New Partnership In Japan; MadTechMoney Adds More Speakers; And Walled Gardens Collapsing
FPC Is Big In Japan
We announced this week a new partnership with Globalive in Japan. Globalive will become a Venture Partner, helping us to raise strategic money in the market.
Globalive will also help bring our portfolio companies to the Japanese market, which is one of the trickiest to crack globally.
This relationship will hopefully extend well beyond Fund 1 - and we look forward to working with Ko and Isao.
You can read more about our new partnership here: https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2022/10/20/firstpartycapital-enters-into-venture-partnership-with-globalive/.
More Speakers Added To MadTechMoney (November 15)
As you know we are hosting our new MadTechMoney event on November 15, bringing together ad tech/martech founders and the investment community.
We have a great line up of speakers already confirmed, and have added a few more this week, including:
Jamie West, early stage investor and strategic advisor (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-west-media-advertising/).
Josh Wepman, Managing Director, Technology Investment Banking, Houlihan Lokey (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuawepman/).
Mike Follett, MD, Lumen Research (https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-follett-a474216/)
The agenda for the day can be seen here: https://madtechmoney.com/#agenda.
We are reaching capacity for the MadTechMoney event, but we do have a handful of complimentary tickets left for our loyal readers. Use the button below to apply.
Snap’s Big Dive: The Story Of A Social Walled Garden In Terminal Decline
The story of the week - apart from the utter political s*** show in the UK - is the capitulation of Snap.
Once a darling of the public markets , Snap has lost 77% of its public valuation in a matter of twelve months. The outlook looks bad: it is forecasting zero revenue growth for the current quarter. I mean, how can you have a bad Q4?
The market thinks that most listed ad-funded businesses are going to have similar problems - and like a bunch of lemmings they have dumped Meta, Pinterest, Alphabet et al. It’s the typical over reaction you’d expect from Wall Street.
FPC takes a contrary view on this. Ad-funded businesses are still in decent shape despite the headwinds. Snap is simply a victim of the fickle social media B2C segment. You get popular. You scale. You enjoy your walled garden glory for a bit. Then, you die. Slowly.
Here are the reasons why most legacy social walled gardens - like Snap - are in terminal decline:
Its measurement has been battered and torn apart by Apple’s ATT
It’s stuck between performance and brand; it’s not brand and it’s not bottom-of-the-funnel performance
Snap is getting eaten alive by TikTok (like everyone else)
Social walled gardens are ephemeral and find it difficult to hang on to their user base
The best thing to happen to Snap now would be a sale, as it is difficult to see how it recovers.
And on that cheery note, I will wish you all a good weekend.