Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• Flexing ARMs 💪

• Youtube’s Existential Crisis 😰

• Asteroids ☄️

Flexing ARMs 💪

The day is 14th September, 2023. As soon as the clock hits 9AM, a group of people flex their ARM(s) and you hear a sound - DING DING DING.

What’s that sound, you ask?

It's the sound of the NASDAQ bell being hit by the team at ARM in what was expected to be the biggest IPO of the year.

And, oh boy. They didn’t disappoint.

It was one of those few moments when you could hear the excitement across the entire nation - from the VCs at Silicon Valley to the Wolves at Wolf Street.

The Blockbuster Opening

As you might already know that the tech IPO markets have been as dry as the Sahara since 2021. Arm promised to be the knight in shining silicon to revive the market once again.

Listing at a price of $51, the stock opened at $56 when trading began and it closed out the markets at $63.6, a jump of 24.7% on day 1 - exactly the kind of results we’d like to have on our ARMs day at the gym.

The IPO debut is a huge victory for Softbank, who has been having a bit of a tough time in the past couple of years, to put it mildly.

Paving the Path

Seeing the love given to ARM by the investors, Instacart raised its target price per share from $26-$28 to $28-$30, which could bump its valuation by a sweet billion dollars.

Both Instacart and Klaviyo are expected to go public this week and if all turns out to be well, we might be exiting the longest IPO drought since 2009.

Analysts have estimated a backlog of about 200 companies that are just itching to take the plunge in the IPO pool.

Do you think the IPO market is back in the biz?

Youtube’s Existential Crisis 😰

It looks like the video heavyweight champ, YouTube, is having a bit of an identity crisis. You know how your grandma started wearing skinny jeans because "It's the trend".

Well, YouTube's done something similar with its TikTok inspired short-video feature, “Shorts”.

First, Meta copied took inspiration from TikTok and then YT did the same.

Since its debut in 2021, Shorts has wooed a whopping 2 billion users!

But here’s the tea: while everyone's busy watching these bite-sized videos, the OG, longer YouTube videos are feeling a bit left out.

It’s like suddenly favoring appetizers and forgetting about the main course!

And the top shots at the Big G are getting worried. You see, long-form video is Youtube’s bread and butter, because, well they are the only real player in the space and long videos are much more lucrative for YT.

• They have more room for ads.

• They have higher click-through rates.

The Coming of the Inevitable

However, this may not matter much if short-form content is what the people want. Youtube had a slump in sales when they launched shorts for some quarters which seems to be going away.

YT sales rose 4.4% to $7.7B in Q2 of this year, ending a three quarter declining streak.

Even though YT shares 45% of the rev share with creators for shorts instead of the 55% for the long-form, creators and brands both seem to like Shorts more.

And creators have a very logical reason for this:

It’s just sooooooo much easier to create a 60 sec video compared to a 30 minute one.

Well, we ain’t arguing with that.

With our attention spans shrinking faster than your favorite sweater in the dryer, maybe this bite-sized frenzy is just the digital evolution at play.

Which team are you? Short-form or Long-form?

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

The US Justice Department is taking on Google in a big antitrust trial, arguing that the tech giant's dominance isn't just due to superior design but also due to sneaky deals. 🍿🔍

TikTok got slapped with a hefty €345 million fine for mishandling kids' data by the EU's GDPR watchdogs. They've been told to shape up their data processes within three months or face more penalties. 💸🚫

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