortages last year. Further, Microsoft said LinkedIn’s ads business brought in more than $3 billion in revenue during the year ended March 31, outpacing pure-play digital ads competitors like Snap and Pinterest. By way of comparison, Snap has generated about $2.8 billion in revenue over the same time period, while Pinterest, which also reported quarterly earnings on Tuesday, saw revenue of $1.9 billion.
Twitter shares were down more than 11% in after-hours trading on Thursday after the company released its first-quarter earnings, missing expectations on user growth and providing lower revenue guidance for the second quarter than expected.
Here’s what Twitter reported versus Wall Street’s estimates:
Earnings: 16 cents per share, adjusted, vs. 14 cents expected
Revenue: $1.04 billion vs. $1.03 billion expected
Monetizable daily active users (mDAUs): 199 million vs. 200 million expected
Twitter reported revenue of $1.04 billion for the quarter, up 28% from $808 million the previous year. Twitter also reported a profit of $68 million, contrasted with a loss of $8.4 million a year ago.
Bitcoin gave Tesla profits a positive boost 💹
After the closing bell on Monday, Tesla also reported its first-quarter results. The company beat expectations, buoyed by sales of Bitcoin and regulatory credits, but the stock dipped as much as 3% after hours as investors digested the numbers.
Here are the numbers:
Earnings: 93 cents per share vs. 79 cents per share expected
Revenue: $10.39 billion vs. $10.29 billion expected, up 74% from a year ago
Net profit reached a quarterly record of $438 million on a GAAP basis. The company recorded $518 million in revenue from sales of regulatory credits during the period. It also recorded a $101 million positive impact from sales of Bitcoin during the quarter. Tesla invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin this quarter and then trimmed its position by 10%, a sale that made a $101 million “positive impact” to the company’s profitability in the first quarter. Tesla also allows customers to make vehicle deposits and vehicle purchases using Bitcoin. Tesla turned to Bitcoin as a place to store cash and to access it immediately, all while providing a better return on investment than more traditional central bank-backed safe-havens. Of course, the higher yields provided by the volatile digital currency come with higher risk. According to a securities filing, Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin was worth $2.48 billion at the end of March, giving the automaker a significant gain on paper just a few months after investing. Earlier this year Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin.
Financial literacy month 💸 April has been the month to recognize financial literacy. In the US, Financial Literacy Month is a national campaign organized by the Jump$tart Coalition to raise awareness about financial literacy and promote financial education. My mission with In The Money is to promote financial literacy in an easy and fun way, all while hoping to inspire more people to start investing. If you like ITM and know someone you think would find this newsletter interesting and helpful please feel free to share In The Money with them.
Privacy, please 🕵️♀️
On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, one of its most anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads. It includes a new privacy tool, called App Tracking Transparency, which could give us more control over how our data is shared. Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a pop-up window will show up on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data. A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably, Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy feature as harmful to small businesses. A big motivator, obviously, was that the privacy setting could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are doing inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us with ads. Others have also suggested that these changes could do damage to some developers and advertisers, while also benefiting Apple’s bottom line. The full impact will depend, in part, on how many people choose to opt-out of tracking.
Another long-awaited update from a pure user standpoint is the ability to unlock the phone using an Apple Watch. It’s a useful addition for the company’s wearable, but more importantly, it comes after a year of frustrated mask wearers hoping for a workaround for face unlock. When wearing a mask, the handset will default to the Watch.
A ton of new emojis. We’ve got kissing couples, fiery hearts, and additional gender inclusivity
Updates to Siri, including an additional voice and the ability to dial an emergency number
AirTag support (AirTags were launched last week, read more about them in last week’s ITM)
Apple Podcasts app redesign
Fitness+ can now be streamed to devices with AirPlay 2 enabled
Reminders can be date, priority, and title
Updates to voice control accessibility
Users can directly report traffic incidents to Apple Maps, using Siri commands. There are also speed checks
The News+ tab gets reorganized to make it easier to find relevant stories and publications
Podcast wars 🎙
Speaking of podcasts, and Apple’s efforts in the space. On Tuesday, its main competitor in the podcasting sphere, Spotify launched its podcast subscription service in the US, giving creators more range in how they choose to make money. Podcast monetization has been difficult for streaming companies to realize because it is hard to measure the return on investment in podcast advertising. However, more players have been putting effort into it. For example, Spotify has invested heavily into its technology with its “Streaming Ad Insertion” tool and $235 million acquisition of ad tech company Megaphone. Spotify’s new subscription feature is powered through Anchor, its creator platform. That will allow podcasters to mark episodes as subscriber-only and put them on Spotify and other platforms. In an effort to draw more creators to the platform, Spotify is not taking subscription revenue cut for the next two years. Participating creators will receive 100% of their subscriber revenues, excluding payment transaction fees. Starting in 2023, the company will charge a 5% fee for the tool. Apple, on the other hand, takes a 30% cut the first year and will then drop the fee to 15% in the second year.
Snap’s shopping streak 🛍
Last week, Snap acquired Fit Analytics for $124 million. Now, Snap has also confirmed that it has acquired Pixel8earth, a company developing 3D mapping technology, specifically based on crowdsourced data, for $7.6 million. Four employees from Pixel8earth are joining Snap to work on map product development. Specifically, they will be building out tools that will work with Snap’s location-based augmented reality (AR) experiences. It’s not clear if Snap will keep Pixel8earth going, or if it will roll selected technology into products like Snap Map. Given the price of the deal, it’s most likely more of talent acquisition. Pixel8earth is co-founded by Sean Gorman and Pramukta Kumar, two repeat founders and mapping PhDs. They built the platform which encouraged people (dubbed “ambassadors”) to join the platform and use their 360 cameras and other cameras to record and contribute information to the startup’s global mapping database. In that regard, the tech was not unlike what Mapillary, which got acquired by Facebook, had developed.
The newest Swedish unicorn 🦄
In what seems to turn out as a tremendous year for Swedish startups, the latest unicorn in the country is the digital health startup Kry, which offers a telehealth service to connect clinicians with patients for remote consultations. On Tuesday Kry announced that it raised $312 million in a funding round. Kry last raised just before the pandemic hit in Western Europe, a €140M Series C in January 2020. The new investment was led by CPP Investments and Fidelity. It also values the seven-year-old firm at $2 billion which is almost three times the $700 million Kry was worth in the 2020 financing round. Existing investors including Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Index Ventures, and Accel also backed Kry’s latest round. The need for people to socially distance during the coronavirus pandemic has given an obvious uplift to the telehealth category, accelerating the adoption of digital health tools that enable remote consultations by both patients and clinicians. Kry’s year-over-year growth in 2020 was 100%, meaning that the about 1.6 million digital doctors’ appointments it had served up a year ago now exceed 3 million. Some 6,000 clinicians are also now using its telehealth platform and software tools.
Would you take your wage in digital? 💰
In last week’s ITM we learned about central bank digital currencies or CBDCs. China has been leading the development of CBDCs and now its plan to introduce its digital currency is getting a lot of help from its tech conglomerates. JD com, a major Chinese online retailer that competes with Alibaba, said Monday that it has started paying some staff in digital yuan. The online retailer has become one of the first organizations in China to pay wages in digital yuan. In August, some government workers in the eastern city of Suzhou also began getting paid in the digital money. China’s major tech companies have actively participated in the buildout of the digital yuan ecosystem, which will help the central government better track money flows. Aside from JD com, video streaming platform Bilibili, on-demand services provider Meituan and ride-hailing app Didi have also begun accepting digital yuan for customer purchases. Gaming and social networking giant Tencent became one of the digital yuan operators and will take part in the design, R&D, and operational work. Jack Ma’s Ant Group has also joined efforts with the central bank to work on building the infrastructure to digitalize money. Huawei, the telecom equipment giant, debuted a wallet on one of its smartphone models that allow users to spend digital yuan instantaneously even if the device is offline.
Chinese IPO boom in the US 🔔
Chinese companies are also rushing to go public in the red-hot US IPO market, at least, before it loses steam. The first three months of the year have been the busiest quarter for overall US initial public offerings since 2000. Despite the coronavirus pandemic and tensions between the US and China, half of the 36 foreign public listings in the US during that time came from companies based in Greater China. And more are coming. About 60 Chinese companies plan to go public in the US this year.
And the Oscar goes to Netflix 🎬
In one night, Netflix nearly doubled its number of Oscar wins. Going into Sunday’s 93rd annual Academy Awards ceremony, Netflix had 36 Oscar nominations across 17 films (the most of any distributor this year). By the end of the night, it collected seven trophies. The second-highest count went to Disney, which took home five awards. Since 2013, when Netflix earned its first nomination, the platform has taken home eight Academy Awards. Now, its collection is 15 strong. The tech company has steadily increased its nominations over the last eight years, proving that it has made quality decisions about the products it has acquired or produced in-house. Nominations alone are enough to bring prestige to the streaming service, but wins can be even more enticing to filmmakers looking for more creative freedom in the industry. The trophies could also coax new subscribers to join the service, which would be a welcome development given the disappointing subscriber growth Netflix posted in the first quarter (reported in last week’s ITM). Netflix shares are down more than 6% since the start of the year. Also, during the Academy Awards, the director of “Nomadland”, Chloe Zhao made history by being the second woman to win the best directing award in nearly 100 years. She is also the first woman of color to win the award.
Lyft-off 🚗
As the latest in a string of acquisitions spurred by the cost and lengthy timelines to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology, the ride-hailing company Lyft announced on Tuesday, it has sold off its autonomous vehicle unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings subsidiary for $550 million. Under the acquisition agreement, Lyft’s so-called Level 5 division will be folded into Woven Planet Holdings. Lyft will receive $550 million in cash, of which $200 million is paid upfront. The remaining $350 million will be made in payments over five years. Around 300 people from Lyft Level 5 will be integrated into Woven Planet. The Level 5 team will continue to operate out of its office in Palo Alto, California. The transaction officially ends Lyft’s nearly four-year effort to develop its own self-driving system. The transaction will remove a big annual expense from Lyft’s budget. The company said that by offloading Level 5 it expects to be able to remove $100 million of annualized non-GAAP operating expenses on a net basis. Those savings will be critical for Lyft as it pursues profitability.
Can’t GameStop, won’t GameStop 🎯
GameStop’s share price jumped 10% in after-hours trading on Monday after gaining nearly 12% in the day. The increase came after the video game retailer said it sold 3.5 million additional shares, raising $551 million to speed up the company’s e-commerce transformation. The shares, favored by the Reddit retail trading crowd, are up nearly 800% this year. GameStop announced the “at-the-market” stock offering at the beginning of April, which was viewed as a way to capitalize on its recent head-turning rally. In January, a band of Reddit retail traders coordinated trades on heavily shorted stocks and created a massive short squeeze in GameStop. The shares surged 400% at one point. The brick-and-mortar retailer traded at less than $20 a share at the start of 2021. The company is now in the middle of a shift to e-commerce, spearheaded by activist investor and GameStop board member Ryan Cohen.
So, why do companies sell additional shares? Essentially, equity financing is the process of issuing and selling shares of stock to raise money. It allows companies to raise large sums of money without having to borrow from banks or issue bonds. Since banks charge an interest rate on loans, equity financing saves a company the interest expense of borrowing. The funds raised in equity financing can be used to acquire another company, build a new manufacturing facility, expand into a new product line, or pay down or pay off outstanding long-term debt among other things. When companies issue additional shares, it increases the number of common shares being traded in the stock market. For existing investors, new shares being issued lead to share dilution. Share dilution occurs because the additional shares reduce the value of the existing shares for investors. As such, issuing additional shares also decreases a company's earnings-per-share (EPS). Since EPS declines from new equity financing, companies often find their stock price decline initially. However, new equity financing is not always a bad decision. If a company is using the funds to pay down debt, which would reduce or eliminate the interest expense from the debt, it can be seen as a good sign and lead to an increase in stock price.
This week in the stock market 🎢
The week began with the S&P 500 edging higher to close at another record on Monday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq also climbed 0.9% to hit its first fresh record close since February 12. On Tuesday, however, the major averages traded around the flatline. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose just 3 points. The S&P 500 closed flat after notching an all-time high the previous day. Nasdaq was the relative underperformer, dipping 0.34% as Tesla fell 4.5%. On Wednesday the major averages closed in the red during normal trading. The Dow fell 165 points, a loss of 0.48%. The S&P 500 hit a record high during the day but couldn’t hold onto those gains and closed 0.08% lower. Nasdaq declined 0.28%. The decrease came after The Federal Reserve said that it would hold interest rates near zero. The S&P slid from its high after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said during a press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee’s decision that there are some signs of froth in the market.
The US Commerce Department reported on Thursday that the US economic activity boomed to start 2021. Widespread vaccinations and more fuel from government spending helped get the US closer to where it was before the pandemic started. Gross domestic product (GDP), the sum of all goods and services produced in the economy, jumped 6.4% for the first three months of the year on an annualized basis. Outside of the reopening-fueled third-quarter surge last year, it was the best period for GDP since the third quarter of 2003. In a separate report, the US Labor Department said initial jobless claims fell to a pandemic-era low last week, but the number was higher than expected. The Dow ended the regular session on Thursday up 0.7%, while the S&P 500 advanced just under 0.7% to finish the day at 4,211.47, a new closing high. Nasdaq, which began the day up 1%, closed the day as the relative underperformer with a gain of just over 0.2%.
Woman of the week
Stacey Cunningham
Stacey Cunningham is the President and CEO of the NYSE Group, which includes the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and a diverse range of equity and equity options exchanges, all wholly-owned subsidiaries of Intercontinental Exchange. She made history in 2018 when she was appointed as the 67th President and the first woman to lead the NYSE Group in its 226-year history.
Cunningham graduated in 1996 with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University. In 1994, while still at university, Cunningham completed a summer internship at the NYSE. After graduating, she began working there as a trading floor clerk. At the time, Cunningham was one of the few dozen female employees on the trading floor, compared to over a thousand male employees. She spent eight years employed as a specialist for the Bank of America.
“Taking risk is okay. Failure is okay. If you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not growing quite as much as you could.”
In 2005, feeling frustrated with the lack of technological transition at the NYSE, she left the exchange to study at the Institute of Culinary Education, working briefly as a chef at a restaurant. From 2007 to 2011, Cunningham worked at Nasdaq stock exchange, first as director of capital markets and then as the head of sales for US transaction services. Cunningham rejoined the NYSE in 2012. From 2015 to 2018, she served as the exchange's chief operating officer. Her job involved handling the exchange's cash equities markets, relationship and product management, and internal governance services. On May 22, 2018, at the age of 43, Cunningham was named the 67th president of the NYSE. Cunningham is the first woman to be appointed president of the NYSE. In an interview, Cunningham said that she has handled working in traditionally male-dominated environments, such as stock exchanges or engineering school, by never showing any doubt about "whether or not I should be where I was.”
Cunningham is listed as No. 35 on the Forbes Most Powerful Women 2020 list.
Thank you so much for reading In The Money. I would love to hear your feedback and please share this with a few friends you think would find this interesting. Have a lovely weekend 💜
I’m Marianne, an early-stage VC based in Stockholm. You can reach me by replying to this email, or find me on Twitter or LinkedIn.