Quration 10: 16th Nov, 2020
This week, I’m trying something new!
There’s a Cambrian explosion happening in the world of newsletters. I plan to navigate my way through the best of them each day, pick out a selection of interesting articles, and provide summarised versions for my readers.
You can read the newsletter below or listen to the AI-enabled podcast version 👇
Please check it out and share any constructive criticism :)
🎙️ Click here if you’d prefer to listen to the podcast version of Quration 🎙️
Doordash is about to deliver some serious profits to its founders and investors
Doordash, America's number one food delivery business, released its public S-1 filing this morning, bringing clarity to its numbers and moving it closer to an IPO before the end of the year.
They intend to raise just under 2.5 billion US dollars to fund their aggressive expansion into other territories and other types of delivery services.
Most interesting was, Co-founder and CEO, Tony Xu's reference to his mother in the introductory note:
We started DoorDash to help people like my Mom.
I was five years old when I immigrated from China with my parents. Like many immigrants, my family came to this country to pursue the American Dream. Dad came to pursue a Ph.D. in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mom hoped she could retain her job as a doctor, her occupation in China, but the odds were against her. The United States didn’t recognize her Chinese medical license and with only $250 to our family’s name, putting her through school again was impossible. But that didn’t stop her.
Mom put food on the table by working three jobs a day for 12 years. One of those jobs was as a server at a local Chinese restaurant, where I got a front row seat as a dishwasher. For Mom, working at a restaurant was a means to an end. After deferring her dreams for more than a decade, she saved enough money to return to school and open her medical clinic, which she still runs more than 20 years later.
DoorDash exists today to empower those like my Mom who came here with a dream to make it on their own.
Xu’s note points to DoorDash's ambition to provide a centralised distribution capability that will enable Mom and Pop stores to compete with Amazon. I hope they succeed.
Disney+ adds 73 million subscribers in just 11 months!
Brooks Barnes, from the New York Times, tells us that Disney+ has gained more than 73 million streaming subscribers in less than one year!
Disney recently reported an 82 percent decline in quarterly revenues due to the devastating effect of the coronavirus pandemic on theme parks and major movie releases.
Wall Street appeared to ignore the news, anticipating that the theme parks will roar back to life in a vaccine-fueled 2021. And, more importantly, they are all blinded by the brilliant performance of Disney's flagship streaming service, Disney+. As of early October, Disney+ had 74 million subscribers - exceeding its five-year targets in just 11 months!
Occasionally-accurate pundit, Scott Galloway, suggests that Disney is perfectly positioned to release a subscription bundle that other streaming services couldn't touch. Such a bundle could include:
Member-only access to parks — with special events, and fewer crowds;
Member-only cruises, with proprietary itineraries and ports of call;
Tentpole films delivered for in-home viewing by subscribers seven days before release in theaters; and
Special access, subscriber-only, merchandise.
Following the announcement, Disney shares rose more than 5 percent in after-hours trading.
Twenty years on and a peaceful Afghanistan is still unlikely
When the U.S. entered Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, Joe Biden was a strong supporter, publicly proclaiming "Whatever it takes, we should do it."
Twenty years on, and the now President-elect Joe Biden will have the opportunity to decide what it will take to deal with the escalating violence of the ongoing conflict.
The Trump administration's attempts to establish a peace process failed to get out of the gates when, days before the peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government, a Taliban bombing in Kabul injured the country's senior vice president, Amrullah Saleh, and killed 10 bystanders. Just last week, another terror attack on Kabul University killed 35 and wounded 50 more.
President-elect Biden will need to take a clear position on an approach to peace. Andrew Watkins, Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Afghanistan, sees two fatal flaws in the peace process as it exists now.
“One: The uncertainty over whether or not the U.S. is going to make its withdrawal from the country strictly conditional on certain Taliban behaviors or not has, in some ways, emboldened the Taliban. And that’s as true in the way that they fight around Afghanistan as it is in Doha negotiations,” Watkins told The Dispatch.
“Two: The Trump administration’s general approach has required essentially pushing an unwilling and reluctant Afghan government to engage in this process in the first place, because what is on the table is essentially a conversation about how to radically change, if not completely dismantle, the current governing order in Afghanistan,” he continued. “Personal interests aside, no institution wants to take place in its own dismantling.”
According to the Doha Agreement, the U.S. will complete its withdrawal from Afghanistan by May 2021. It remains to be seen what happens between now and then, but the timeline means that this issue will be front and centre during the transition to a Biden Administration.
Charlotte Lawson provides a complete synopsis of the situation in her article in The Dispatch - "Kabul Violence Highlights Failure of Afghan Peace Process".
The magic of mushrooms
Because of long-held negative or recreational associations, most people are unaware that psychedelics are the most promising treatment for a wide range of mental health issues -- from depression to alcoholism to anorexia -- that we’ve ever seen.
The total direct and indirect costs of the mental health epidemic are expected to reach __$6 trillion__ by 2030, up from $2.5 trillion in 2010, according to the World Economic Forum. The Lancet Commission estimates that number to be as high as $16 trillion when you include the loss of productivity, and spending on social welfare, education, and law and order. Despite the huge need, the last real innovation in the fight against mental illness was the release of Prozac in 1988.
After fifty years in the dark, though, psychedelics are once again getting the chance to shine. Led by public figures like Michael Pollan, Tim Ferriss, and even Joe Rogan, and leading institutions like Johns Hopkins, NYU, Berkeley, and Imperial College London, therapeutic psychedelics are going mainstream again:
On election night, Oregon voted to legalize psilocybin for mental health treatment in supervised settings. Washington, DC voted to decriminalize it.
The FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy Designation, which they grant to therapies that have shown great promise and clinically significant improvement over available therapies, to three trials using psychedelics to treat mental health indications, one with MDMA and two with psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.
Last week, Johns Hopkins released a new study that showed that treatment with psilocybin and supportive psychotherapy produced rapid and large reductions in depressive symptoms in adults with major depression, with a magnitude of effect four times larger than antidepressants’.
For a full review of the current medical applications of psilocybin, and why silicon valley investors are lining up to get behind psychedelic startups, check out Packy McCormick's post, "The Magic of Mushrooms".
The husband and wife team behind the leading vaccine to solve Covid-19
Last week, a German company, BioNTech, teamed up with Pfizer to announce that they had developed a vaccine for the coronavirus that was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of having previously been infected. The stunning results vaulted BioNTech and Pfizer to the front of the race to find a cure for a disease that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
BioNTech was founded by two scientists - Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci.
The following excerpt is from the New York Times article by David Gelles, The Husband And Wife Team Behind The Leading Vaccine To Solve Covid-19.
Dr. Sahin, 55, was born in Iskenderun, Turkey. When he was 4, his family moved to Cologne, Germany, where his parents worked at a Ford factory. He grew up wanting to be a doctor, and became a physician at the University of Cologne. In 1993, he earned a doctorate from the university for his work on immunotherapy in tumor cells.
Early in his career, he met Dr. Türeci. She had early hopes to become a nun and ultimately wound up studying medicine. Dr. Türeci, now 53 and the chief medical officer of BioNTech, was born in Germany, the daughter of a Turkish physician who immigrated from Istanbul. On the day they were married, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci returned to the lab after the ceremony.
The pair were initially focused on research and teaching, including at the University of Zurich, where Dr. Sahin worked in the lab of Rolf Zinkernagel, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in medicine.
In 2001, Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci founded Ganymed Pharmaceuticals, which developed drugs to treat cancer using monoclonal antibodies.
After several years they founded BioNTech as well, looking to use a wider range of technologies, including messenger RNA, to treat cancer. “We want to build a large European pharmaceutical company,” Dr. Sahin said in an interview with the Wiesbaden Courier, a local paper.
Even before the pandemic, BioNTech was gaining momentum. The company raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now has more than 1,800 people on staff, with offices in Berlin, other German cities and Cambridge, Mass. In 2018, it began its partnership with Pfizer. Last year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invested $55 million to fund its work treating H.I.V. and tuberculosis. Also in 2019, Dr. Sahin was awarded the Mustafa Prize, a biennial Iranian prize for Muslims in science and technology.
Dr. Sahin and Dr. Türeci sold Ganymed for $1.4 billion in 2016. Last year, BioNTech sold shares to the public; in recent months, its market value has soared past $21 billion, making the couple among the richest in Germany.
The two billionaires live with their teenage daughter in a modest apartment near their office. They ride bicycles to work. They do not own a car.
In Germany, where immigration continues to be a fractious issue, the success of two scientists of Turkish descent was cause for celebration.
Belgian racing pigeon fetches record price of $1.9 million
An article by RAF CASERT, from The Associated Press
A wealthy Chinese pigeon racing fan put down a record price of 1.6 million euros ($1.9 million) for the Belgian-bred bird, saying a lot more than merely what kind of money can be made in the once-quaint sport, which seemed destined to decline only a few years back.
During a frantic last half hour Sunday at the end of a two-week auction at the Pipa pigeon center, two Chinese bidders operating under the pseudonyms Super Duper and Hitman drove up the price by 280,000 euros ($325,000), leaving the previous record that Belgian-bred Armando fetched last year well behind by 350,000 euros ($406,000).
Super Duper got the hen, and behind the pseudonym is said to be the same wealthy Chinese industrialist who already had Armando, allowing for breeding with the two expensive birds.
With the rise of business wealth in China came also conspicuous consumption and a new venue for gambling. Somehow, pigeons fit the bill. China often features one-loft racing, where pigeons all get used to one coop for months and then are released many hundreds of miles away to make their way back with their unique sense of orientation and special speed training. Prize pots can reach into the tens of millions of euros.
For breeding, though, there is no place like Belgium. This is where, little more than a generation ago, the national weekend radio news was followed by announcements on whether pigeons were released in faraway places in France or even Spain and what weather conditions the birds were facing.
It was proof again that an age-old hobby in Western Europe identified with working-class men now has a new, elitist foreign lease on life.
If you'd like to see more of what I'm exploring, you can follow me on twitter. If you've come across something you think I'd like, hit reply and let me know why it's worth checking out (articles, lectures, podcasts, books, exhibitions… whatever).