Category: Tech

• The evolution of tech and media is creating opportunities for innovation in sports.
• Sports betting has also added new facets to the industry in the US.
• Here are pitch decks 10 sports startups used to raise millions in Series A and Seed rounds.

The sports industry has exploded in recent years as technology and consumer habits change.

The expansion of legal sports betting in the US ushered in one of the biggest transformations. It’s opened up a new market not only for sportsbooks like DraftKings, but for the ancillary businesses that support betting — be it platform providers, data companies, media partners, geolocation and compliance suppliers, or others.

Venture capital poured $334.5 million into the early-stage sports betting and gambling space last year, despite the current macroeconomic struggles, according to PitchBook. That’s down from the previous year but more than the year before. And more opportunities for growth are expected in the next decade ahead as sports gambling expands into more states such as California.

In college sports, student-athletes are finally allowed to profit from their name, image, and likeness, after a 2021 rule change. Student-athletes have since become one of the most engaging influencer groups, earning anywhere from a few hundred dollars to six figures from brand deals. This has opened the opportunity for startups to build marketplaces or creator tools to help student-athlete creators. 

Technology has also changed the way leagues and teams operate and how fans consume sports. Uplift Labs has partnered with leagues like the NBA for its technology that analyzes player movement through smartphone cameras.

Stadium Live, which has raised $13 million in funding since 2020, created a fan-engagement app for Gen-Z audiences, who founder Kevin Kim said are paying less attention to TV screens during live sports. Kim said investors even chased him down on platforms like Twitter and Discord, gaining interest in Stadium Live’s unique position in sports media.

“Every time an investor or potential people would look at [Stadium Live], they were like, ‘Oh, this has a unique vibe that we have not seen before in any other apps,’” Kim told Insider.

Whether it’s in sports tech, betting, or consumer products, the sports space has become a world of opportunity for startups to take a stab at creating the next big company.

Insider talked with a handful of sports startup founders who’ve pitched their startups to investors about their process. They broke down the pitch decks they used to secure millions of dollars in funding. 

Read the pitch decks that helped 10 sports-focused startups raise millions of dollars:

• Kero Sports, a startup that powers free-to-play games in sports apps: $1 million seed round (6 key pages)
• BeyondPlay, a mobile gaming and online-gambling app: $1.7 million (90-second video)
• Curastory, a video-making startup for sports creators: $2 million seed round (27 pages)
• Compliable, a tech company helping with the sports-gambling licensing process: $3.6 million seed round (4 pages)
• Brag House, an esports social platform for college gamers: $5 million Series A round (24 pages)
• Uplift, a sports tech startup using biomechanics to improve performance and physical health: $5.5 million seed round (14 pages)
• Champions Round, a social-gaming startup catering to Gen-Z audiences who want shorter, faster play: $7 million Series A (13 pages)
• Stix, a golf startup aiming to make quality equipment more affordable: $10 million Series A (14 pages)
• Mojo, a sports-betting app where bettors can invest in the careers of athletes (11 pages)
• Overtime, a social media outlet target ting the Gen-Z market that has launched a basketball league (33 pages)

This post has been updated with new information.

• Austin’s airport is one of the newest and fastest-growing airports in the US.
• Despite efforts, the airport is rapidly outgrowing an infrastructure designed for a much smaller population.
• A 20-year expansion plan aims to build a model airport for growing cities, but forecasts predict it still won’t be enough.
• This story is part of “Advancing Cities,” a series highlighting urban centers across the US that are committed to improving life for their residents.

The capital city of Texas has quadrupled its population since 2000, and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (ABIA) serves as a gateway for transplants and visitors alike.

In 1999, Austin closed its municipal airport to open a new international airport on the site of the former Bergstrom Air Force base, making ABIA one of the newest and fastest-growing airports in the nation.

But the airport has struggled to keep up with the city’s booming population, leading to delays and other air-travel frustrations. So the city has come up with a 20-year “master plan” to get ABIA on track.

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The Amazon Pet Day deals are live and so are we! Amazon’s dedicated annual pet sale is a 48-hour smorgasbord of discounts aimed at our hairy, scaly, and furry friends. As with any Amazon sale, it can be hard work trying to filter out the genuine bargains and quality items amongst the thousands of discounts buried on the site. 

We can help though, our team of pet-loving deal hunters is combing through various categories to help recommend the best Amazon Pet Day deals. If we wouldn’t buy it for a pet of our own, we won’t recommend you do either. Expect big price drops on food, treats, pet care, litter, vacuum cleaners, trackers, pet cams, bedding, toys, and much more.

Directly below, you’ll find links to various categories if you’d like to dive in and have a browse yourself. Further down the page, is our live blog where we’ll be adding fresh highlights throughout the next two days.

Amazon Pet Day live deal updates:  

After the 2016 election, Altman, who tweeted that he voted against Donald Trump, said he decided to talk to 100 Trump supporters around the US to understand what they did and didn’t like about the president. He also wanted to know “what would convince them not to vote for him in the future.”

In a thread on Twitter, Altman said he was “voting against Trump because I believe the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America.”

He also said Peter Thiel, who was still working with YC at the time, “is a high profile supporter of Trump,” and that, “I disagree with this.”

But, he said, “YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee.”

YC and Thiel stopped working together a year later in 2017 for unspecified reasons.

During his interviews, Altman said he “did not expect to talk to so many Muslims, Mexicans, Black people, and women in the course of this project.”

He said almost everyone he approached was willing to talk to him, but they also didn’t want to share their names in fear of being “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him.” Altman said one of the people he talked to in Silicon Valley made him sign a confidentiality agreement before talking because she was scared of losing her job for supporting Trump.

Source: Twitter, Sam Altman, Insider

• Top economists see a painful credit squeeze and crash in the commercial real estate market.
• David Rosenberg predicted the US will tip into a recession by September.
• “A recession is a very big call because it’s a haircut to national income,” he said. 

It’s an uncertain time for the US economy.

GDP growth slowed more sharply than expected in the first quarter. More and more companies are announcing mass layoffs. Inflation has cooled by remains high, raising new questions about how high the Federal Reserve will lift rates.

Elsewhere, turmoil has slammed regional banks. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed last month, and First Republic Bank could be the next shoe to drop. 

The consensus view has zig zagged and now looks like less of a consensus. For what it’s worth, here’s what three top economists are saying about the US economy. 

David Rosenberg

The former chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch predicted the US will tip into a recession by September. He also sees a 20% downside in stocks and a damaging credit crunch.

On Blockworks’ On The Margin podcast this week, the founder and president of Rosenberg Research offered some other hot takes. 

• “I don’t think there are enough rate cuts priced in for next year. There’s a serious risk we’re going back down to the zero bound in a recession that ends up destroying demand and causing inflation to decline.”
• “A recession is a very big call because it’s a haircut to national income. It’s as if the whole country takes a pay cut. It’s not that we take the Lamborghini from 80 down to 20. It’s that we go in reverse.”
•  “It was like the Energizer Bunny — it gave us a little bit more juice. But to say that we’re not going to have a recession because of lagged impacts of fiscal stimulus from two years ago is ridiculous. The leading indicators are telling me that the recession is actually starting this quarter or next quarter. It’s certainly not a 2024 story.”

Jeremy Siegel

The Wharton professor said don’t be fooled by the current upbeat earnings season because the US economy is undergoing a credit crunch. “The impact is there, it’s just not in the data yet,” Siegel told CNBC of first-quarter financial results.

In a weekly note to clients, Siegel also added:

• “I still believe the cumulative effect of tightening rates and the banking reverberations will slow things down dramatically and make it hard for the stock market to break out from these high levels it has reached several times before.”
• “I remain uncharacteristically cautious until the Fed ‘gets it’ and not only pauses but says it is starting to look at rate cuts. I believe the real interest rate is too high to sustain normal growth at this point in the cycle.”

Mohamed El-Erian

The chief economic adviser at Allianz said large institutions like the Fed must adapt quickly on handling this unprecedented macro environment. 

The top economist broke down his outlook in a Financial Times column released on Friday.

• “Markets will punish companies and their managements if they do not adapt. Indeed, we are likely to see more financial stress and bankruptcies for businesses lacking resilience, as well as those with operating approaches that are not easily adaptable to a world of higher rates for longer. The latter includes commercial real estate whose moment of truth will materialise as more than $1tn of holdings need to be refinanced in the next 18 months.”
• “Without [adaptability], the steadying and guiding role of US institutional maturity will weaken even faster in the face of eroding credibility, turning this once dominant US comparative advantage into an even greater source of domestic and global instability.”

• Bitcoin could climb by $20,000 if a US default happened, Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick said.
• Not every crypto would act similarly, with some behaving more like equities, he told Insider.
• “So actually, the optimal trade would probably be long bitcoin, short ethereum.”

With the looming debt ceiling crisis showing no signs of a resolution, both bond and equity markets have become jittery.

But while some investors are fearful of a historic default, one asset could potentially rise through such a situation: Bitcoin.

Describing a US default as a “low-probability, high-impact event,” Geoff Kendrick, head of FX research at Standard Chartered, said it may cause the bitcoin to jump by about $20,000, representing an increase of 68% from current levels.

He told Insider that’s because the top cryptocurrency by market cap has a reputation for performing well in periods of stress and is often seen as a safe haven, especially as it is a decentralized asset.

But Kendrick doesn’t think bitcoin would rally in a straight line in the event of a US default, saying “it probably comes a bit lower on day one or day two or week.” In that case, bitcoin could dip by $5,000 initially, then jump by $25,000, he estimated.

And not every cryptocurrency would follow bitcoin’s behavior, he added, with others like ethereum trading more like stocks, which would likely fall in a default.

“So actually, the optimal trade would probably be long bitcoin, short ethereum. That sort of mix would probably be a good expression of this,” Kendrick said.

If Congress fails to lift the $31.4 trillion federal debt limit, a default could come sometime in the summer — an event that could cause seismic ruptures global markets. On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned a default would be catastrophic for the US economy, sparking mass unemployment, payment failures, and higher rates “into perpetuity.”

With House Republicans and the White House still far from a deal to raise the debt ceiling, yields on three-month Treasurys recently jumped to a 22-year high, as they would mature around a potential default date.

Meanwhile, bitcoin is still recovering from a massive sell-off that began in late 2021 and continued through much of 2022 as the Federal Reserve embarked on an aggressive tightening cycle. 

But bitcoin has rallied nearly 80% so far in 2023 and recently neared $30,000 as First Republic Bank’s woes reignited fears over the financial sector. 

For his part, Kendrick is already bullish on bitcoin, saying in a note on Monday that it could surge to $100,000 by the end of 2024 due to bank turmoil, bitcoin halving, and the expected end of Fed rate hikes, among other things, though it didn’t mention the risk of a US default.

“While sources of uncertainty remain, we think the pathway to the USD 100,000 level is becoming clearer,” he wrote.

• Republican megadonor Peter Thiel is not planning to donate to any 2024 GOP candidates.
• Sources told Reuters that he’s unhappy with the GOP’s positions on abortions and transgender rights.
• Thiel wants Republicans to talk less about the culture wars, and more about China, per Reuters.

Billionaire Republican megadonor Peter Thiel is not planning to donate to any political candidates in 2024 because he’s unhappy with the GOP’s positions on several important social issues, according to Reuters.

The news agency spoke to two sources close to the businessman, who was an early backer of former President Donald Trump and stumped for him in 2016, who said that Thiel reached this decision late last year.

One source, a Thiel business associate, said that the GOP’s positions on abortion and restrictions on which bathrooms transgender students can use in schools contributed to his decision.

The source said that Thiel believes Republicans are making a mistake by honing in on culture war topics for 2024, and prefers candidates to instead focus on US innovation and competing with China.

Both sources said that Thiel, who has a net worth of more than $8 billion, has declared on several recent occasions that he has taken a step back entirely from US politics.

Four other sources confirmed to Reuters that Thiel, who was born in Germany and later went on to co-found PayPal, has plans to withdraw from American political life, with one person saying that concerns over his family’s safety have influenced his decision.

Thiel donated some $1.25 million to the 2016 campaign efforts of Trump, which set him up as an outlier in Silicon Valley.

But he didn’t financially back Trump’s re-election efforts in 2020, with one source close to Thiel telling Reuters that the businessman was turned off by the chaos surrounding Trump’s persona.

Thiel contributed more than $25 million to federal-level GOP candidates in 2022, making him the 10th largest donor to either party in the midterm congressional elections, according to Reuters, which cited OpenSecrets data.

Insider contacted Thiel for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

The news that Thiel does not intend to contribute to GOP candidates in 2024 follows reports that Republican megadonors are souring on Gov. Ron DeSantis, with some attributing it to similar reasons.

Thomas Peterffy, for example, told the Financial Times that DeSantis’ “stance on abortion and book banning” meant that he and “his friends” are no longer planning to give their financial support to the Republican governor.

• Tesla is being sued by the widow of an Apple engineer who died in a 2018 car crash.
• The lawsuit cites statements from Elon Musk promoting the safety of Tesla’s self-driving software.
• But Tesla’s lawyers say they can’t confirm if he ever said that, because they could be deepfakes.

Tesla’s lawyers say that Elon Musk’s past statements about the safety of its self-driving feature can’t be trusted because they could be deepfakes, per court filings seen by Insider.

The electric car company is being sued by Sz Hua Huang, whose husband Walter Huang died in a car crash in 2018.

The lawsuit – which was first submitted to the Santa Clara County Superior Court in 2019 – alleges that Tesla’s autopilot feature was defective, and accelerated Huang’s car into a concrete barrier after misreading highway lane lines.

Huang’s lawyers want to interview Musk about statements he made promoting the capabilities of Tesla’s self-driving software.

Per Reuters, that includes a speech from a 2016 conference, when he said: “A Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person right now.”

But Tesla’s lawyers say they don’t know whether or not Musk actually said any of those things.

“At first glance it might seem unusual that Tesla could not admit or deny the authenticity of video and audio recordings purportedly contain statements by Mr. Musk,” they wrote in an April 20 court filing seen by Insider.

“The reality is he, like many public figures, is the subject of many ‘deepfake’ videos and audio recordings that purport to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did.”

On Wednesday, Judge Evette Pennypacker said these arguments were “deeply troubling” and tentatively ordered Musk to be interviewed under oath for three hours about whether he made the statements, Reuters reported.

“Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deepfakes, his public statements are immune,” Pennypacker wrote, per Reuters.

“In other words, Mr. Musk, and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deep fake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do,” the judge added.

The lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial on July 31.

Tesla and an attorney for Huang did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, sent outside US working hours.

• Netflix is pushing ahead with its password-sharing clampdown.
• The streaming giant has said its US crackdown will start in the current quarter. 
• In Spain, users have gone on a canceling spree. Here’s how the clampdown works.

Netflix is pushing ahead with its password-sharing clampdown — and research shows that scores of customers have gone on a canceling spree.  

In the US, the streaming giant said its crackdown on password sharing will start in the current quarter. The proposed plans have been met with fierce backlash from some customers, several of who threatened to cancel their accounts if the rules were enforced.

However, the policy has already been rolled out in several countries.

In Spain, where password-sharing rules were enforced in early February, Netflix subscribers have been on a canceling spree, per Bloomberg.

Citing research from Kantar, Bloomberg reported that Netflix lost more than one million users in Spain during the first three months of 2023. Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared with the previous period, per Kantar’s research.

The reaction is not entirely unexpected. In an earnings call in January, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said the company was expecting to see “a bit of a cancel reaction” to the policy. In its first-quarter earnings release on April 18, Netflix said the company expected the dip to be temporary before “borrowers” started signing up for their own accounts. 

How it works

Netflix has said it can detect when passwords are shared outside a household, which it defines as people who live in the same location as the account owner.

The company previously said it uses a combination of IP addresses and device IDs to determine if an account is being used in the correct location. If users want to share their account with someone outside their household they can buy an “extra member” and add them to the account, according to Netflix’s help center. This feature is only available in some countries. 

Paid sharing was initially tested in Costa Rica, Chile, and Peru, where it costs the equivalent of around $2 to $3 to add an extra member account.

This was later extended to include New Zealand, Canada, Spain, and Portugal.

The extra member prices differ across countries. In New Zealand, the service costs NZ$7.99 ($5.09) per month, in Canada it costs CAN$ 7.99 ($5.96) per month. In Spain, the service costs 5.99 euros ($6.45), and in Portugal, it’s 3.99 euros ($4.30).

The company has compared Canada’s reaction to the new policy with what it hopes to achieve in the US.

“In Canada, which we believe is a reliable predictor for the US, our paid membership base is now larger than prior to the launch of paid sharing and revenue 4 growth has accelerated and is now growing faster than in the US,” the company said in a letter to shareholders after its first-quarter earnings release.

Netflix has tested other rules aimed at stamping out password-sharing, including temporary-access codes for traveling, Insider previously reported.

Netflix did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment made outside of normal working hours. 

• The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index declined further in March, suggesting a recession will hit in mid-2023. 
• The LEI is down 4.5% over the last six months, a steeper decline than the 3.5% rate in the preceding six months.
• The key indicator has declined for 12 consecutive months.

The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index for the US dropped for the 12th consecutive month in March, signaling that a recession is set to hit in the middle of 2023. 

The indicator — which broadly tracks business cycles using 10 inputs from across manufacturing, unemployment, building permits, and interest rate spreads, among other factors — slipped 1.2% in March to. 108.4, following a decline of 0.5% in February.

In the six-month span leading up to March, it fell 4.5%, a steeper drop than the 3.5% contraction from the preceding six-month stretch.

“The Conference Board forecasts that economic weakness will intensify and spread more widely throughout the US economy over the coming months, leading to a recession starting in mid-2023,” Justyna Zabinska-La Monica, senior manager, business cycle indicators, at the Conference Board, said last week.

The Leading Economic Index has seen its sharpest reversal on record outside of a recession dating back to the 1950s, Wells Fargo economists said in a recent note, and presents a “clear message” that a downturn remains ahead.

To be sure, the data illustrated that manufacturer’s new orders for consumer goods and materials, as well as stock prices, have been positive contributions over the last six months.

All other indicators pointed lower, however, with negative contributions flashing across non-financial as well as financial components, like credit and Treasury rates. 

Recent bank turmoil that started with Silicon Valley Bank added pressure to the financial and credit systems, while the labor market’s strength has started to lose some momentum over the last month.  

At the same time, the New York Fed’s Recession Probabilities Model suggests the odds of a downturn are at their highest since 1982. The model’s April reading shows a 57.7% chance of a recession.