AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Hello!
Welcome to your weekly fix of Business Insider's Prime stories.
I'm Cadie Thompson, Business Insider's deputy executive editor, and I'm helping fill in while Matt Turner is on paternity leave.
This will be our last newsletter for 2019, as we will be taking next Sunday off. With that in mind, we'd just like to say thank you for being a loyal Prime member and we can't wait to do 2020 with you.
Bracing for 2020
The year is coming to a close, which means it's time to start planning for the year ahead. Fortunately, we've got some stories to help you do just that.
Are you wondering what the stock market will do in 2020 and where you should put your money? Akin Oyedele spoke with $4
Oyedele also got $4
We've also got heaps of industry predictions for you, including what VC's foresee being the $4 and $4.
And if you are looking for a new job opportunity in the new year, we've got you covered. Dominick Reuter and Jennifer Ortakales put together a list of the $4businesses and our tech enterprise team has compiled $4 We also got ex-McKinsey employees to tell us $4
And if you are just starting off in your career, you should definitely check out Ashley Rodriguez's $4
Googlers don't seem to care that Larry and Sergey stepped down
Google insiders are seemingly shrugging off Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping down as CEO and President. Employees also don't seem to be that enthused about Sundar Pichai getting promoted to the top spot at Alphabet.
Current and former workers told Business Insider that $4, so the changes just seem like the natural progression at this point.
"It feels anticlimactic," a current worker told Business Insider's Rob Price and Allana Akhtar. "I haven't seen anything outside of Sundar being in charge of things … internally, it seems as though that's already the level at which he was mostly operating."
FedEx takes a beating while Amazon gets vengeance
FedEx had a rough week.
On Sunday, Amazon announced third-party sellers could not use FedEx's Ground and Home shipping for Prime services. The logistic company's stock took a hit on the news.
The move comes after FedEx ditched Amazon twice this year. First, in June when FedEx Express cut its US business with Amazon, and then in August when FedEx Ground followed suit.
To make matters worse for FedEx, the company reported disappointing earnings on Thursday which were described in a note by Deutsche Bank's Amit Mehrotra as "breathtakingly bad." The numbers were so bad in fact, that by Friday morning some $3.5 billion of the company's market value had been wiped out.
Amazon dropping FedEx right before Christmas and right before the company's earnings was $4, experts told Business Insider's Rachel Premack.
"FedEx broke up with Amazon and Amazon is now giving them a stick in the eye," Sterling said.
Finance and Investing
The bar has been raised for startups looking to go public, according to LionTree founder Aryeh Bourkoff.
Compass New York regional manager Rory Golod gave us a look at how exactly its platform works.
Bill McGlashan, the founder and former managing partner of the high-profile private-equity firm TPG Growth, said in a court filing on Wednesday that it was through Schwab's charitable business that he made a donation to the college-admissions scandal mastermind Rick Singer.
The company has cut several people from its 20-person data-science team, several sources said, including Dipanjan Sen, who was the data-science team lead and a former data scientist at Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Tech, Media, Telecoms
Kyle Ewing, Google's head of talent and a 13-year company veteran, told Business Insider that she values humility in job candidates.
The job cuts affected 18 employees, our sources said, and about half of them worked in operations - an umbrella organization that's tasked with adding new childcare providers as partners, offering customer support to parents, and growing the company in new markets.
Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes TikTok has one key advantage over its competition: an ever-growing library of delightful content.
In one of the year's biggest deals, Vice Media acquired Refinery29, a company that had raised $133 million, for mostly stock. Group Nine Media also acquired the fellow millennial media company PopSugar in a stock deal.
How much money a creator on YouTube will earn from a single video varies depending on a number of factors. And getting a lot of views - even millions of them - doesn't always guarantee a huge payday.
Health, Retail, Transportation
Morgan Paxhia, a cofounding partner of Poseidon Asset Management, says next year will be the "ending of a period of recalibration" for the cannabis industry.
For the companies that survive, this era of crashing stock prices will be seen as a small blip on the path to global domination, insiders said.
Reselling sneakers can be profitable on its own. But there's a whole wave of sneakerheads who have figured out how to use YouTube to make even more.
Yum Brands' David Gibbs told Business Insider that the "restaurant industry is becoming all about scale."
Amazon is revolutionizing one of the most entrenched practices in the long-haul trucking industry: paying per mile.
Paloma Castro Martinez is no longer Lime's head of international communications according to her LinkedIn profile, marking yet another departure at in a year that's been marked by executive turnover for the firm.
One more thing...
We're hosting an event focused on the future of retail in New York City on Tuesday, January 14. From the rise of direct-to-consumer brands to sustainable fashion, the future of retail is all about connecting with customer passions and values. Join us for a series of conversations with retail entrepreneurs and experts to discuss industry strategies and innovations, and investment opportunities that these innovations create.
Speakers will include Layla Amjadi, Product Manager, Instagram Shopping, Michelle Cordeiro Grant, Founder & CEO, LIVELY, Jack Forestell, Chief Product Officer, Visa; Arpan Podduturi, Director of Product, Shopify; Geoff Ramsey, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist, eMarketer; Anushka Salinas, Chief Operating Officer, Rent the Runway; and Maggie Winter, Co-Founder and CEO, AYR.
$4