India in Space, The Great Bubble, Bain’s PE Report

Fountainhead News: Feb 28, 2017

I. India in Space

On Valentine’s Day India launched 104 satellites into orbit, which is more than the nanosats launched in all of 2017 across the entire industry. What are they doing? The vast majority of these sats were owned by a Space Startup called Planet that images the Earth. Now, they’re able to take pictures of every part of our planet over a single day.

What that means is we humans now have the ability to see how are planet is changing in a near real-time way.

You might be asking yourself how much it cost India to launch a hundred satellites into orbit. The answer might surprise you.

$15 million.

That’s insane. No way NASA could have done that. The unit cost is about $140K per satellite. Still prohibitively expensive for a new Space gold rush, but it’s still the top of the first inning in a 9-inning ballgame.

II. The Great Bubble

Slowly seeing more signs, irrational exhuberance. The weird part is nobody is talking about it yet which makes me believe there’s more time. But when the rest of the world crashes like it did in 2008, guess where the best place to put your money will be? Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It’s decentralized, which means no one government or entity controls it, and also means you can’t defraud it, like the housing market collapse.

When fear reigns supreme, you go where there’s safety.

China is working on their own cryptocurrency that they believe will take over part of their money supply. Knowing that most of China uses WeChat to pay for everything, it isn’t a leap to see how China’s scrappy nature is going to give them better insight into their economy’s economic indicators, allowing them to make real-time monetary policy decisions.

III. Bain’s PE Report

Some interesting findings from Bain’s 2017 Global Private Equity report:

• A vast majority of deals from a decade ago that still haven’t exited are underwater
• There’s lots of cash floating around to do new deals

The question is: what companies are they going to invest in over the coming years?

— Sean