00:00 Jason intros the show 01:50 CCP closes foreign IPO loophole 16:07 The 4 ways the CCP is reigning in big tech 18:44 Roneil Rumburg, Founder and CEO of Audius 27:24 Why NFTs & Crypto matter for music 38:20 How token-based fundraising works 47:44 Why Crypto isn’t as transparent as people think 57:13 The Foundation that controls $450M in tokens 1:07:34 Royal, 3lau’s new company
Can I share this graphic? Yes. Visualizations are free to share and post in their original form across the web—even for publishers. Please link back to this page and attribute Visual Capitalist.
When do I need a license? Licenses are required for some commercial uses, translations, or layout modifications. You can even white label our visualizations. Explore your options.
Interested in this piece? Click here to license this visualization.
Who Were the Highest-Paid Athletes in 2021?
The financial figures in sport are enormous. The highest-paid athletes in the world make tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions per year.
The global pandemic put a significant dent in the commercial aspect of many sports. Even though the teams and their owners earned significantly less during this period, individual athletes actually thrived.
According to the Forbes annual rankings of the world’s highest-paid athletes for 2021, the top 50 of them turned in a record-setting year and made nearly $2.8 billion in 12 months, beating 2019’s record total by more than $150 million.
Highlights of the Year
This year’s list had a multitude of names making the big bucks. Here are some of the highlights:
Connor McGregor is 2021’s highest-paid athlete
MMA fighter Connor McGregor tops the list with a whopping $180 million earned in 2021. According to McGregor, this has been a long time coming, who in 2016 infamously boasted to soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo that he’d overtake him one day as sports’ highest-paid (Read more...)
Can I share this graphic? Yes. Visualizations are free to share and post in their original form across the web—even for publishers. Please link back to this page and attribute Visual Capitalist.
When do I need a license? Licenses are required for some commercial uses, translations, or layout modifications. You can even white label our visualizations. Explore your options.
Interested in this piece? Click here to license this visualization.
Who Were the Highest-Paid Athletes in 2021?
The financial figures in sport are enormous. The highest-paid athletes in the world make tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions per year.
The global pandemic put a significant dent in the commercial aspect of many sports. Even though the teams and their owners earned significantly less during this period, individual athletes actually thrived.
According to the Forbes annual rankings of the world’s highest-paid athletes for 2021, the top 50 of them turned in a record-setting year and made nearly $2.8 billion in 12 months, beating 2019’s record total by more than $150 million.
Highlights of the Year
This year’s list had a multitude of names making the big bucks. Here are some of the highlights:
Connor McGregor is 2021’s highest-paid athlete
MMA fighter Connor McGregor tops the list with a whopping $180 million earned in 2021. According to McGregor, this has been a long time coming, who in 2016 infamously boasted to soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo that he’d overtake him one day as sports’ highest-paid (Read more...)
BTS songs are really interesting.I rarely like them the very first time I hear a BTS song. but by the fifth time, I can’t stop singing along. NPS of BTS increases dramatically over time
The SpaceX Starship might be the next rocket to take humans to the moon, but it won’t be the first, and likely not the last.
Starting in the mid-20th century, humanity has explored space faster than ever before. We’ve launched satellites, telescopes, space stations, and spacecrafts, all strapped to rocket-propelled launch vehicles that helped them breach our atmosphere.
This infographic from designer Tyler Skarbek stacks up the many different rockets of the world side-by-side, showing which country designed them, what years they were used, and what they (could) accomplish.
How Do The World’s Rockets Stack Up?
Before they were used for space travel, rockets were produced and developed to be used as ballistic missiles.
The first rocket to officially reach space—defined by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale as crossing the Kármán line at 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth’s mean sea level—was the German-produced V-2 rocket in 1944.
But after World War II, V-2 production fell into the hands of the U.S., the Soviet Union (USSR), and the UK.
Over the next few decades and the unfolding of the Cold War, what started as a nuclear arms race of superior ballistic missiles turned into the Space Race. Both the U.S. and the USSR tried to be the first to achieve and master spaceflight, driving production of many new and different rockets.
This is the Language Each Country Wants to Learn the Most
When it came to choosing a new hobby during COVID-19 lockdowns, learning a new language was a popular choice—in March 2020, the language app Duolingo saw a 300% boost in new users.
But which languages were the most popular to learn in each country? This graphic by Wordtips maps the most popular language learning choices around the globe.
To find out which countries wanted to learn which languages, Wordtips used Google’s Keyword Planner, and tallied the number of searches for ‘learn x language’ (translated into different languages) in every country from May 2020 to May 2021.
Most Desired Languages to Learn in North America
Interestingly, Japanese is the most popular language that Americans and Canadians want to learn.
While this may sound surprising, North Americans have consumed and adored Japanese pop culture since the early 1990s. And recently, Westerners’ interest in anime has grown even more prominent, with the demand for anime programs in the U.S., for Q1 of 2021, up 33% compared to a year prior.
Another country’s top pick that may come as a surprise is Belize, where the most popular language to learn is Chinese.
According to the 2000 Census, almost 1% of the country’s population identifies as Chinese. Chinese immigration to Belize began in the mid-1800s, when Chinese immigrants were brought into the country (then known as British Honduras) as laborers.
More recently, a wave of Taiwanese migrants have immigrated and set up businesses (Read more...)
The consumer internet industry spent two decades building a huge, complex, chaotic pile of tools and systems to track and analyse what people do on the internet, and we’ve spent the last half-decade arguing about that, sometimes for very good reasons, and sometimes with strong doses of panic and opportunism. Now that’s mostly going to change, between unilateral decisions by some big tech platforms and waves of regulation from all around the world. But we don’t have any clarity on what that would mean, or even quite what we’re trying to achieve, and there are lots of unresolved questions. We are confused.
First, can we achieve the underlying economic aims of online advertising in a private way? Advertisers don’t necessarily want (or at least need) to know who you are as an individual. As Tim O’Reilly put it, data is sand, not oil - all this personal data actually only has value in the aggregate of millions. Advertisers don’t really want to know who you are - they want to show diaper ads to people who have babies, not to show them to people who don’t, and to have some sense of which ads drove half a million sales and which ads drove a million sales. Targeting ads per se doesn’t seem fundamentally evil, unless you think putting car ads in car magazines is also evil. But the internet became able to show car ads to people who read about cars yesterday, somewhere else - to target based on (Read more...)
Can I share this graphic? Yes. Visualizations are free to share and post in their original form across the web—even for publishers. Please link back to this page and attribute Visual Capitalist.
When do I need a license? Licenses are required for some commercial uses, translations, or layout modifications. You can even whitelabel our visualizations. Explore your options.
Interested in this piece? Click here to license this visualization.
The Briefing
The cost of running a Fortune 500 company can easily exceed $100 billion annually
Walmart’s operating costs in 2020 were equal to 70% of U.S. military spending
What Does it Cost to Run Big Business?
How much does it cost to run one of America’s largest corporations? For household names like Apple, Costco and Walmart, well over $100 billion each year.
To get a better sense of their massive scale, this chart compiles financial data from some of the largest Fortune 500 companies, and includes U.S. military spending as an additional point of comparison.
Entity
Cost of Operations, USD billions
Revenues, USD billions
Operating Margin, %
U.S. Military Spending
$778
N/A
N/A
Walmart
$537
$559
4%
Amazon
$363
$386
6%
Apple
$170
$275
38%
CVS Health
$255
$269
5%
Berkshire Hathaway
$231
$246
6%
Alphabet
$142
$183
22%
ExxonMobil
$210
$182
-15%
AT&T
$165
$172
4%
Costco Wholesale
$161
$167
4%
To determine each company’s total cost of operations, we combined its selling, general & administrative expense (SG&A) and its cost of goods sold (Read more...)
With so much startup activity in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space it can be a challenge for businesses to figure out which of these SaaS (SaaSes?) are actually useful and worth continuing to shell out for. Well, Cologne-based startup Sastrify is here to help — offering what it describes as a “highly automated” platform (covering some 20,000+ SaaS solutions) to help other businesses with procurement and management of third-party services.
It may not sound the sexist startup business to be in, but despite only launching earlier this year, Sastrify is already cash-flow positive — and can tout “a high six-digit recurring revenue” just a few months post-launch. Not bad for a startup that was only founded last summer.
Today it’s announcing closing a $7 million seed round from HV Capital and the founders of FlixMobility, Personio and SumUp. That follows a $1.3 million pre-seed raised back in late 2020, ahead of its launch.
Sastrify tells us it has around 50 customers at this stage — including “unicorn startups like Gorillas”. It says its approach works best for growing companies with 100+ employees, and is perhaps especially suited to European tech scale-ups.
On the competitive front the startup points to U.S.-based Vendr and Tropic, which may further explain the regional focus (although it’s not only selling in Europe).
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris were joined by none other than TechCrunch’s own Mary Ann Azevedo, in her first-ever appearance on the show. She’s pretty much the best person and we’re stoked to have her on the pod.
And it was good that Mary Ann was on the show this week as she wrote about half the dang site. Which meant that we got to include all sorts of her work in the rundown. Here’s the agenda:
Then we spun the globe to narrow our focus to Latin America, a booming startup scene that Mary Ann recently profiled for Extra Crunch. In a nutshell, venture capital is helping drive an enormous wave of startup activity in the region — or perhaps a wave of startup activity is driving a boom in venture investment? — leading to huge companies, and perhaps some tech-powered inclusion of more folks into the modern banking, and digital economy. (For more, here (Read more...)
