Issue #4

Apr 02, 2023

VC 🚀

By Contrary Research

Founded in 2017, by Ali Amin-Javaheri, Knowde is an online marketplace for producers and buyers of ingredients, polymers, and chemistry. Home to 100K products and thousands of producers, Knowde is the largest marketplace of its kind.
The California-based startup allows buyers to search, learn, engage, sample, quote and purchase from most major chemical suppliers. The built-in search functionality gives buyers the ability to explore by chemistry, application, function, technical properties, etc.
By analysing millions of documents, Knowde built a unique taxonomy that mapped every supplier’s unique vocabulary to a universal language for the industry.
The chemical industry is highly fragmented leading to intense competition among sellers which will boost Knowde’s network effects. Meaning, if a seller experiences an increase in sales after registering on Knowde, other sellers will quickly follow suit, which will in turn lead to more buyers using the platform.
Knowde is free for buyers and revenue is generated only from sellers. The seller pays a flat fee to create the online storefront and pays an annual subscription to maintain it and generate leads. As a part of its premium offering, Knowde offers a full suite of tools that can 10x customer leads, provide more in-depth analytics, grow the business, etc.

By How They Make Money

Since stock-based compensation (SBC) is a part of employee compensation, it’s included in the cost of goods sold and operating expenses and hence impacts important financial ratios such as gross margin, operating margin, and net profit margin.
SBC, being a non-cash expense, has the effect of lowering net income in the income statement. However, when computing operating cash flow, SBC is added back, which leads to an artificially inflated cash flow margin.
Apart from stating GAAP metrics in their financial statements, many companies also provide non-GAAP (stated on an adjusted basis) metrics which tend to exclude SBC. This exclusion is unnecessary as SBC is not a non-recurring cost (like restructuring or impairment costs) and is essential to attract and retain talent.
Equity overhang measures the total outstanding stock-based compensation as a percentage of a company's outstanding shares. An elevated equity overhang may imply the potential for dilution risk and diminished value for shareholders.

By Current Affairs

Former colonies that gained independence were forced to borrow money to repay their occupiers for nationalizing the assets they left behind, and usually, it was the World Bank that facilitated these loans.
The World Bank and Western investors often funded projects that promoted extractive industries and the export of basic commodities leaving out higher value-added sectors that could have helped the nation escape poverty.
According to the World Bank, by 2010 the external debt owed by third-world nations had ballooned to a whopping US$4T. Countries such as Ecuador, Malawi, Paraguay, and the like spend more on servicing their external debt than on education and health.
By the 1980s, the IMF had evolved into a hard money lender and credit enforcer, lending money to countries that were unable to secure loans from anywhere else.
The IMF has become infamous for its policy changes known as Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) which it requires before sanctioning loans. The policy demands severe austerity programs that slash health and education spending, and public commodity subsidies, and also enforce higher taxes on the economically vulnerable. The SAP generally ends up slowing economic growth as higher interest rates slow down business activity, public sector workers are laid off, and reduction in subsidies affects citizens’ purchasing power.

Council on Foreign Relations: The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher that helps readers better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.
Hands-On Data Visualization: This open-access (free-to-read) book teaches you how to design interactive charts and customized maps for your website, beginning with easy drag-and-drop tools, such as Google Sheets, Datawrapper, and Tableau Public. You’ll also gradually learn to edit open-source code templates built with Chart.js, Highcharts, and Leaflet on GitHub.
Autumn’s Declassified Tableau Survival Guide: A Tableau guide created by Autumn Battani for those looking for inspiration, people to connect with, projects to work on, or ways to advance your skills.

For more free resources (180+ websites and tools), please check out Searching (it’s a Notion database that I’ve created).