Hey readers, the situation in India remains grim. If you are able, and would like to, please consider making a donation to support relief efforts here, being driven by the Indian startup ecosystem. We continue to hope that your loved ones are safe and get well soon if they are unwell 🙏. We lost someone very close to us, but the writing must go on 🙇. Did you know.. it’s earnings season?!
Wait, what’s Earnings?! 🙂 Checkout the “Wait, what” section 👇
About BNFK
Knowledge is at the heart of being. To be more, you must know more.
With this weekly we distill the latest, most interesting, Business News 📰 .. to an emoji filled Newsletter for Kids. A dad 👽 & son 👾 experiment, delivered every Sunday.
Toyota is buying Lyft’s autonomous cars business unit for $550 million. Lyft is a ride-hailing company like Uber, but while Uber is running its autonomous cars program, Lyft decided to shutter its over 4 year effort. Will it be a good decision in the long term? 🤔 Discuss with Dad or a big person at home.
And that $2.9 billion NASA contract 🚀 we reported on.. the one to get humans to the moon 🌝 using SpaceX’s Starship? It’s been put on hold 😱, and under review, after complaints by competitor Blue Origin 😅.
Wait, what is..
Earnings: You’ll probably remember Revenue from Edition #3 as the amount of money a company makes.. well Earnings is the Profit a company makes before it pays tax💰. See row E in the chart below. Every quarter, companies that are listed share their results including how they did on Revenues and Earnings; this time period is referred to as Earnings Season or Earnings Week.
Going IPO, Listing, Listed 💹 (refresher): Most companies begin life as a Private company. This simply means the Shares of the company are not bought and sold freely. When a company says they are going ‘public’ or that they are ‘listing’, this means that they are now making available their shares to be bought and sold by anyone in the public. Autonomous: Something that can think for itself. When applied to cars, it means cars that will be able to drive entirely themselves, without a driver. Dutch: Very few countries have names as different as the Dutch. Wait what? Dutch refers to citizens of The Netherlands or Holland as the country is also known. If that wasn’t confusing enough, Dutch is also the language spoken by them. 🤗 5G: Like 3G and 4G, 5G is a telecom network technology that boosts speeds of internet on mobile devices. 5G is capable of giving download speeds of upto 10 GB per second, thats 100x faster than 4G. 🎉 Market Capitalisation: It’s kind of like Valuation👇 of a company. But not quite. Valuation (refresher): Simply put valuation is the value of a company. There are many things that go into deciding the valuation of a company, but most important bit used to calculate value is a multiple of the company’s Revenue or Profits before tax. Depending on what type of company it is, you can get 1x, 3x, 10x or 100x the value of Profits. Psst.. did you know Tesla is currently valued at a 1000x its Profits 🙇
Woah 😱 Weird 🥴
If you hadn’t noticed, give a keener look to the image below. No it’s not a building in the middle of a city, its an actual Super Yacht being pulled through narrow canals in the city of Rotterdam, getting set for sea trials. Photographed by Tom van Oossanen it surely had a tight ride out 🛳
If you thought that 👆 image was strange, notice something about this 👇 one. Its a tractor with no driver! A new farming bot (robot) is capable of zapping out weeds at the rate of 100,000 per hour, using laser. ⚡️
After DoorDash in the US, and Deliveroo in the UK, India foodtech behemoth Zomato has filed for a $1 billion IPO. Can you spot what their Revenue (remember Edition #3) was for 2020 from the chart below? Take help from Mom or a big person at home.
Mental models.. whaaaat! 🤯
My dad insisted we put this section in here, even though I protested saying its going to be a while before kids need to apply mental models. Mental models are nothing but ways of thinking, you can use as a framework, to take decisions or solve problems. Who knows, they might just be useful!
Second Order Thinking 😇 - When we take decisions, we tend to think like "Whats the worst that can happen?" 🤔 and in this thinking, usually only end up thinking of the first level of what can go wrong with that decision. Ignoring, many resulting and further follow-on impacts of that decision. 🚞 🚃 🚃
Second Order thinking states that one must think of the second or subsequent impacts of a decision. And hence urges one to not take decisions in haste, and only after due consideration. 🙂
Read more in this fabulous Farnam Street blog.
Tech, products, toys ++ 🤖
Continuing with our EV themed news, here is a big one. One of the first production version solar cars 🌞, the Lightyear One, will go on sale this year. Built by a Dutch startup, it will retail for €150,000 and boast a 450 mile range. 🏎
Online video conferencing startup, Zoom, just launched an “immersive” view. You’ll ‘feel’ as if you’re sitting in one room.. even though its a virtual room 🤷
Pro Tip: The magic of learning is in curiosity. Don’t shy away from clicking those hyperlinked texts to read and learn more. We mostly hyperlink to text we have read ourselves to make sure it is safe, but please be aware that comments and ads shown on these pages are beyond our control. We recommend using a kids friendly browser to view the links.
Disclaimers: Please preview, review, and make sure to pass on only that content which you feel is appropriate for your kids. Stocks or cryptocurrencies covered are in no way a recommendation and shared only for news / information purposes. We have near zero expertise on investing, and it’s always good to know that Cryptocurrencies are a highly risky, and even illegal, investment in many markets :)
