Hi there,

Here is this week in charts.

The big crypto apple. New York is the crypto capital of the US. In 2021, NY-based startups raised $6.5B, or 46% of US blockchain funding, led by massive Q4 rounds from NYDIG ($1B) and Celsius Network ($750M). Silicon Valley came in second with $3.9B in blockchain funding. Los Angeles and Miami tied for third, each seeing just over $760M in 2021.

The big get bigger. Microsoft just notched 3 straight quarters of 20%+ YoY revenue growth. The last time the $2.3T company did so was over 20 years ago in 1999, when its revenue was only 12% of what it is today. It’s not just startups that are scaling quickly — tech giants are also growing at an unprecedented rate (h/t Michael Batnick) and gobbling up others in the process. 

All the options. Options trading — which lets investors bet on the direction they think a stock price will go — has soared in popularity since the beginning of the pandemic. Even as trading of “meme stocks” like GameStop has slowed, options trading has maintained its momentum among small traders. The rise of retail investing apps like Robinhood — which derived 38% of its net revenue in 2021 from options payments — has helped drive the boom. 

Online DIY. PhDs are more likely to rely on the internet to determine their career path than their supervisor’s or peers’ advice, according to a 2019 Nature survey of over 6,000 graduate students. High-consideration decisions of all types are increasingly moving online. The internet is not just shaping students’ career choices — from managing personal finances to finding skincare products, going online is increasingly becoming key to millennials’ decision-making. 

Selling off into the sunset. Superyacht sales have gone bananas. 2021 saw 77% more superyacht sales than in 2020. Boosted by surging stock markets, and desiring socially distanced forms of recreation, the ultrarich put in a surge of orders last year. 

So many directions to take this. This isn’t a bad chart so we're kind of breaking the normal +1 theme, but we thought it was worth sharing. 
 

I love you.

Anand

@asanwal

P.S. You’ve got questions. We’ve got answers. Our 2022 tech trends roundtable discussion is next week (February 10) — sign up here.

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