1/ Interesting thing happening in the LIDAR industry right now. 5+ companies will soon or have SPAC'd. Their value is based on *projected* revenue that comes from *entirely overlapping* potential customers, with very little discount applied to future projections. Is this bad?

2/ And how did we end up here? SPACs aren't subject to the same effective restrictions on future revenue projections as traditional IPOs. It's totally possible the numbers will be correct for one of these companies. But it's not possible for all to be correct.
3/ SPACs may be a good thing for pre-revenue companies or companies that have chosen to go public before they meet the more customary milestones for an IPO ($100m in ARR, for example).
4/ If these companies were to be valued based on earnings today, they would be severely undervalued. But if you look at the market caps for each of these companies, they're each being valued as if they had already realized some of their ambitious future projections.
5/ Of course, it's certainly not unusual for startups to be valued based on future revenue projections, even in a highly competitive space. But I typically see private markets put a much larger discount on these future projections than what we see with these SPACs.
6/ Let's look at the overlap (from public pitches):
* All targeting ADAS or robotaxi market as the top of one of the top revenue sources
* All include value added software for perception
* All counting on today's nascent industry adoption of LIDAR to balloon

In no order:
7/ AEVA
8/ Innoviz
9/ Ouster
10/ Velodyne
11/ Luminar
12/ What does this mean? First, I have great respect for all of these companies. They're each innovating in different ways, and competition is great for the industry. Robotaxis will have an enormous positive impact on society, so it's critical to see progress here.
13/ But we saw a consolidation / collapse of the robotaxi space over the last 24 months (down to a handful of players), and LIDAR is next. This probably means lower market caps for most of these co's, which sucks for everyone involved, but may the best product win!

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Should we go into the details of these 125 years?


SA is built on the exploitation of labour. That labour has functioned on alcohol unfortunately. Very few people consume liquor purely for enjoyment unfortunately. When SAB opened its doors 1895 workers were paid in alcohol- the dop/tot system. 2 years into SAB's establishment

The Prohibition Act is introduced. This means black people are barred from buying your wines, beer etc. So SAB's products are exclusively for white people. But during this period beer brewing by Black women is the norm. Ayinxilisi ncam ke this type of beer. Apparently it had some

Nutritious elements to it. Now some of the context around drinking culture during this time is migrant labour to the mines, further land dispossession, the Anglo-Boer Wars, Rhodes corruption (our first state capture commission if you will) which leads to his resignation.

This context plays a role in how our cities and small towns are constructed, how they lead to the confinement and surveillance yabantu. Traditional beer brewing is identified as a threat because buy now mining bosses have identified that there's money to be made here.

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