Weekend Update #137
Welcome to Blue Room's Weekend Update. Each week, we're sharing what companies we're researching and the what, the who and the how that we think makes the companies interesting and unique. This roundup is brought to you weekly by a group of interns, creative minds, artists and investors who believe that through best in class investing along with the democratization of financial education we can do great things together. Enjoy, Explore and Share.
This week saw a flurry of activity both on the macroeconomic and securities markets fronts. The Federal Reserve met on Tuesday and released their latest policy decision on Wednesday. The central bank raised the target range of the Federal Funds rate by another 25 basis points, bringing it to 5.25% to 5.50%—the highest it’s been in over 21 years (since March 2001). Despite a “welcome” June CPI reading of +3.0% year-over-year, they cited elevated core CPI of +4.8% and May core PCE of 4.6% along with a still-strong labor market as reasons for needing additional policy tightening. Overall it seemed the Committee was pleased with the progress they’re seeing so far—signs of disinflation while avoiding significant increases in unemployment. They stressed they will continue being data dependent and will make future decisions on a meeting-to-meeting basis.
Earnings season is well into full swing with several megacap companies reporting. Microsoft (MSFT) exceeded expectations for the quarter, posting 8%year-over-year revenue growth of $58.2 billion driven by its Azure segment but also disappointed on its revenue guidance, whose midpoint of $54.3 billion fell short of analyst expectations of $54.9 billion. Alphabet (GOOG) beat on revenue ($74.6 billion versus $72.8 billion expected) and on EPS, boasting $1.44 per share versus the Street estimate of $1.32. Its strong results were driven by strength across all of their revenue segments, including Google advertising, YouTube Ads, Services and Cloud, and they even improved their operating margin, coming in at 29% versus 27.6% expected. Meta (f/k/a/ Facebook) also exceeded expectations, posting their first double-digit revenue growth since the fourth quarter of 2021 thanks to their digital ads segment.
You can find this and more in this week’s Blue Room Newsletter.
Weekly Performance
S&P 500 4,582.23 +1.01%
Dow Jones 34,459.29 +0.66%
Nasdaq 15,750.93 +2.11%
Key Economic Readings Next Week
Monday, July 31 — Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS)
Tuesday, August 1 — JOLTS Job Openings
Wednesday, August 2 — ADP Employment Change
Thursday, August 3 — Challenger Job Cuts; ISM Services Index
Friday, August 4 — Change in Nonfarm Payrolls; Unemployment Rate
Thank you Blue Room Team Leader OMAR GUZMAN.
Highlights
Spotify reported mixed results Tuesday morning. It cited 551 million Total Monthly Active Users for the second quarter of 2023—a 27.3% increase from the previous year period, and an acceleration from the 22.0% increase seen in the first quarter of this year. This exceeded median Street estimates and Spotify’s own guidance of 530 million by 21 million users—a 4.0% beat. Spotify attributed the performance to continued improvements in Ad-Supported retention and performance marketing efficiencies, and was led by Rest of World and Latin America and strong growth amongst Gen Z listeners.
Premium Subscribers also exceeded Street and company guidance of 217 million, with 220 million Premium Subs in Q2—a 17% year-over-year increase and an acceleration from the previous quarter’s +15% figure.
Despite these positive developments, Spotify fell short on the financial side, missing revenue, in both the Premium and Ad-Supported segments, with total revenue of €3.177 billion missing Street estimates of €3.208 billion. Gross Margin also suffered, coming in at 24.1%—below the Street’s 25.5% estimate—and contributing to a larger-than-expected loss per share of (€1.55) compared to the Street’s (€0.66) figure.
Despite the increase in Premium Subscribers, this was offset by the 6% year-over-year decline in ARPU of €4.27 in Q2 2023, down from €4.54 in the same period last year, reflecting product and market mix as Spotify continues growing in lower-ARPU markets.
One of the most concerning things for me is the deceleration of growth in the Ad-Supported segment. Ad-Supported Revenue of €404 million represented a 12% year-over-year increase—below the 17% and 14% increases seen in Q1 ‘23 and Q4 ‘22, respectively. Spotify attributes the slowdown ultimately to macroeconomic-led price softness, despite podcast revenue growth of 30%. Ad-Supported Gross Margin deteriorated by 680 basis points due primarily to “charges for the write-off of content assets, employee severance, and contract terminations and other related costs” but then goes on to forecast gross margin of 26.0% in Q3 2023 as it moves past these supposed one-off charges.
In last year’s Investor Day, Spotify emphasized the importance of the ad-supported segment as being the primary future driver of growth and profitability for Spotify, but it currently appears to be stagnating, especially as a percentage of total revenue. A reinvigoration of this trend would be extremely positive for Spotify, but a failure for this to materialize would potentially not bode well for the company’s share price.
ANALYST NOTES
Quarterly results exceeded expectations on top and bottom line, led by CCG which grew $1.0 billion sequentially (+18% Q/Q).
Continuing to develop their AI opportunities and sees a $1 trillion semiconductor industry by 2030:
AI “underpins” the growth in semi-industry
Five nodes in four years ambition appears to be on track:
Intel 7 is done
Intel 4 will launch 2H23 (Meteor Lake) the first EUV node
Intel 3 is “on track for overall yield and performance targets (Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids)
Intel 20A will be the first node to use ribbonFet and Power Via for backside power delivery (for power efficiency)
Intel 18A is on track to begin manufacturing in the second half of 2024
Intel foundry is picking up:
Doubled Q/Q
Run rate implies 73% gain Y/Y for the full year
Executing on the Intel 18A offering
Northrop Grumman joins the RAMP-C program along with IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia:
The RAMP-C program is a US DD implementation to assure domestic access to 3nm node chips based on chips fabricated in the U.S. by Intel
Plans to build two leading edge semiconductor facilities in Germany and a new assembly and test facility in Poland.
Client business gained share in Q2 with “modest” recovery in the consumer and education segments and strength in premium segments where Intel has leadership performance:
Looking to support the client growth with AI dedicated PCs, led by the Meteor Lake PC CPU built on Intel 4 (so 2H23)
Shipping 1 million 4th gen Xeon this quarter
Concerns around the TAM for CPU servers:
TAM is soft on “persistent weakness across all segments, but particularly in the enterprise and ROW, where the recovery is taking longer than expected..”
CPU inventory digestion in server to persist in the second half, impacted by “Near-term wallet share focus on AI accelerators over general purpose compute in the cloud.”
Badri Kothandaraman — President and Chief Executive Officer
Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter 2023 financial results.
We reported quarterly revenue of $711.1 million, shipped approximately 5.2 million microinverters and 82.3 megawatt hours of battery and generated free cash flow of $225.2 million. Approximately 78% of our Q2 microinverter shipments were IQ8. We exited the second quarter at 46% gross margin, 14% operating expense and 32% operating income, all as a percentage of revenue on a non-GAAP basis. Mandy will go into the financials later in the call.
Let's now discuss how we are servicing customers. Our worldwide NPS was 74% in Q2 compared to 75% in Q1. Our North American NPS was 77%, the same as Q1. Our average call wait time was 1.1 minutes compared to 1.2 minutes in Q1. We continued to focus on root cost fixes of customer issues and expanded our customer service and field service teams globally.
Let's talk about microinverter manufacturing. Our overall supply environment remains quite stable and there are no major shortages right now. Let's come to IRA. We expect the IRA to increase the overall solar demand in the U.S. and accelerate domestic production. We are pleased to be part of creating new jobs in the U.S. and advancing the country's clean energy economy.
We shipped 50,000 microinverters to customers in Q2 from two of our contract manufacturers, Flex in South Carolina and Foxconn in Wisconsin. We are on track to begin with the third contract manufacturer in Q3. We expect to ship approximately 600,000 microinverters to customers in Q3 from our U.S. manufacturing facilities.
In a study conducted by the American Cancer Society, it was found that since reaching its peak in 1991, the cancer death rate in the United States has fallen by 31%. The study’s authors attribute the decrease in cancer death rates to reductions in smoking, earlier detection and better treatment for some cancers. Rebecca Siegel MPH, the lead author of the study concluded “we have made a lot of progress in the fight against cancer.” While a 31% decline in the cancer death rate is profound and is a testament to the miracles of modern medicine, cancer remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, following only heart disease. Its proliferation seemingly knows no bounds, as everyone knows someone who has been affected by cancer. Survival rates with respect to many cancers have markedly improved, yet many treatments require further refinement. Indeed, many cancers have yet to find an adequate treatment. Acute Myeloid Leukemia is one of those cancers.
Leukemia is a type of cancer that starts in the cells that would normally develop into different types of blood cells. Myeloid stem cells produce red blood cells, platelets and certain types of white blood cells. When myeloid stem cells become cancerous, they produce diseased cells that do not perform their normal functions. They also multiple rapidly. As the disease progresses, the abnormal cells can crowd out the healthy cells.
As a result, AML can greatly weaken the patent. Some patients may develop anemia due to the decrease in red blood cells. Some may develop blood clots. It also can severely weaken the patient’s immune system due to the loss of white blood cells, leading to frequent infections.
VOR Biopharma’s Founder and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board Sidhartha Mkherjee, MD DPhil discussing the company’s unique approach to fighting cancer.
Recent indicators suggest that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated. The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient. Tighter credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to weigh on economic activity, hiring, and inflation. The extent of these effects remains uncertain. The Committee remains highly attentive to inflation risks.
The Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run. In support of these goals, the Committee decided to raise the target range for the federal funds rate to 5-1/4 to 5-1/2 percent. The Committee will continue to assess additional information and its implications for monetary policy. In determining the extent of additional policy firming that may be appropriate to return inflation to 2 percent over time, the Committee will take into account the cumulative tightening of monetary policy, the lags with which monetary policy affects economic activity and inflation, and economic and financial developments. In addition, the Committee will continue reducing its holdings of Treasury securities and agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities, as described in its previously announced plans. The Committee is strongly committed to returning inflation to its 2 percent objective.
In assessing the appropriate stance of monetary policy, the Committee will continue to monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook. The Committee would be prepared to adjust the stance of monetary policy as appropriate if risks emerge that could impede the attainment of the Committee’s goals. The Committee’s assessments will take into account a wide range of information, including readings on labor market conditions, inflation pressures and inflation expectations, and financial and international developments.
Voting for the monetary policy action were Jerome H. Powell, Chair; John C. Williams, Vice Chair; Michael S. Barr; Michelle W. Bowman; Lisa D. Cook; Austan D. Goolsbee; Patrick Harker; Philip N. Jefferson; Neel Kashkari; Lorie K. Logan; and Christopher J. Waller.
Consumer sentiment rose for the second straight month to 71.6, soaring 11% above June and reaching its most favorable reading since October 2021.
All components of the index improved considerably, led by an 18% surge in long-term business conditions and 14% increase in short-run business conditions.
Overall, the sharp rise in sentiment was largely attributable to the continued slowdown in inflation along with stability in labor markets.
However, sentiment for lower-income consumers fell. This group anticipates that inflation and their income prospects will both worsen in the year ahead, highlighting the heterogeneity of views across the population.
July 27, 2023 BLUE ROOM Meeting #120
Thursday
July 27, 2023
12 PM
BLUE ROOM
MEETING NUMBER 92
Dear Blue Room,
Please join us for our 12 PM meeting.
Should be a good one!
Agenda
Blue Room Company Updates
Blue Room Investing
Investment Update
Internship Update
Sales UpdateBlue Room Impact
Agriculture
Housing
Art
Icebreaker Question:
Let's have a fresh conversation on an old topic.Aliens.Do you wish it were true that aliens exist?
Yes or No.How would life and your life change if we confirmed that humans have encountered extraterrestrial life?
If you could spend a day with an alien, what would you do?
ANALYST TAKEAWAYS
TXN reports revenue above expectations and within the guidance range provided in the prior quarter. The forecast for 3Q23 revenue was also below conesus expectations (revenue guided to $4.55 billion vs $4.59 billion expected), contributing negative sentiment on the outlook. Top investor concerns on the call were 1.) negative annual revenue comparisons, 2.) a fifth straight quarter of margin contraction, and 3.) a seventh straight sequential jump in inventory days (based on our calculations).
Sales Trends Remains Weak
In the quarter, all end markets were pressured with the exception of automotive, which continues to remain the strongest end-market broadly.
Automotive revenue likely grew in the mid-twenties percentage range on a low single-digit sequential comp. Although strong in the past year, automotive appears to be slowing against higher year-over-year comps.
Within Industrial, revenue grew in the upper-single-digits percentage range on a year-on-year basis, representing a flat sequential comp.
Personal Electronics fell mid-double digits on an annual basis, but grew in the low single digits sequentially. Weaker 3Q23 revenue forecasts may be attributable to a lower-than-anticipated recovery in the consumer end-markets.
Communications Equipment fell -15.0% sequentially and over 30.0% annually. Enterprise Systems fell -5.0% quarter-over-quarter after falling -30.0% and -21.0% in 1Q23 and 4Q22, respectively. The segment may be the first to recover based on this trend.
Going into the year, the market expectation for 2H23 had previously been a quick rebound in most end-markets, as consumers upcycle their tech, the industry laps weak annual comps, and enterprises begin to make the investment in data centers, but given TI’s outlook for the trends in each of its segments to continue, a hopeful recovery is unlikely to occur in CY23 at all.
A positive offset to the negative outlook, however, is the potential for 1Q23 to have been the bottom for the company’s revenue. TI’s revenue guidance for 3Q23 indicates a slight sequential increase in sales, although the guide does not leave much room for error.
FY 2023 Guidance:
Revenue: $14.7 billion (above consensus estimate of $14.461 billion, below BLUE ROOM estimate of $14.942 billion)
Adj. EPS: $14.82 (above consensus estimate of $14.55, below BLUE ROOM estimate of $15.30)
CapEx: ~$400 million (above consensus estimate of $375 million, below BLUE ROOM estimate of $474 million)
75-100% Free Cash Flow Conversion (in line with prior guidance)
Free Cash Flow: $825-1,100 million (raised from prior $750-1,000 million guidance)
Engineering Expense: + ~20% year-over-year (in line with prior guidance)
Operating Margin: ~11.7% (raised from prior ~10.9% guidance)
Other Expense: + ~$90 million (raised from prior + ~$50 million guidance)
Effective Tax rate: 27-28% (in line with prior guidance)
In an agricultural economy reeling from record-high input prices, inflation, and major supply shocks, one unlikely beverage has outpaced almost every other commodity: orange juice. (And it doesn’t look like it’s stopping).
The Citrus Pandemic
In 2005, farmers in Florida began noticing their orange trees develop yellow mottling on their leaves. Shortly after, the fruits of these mottled trees grew smaller, less dense, and far more bitter than normal. Within 5 years, these trees would die. What they were infected with was an unculturable bacteria called Huanglongbing (HLB), or Citrus Greening Disease. Considered the most serious and destructive citrus disease, HLB is transmitted to citrus trees from the Asian Citrus Psyllid (lice) when feeding on new shoots.
Q2 Key Takeaways
Roku grew Platform revenue 11% year-over-year despite ad spend on traditional TV declining 9.4% year-over-year and traditional TV ad scatter down 17.2% year-over-year. Roku saw a rebound in ad spend from some verticals, including CPG and Health and Wellness, while other industries like technology and media and entertainment (M&E) remain pressured. Although M&E spend has been lagging, executives reported gaining share versus the competition during the quarter. The newfront cycle is still ongoing as the macroenvironment has prolonged the typical process, but leadership has indicated things are going well as the platform has seen more advertisers engage than previous newfronts, and the newly launched Roku City offering currently has more demand than capacity with advertisers. The company also continues to ramp up its business with third party DSPs to capture incremental demand
Roku continues to grow engagement and scale on its platform with total Q2 streaming hours growing 21% year-over-year to 25.1 billion in comparison to traditional TV in the U.S. falling 13%. Streaming Hours originating from the Home Screen Menu grew 90% year-over-year. Streaming Hours on The Roku Channel also grew more than 50% year-over-year as it achieved over 1% market share in the U.S., on par with Peacock and Max streaming platforms.
Roku also saw success in its devices segment as smart TV unit sales in the US were up in Q2 despite slight increases in TV panel and freight costs. Roku OS maintained its position as the #1 selling TV OS in the U.S. with year-to-date TV unit share greater than the next three largest TV operating systems combined. Roku was also the #1 selling smart TV OS in Mexico for the third quarter in a row. The launch of Roku-branded TVs has helped the company grow its market share in the larger-screen segments, with positive reviews of 4.5 stars or higher across all of its models.
Despite the strong performance, Roku expects recent trends in the advertising market to continue into the second half with the limited fall release schedules and ongoing writers’ and actors’ strikes. However, the ad scatter market started to materially slowdown in the second half of 2022, so there should be easier comps going into Q3 and Q4 2023. The company will continue to moderate its expenses, with year-over-year OpEx growth rate expected to fall below 5% in Q3 and further improvement in Q4. Executives also reiterated their commitment to delivering positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024.
CFO Outlook Commentary
We expect third quarter 2023 total revenue to be in the range of $32-34.5 billion. Our guidance assumes a foreign currency tailwind of approximately 3% to year-over-year total revenue growth in the third quarter, based on current exchange rates.
We anticipate our full-year 2023 total expenses will be in the range of $88-91 billion, increased from our prior range of $86-90 billion due to legal-related expenses recorded in the second quarter of 2023. This outlook includes approximately $4 billion of restructuring costs related to facilities consolidation charges and severance and other personnel costs. We expect Reality Labs operating losses to increase year-over-year in 2023.
While we are not providing a quantitative outlook beyond 2023 at this point, we expect a few factors to be drivers of total expense growth in 2024 as we continue to invest in our most compelling opportunities, including artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.
First, we expect higher infrastructure-related costs next year. Given our increased capital investments in recent years, we expect depreciation expenses in 2024 to increase by a larger amount than in 2023. We also expect to incur higher operating costs from running a larger infrastructure footprint.
Second, we anticipate growth in payroll expenses as we evolve our workforce composition toward higher-cost technical roles.
Finally, for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem.
We expect our full-year 2023 capital expenditures to be in the range of $27-30 billion, lowered from our prior estimate of $30-33 billion. The reduced forecast is due to both cost savings, particularly on non-AI servers, as well as shifts in capital expenditures into 2024 from delays in projects and equipment deliveries rather than a reduction in overall investment plans.
Looking ahead, while we will continue to refine our plans as we progress throughout this year, we currently expect total capital expenditures to grow in 2024, driven by our investments across both data centers and servers, particularly in support of our AI work.
Absent any changes to tax law, we expect the tax rate for the rest of the year to be similar to Q2.
In addition, we continue to monitor the active regulatory landscape. With respect to EU-U.S. data transfers, we saw a positive development with the European Commission’s adoption of a final adequacy decision, which allows us to continue to provide our services in Europe. This is good news, though broadly speaking, we continue to see increasing legal and regulatory headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and our financial results.
INDUSTRY HEADWINDS
Prior to the first quarter of 2023, industry players shared the sentiment that the industry would rebound in 2H of 2023, however, purchasing orders have not rebounded meaningfully, nor have inventories settled to the degree that was expected. At this point, estimates for a recovery in demand (overall) has been revised to a 4Q23/1Q24 timeframe.
Memory prices (NAND and DRAM) are still negative year-over-year and the segment began undershipping demand roughly three quarters ago, with Samsung being the final major to adopt lower memory production. This is being done to cut the supply into the market in order to balance the supply/demand dynamic.
The CHIPS Act has sparked an aggressive capacity expansion program for many semiconductor manufacturers, but has been offset by lower WFE investment to fill those Fabs. Additional headwinds have begun to arise with manufacturers and labor in the U.S., which we plan to address in the next semiconductor report after all companies report their 2Q23 results.
INDUSTRY TAILWINDS
Despite demand slowing, this has allowed inventories for some firms to rebalance. In the third and fourth quarters of 2022 we saw the inventory rebalancing effort cut into gross profit as suppliers cut prices and undershipped demand. Some firms have begun to return to more normalized levels of gross profit.
Certain pockets of demand are propping up the industry including IoT, Industrial, military aerospace, electric vehicles, medical equipment and generative AI.
From our channel checks, we discovered that the consumer end markets may have some upside momentum as pandemic CE spend enters an upgrade cycle (3-7 years). The particular end markets would primarily be from education and WFH.
Earnings Call Content Summary
Alphabet achieved $74.6 billion in total revenue with strength across the board as they exited Q2 2023, particularly in YouTube subscriptions and Google Cloud.
Q2 operating margin rose to 29%, a ~4 bps improvement compared to Q1, which was attributed to acceleration to search advertising growth and a delay in certain data center construction projects.
These projects will continue in 2H23 as Alphabet invests into their technical infrastructure to prepare for new AI opportunities, especially with the early performance of AI-integrated Search.
Gemini, Google’s next GPT-4 competitor, was also mentioned as a point of interest. Alphabet sees great potential for Gemini as it is built to be multimodal, and Google Lens has been a great addition to the visual aspect of Search.
All these AI investments are also applicable to Cloud as well, as they think about how it can help expand their addressable market.
A change in management was also announced as Alphabet’s long-time CFO, Ruth Porat, was appointed to a new role as a president and chief investment officer.
FY2023 Q4 Earnings Summary
MSFT is focusing on 3 key priorities:
helping customers use the Microsoft Cloud to get the most value on to their spend;
investing to infuse AI across every layer of the tech stack;
driving operating leverage
MSFT extended their Activision Blizzard merger agreement deadline to October
MSFT is having great momentum across Azure Arc, Azure OpenAI Service. VS Code and GitHub Copilot are category-leading products when it comes to how developers code every day.
MSFT continues to build momentum in Microsoft Teams (Teams Premium, Teams Phone, Teams Room) across collaboration, chat, meetings and calling.
Windows Copilot is introduced, helping every Windows 11 user become a power user with just natural language.
LinkedIn's revenue surpassed $15 billion for the first time this fiscal year. Businesses with Bing Chat Enterprise, which offers commercial data protection is expanding
The change in accounting estimate for the useful life of server and network equipment resulted in $3.7 billion of depreciation expense shifting from FY '23 to future periods. Thus, FY '23 operating income and margins benefited from this change in accounting estimate and that will be a headwind to growth in FY '24 as the benefit reduces to $2.1 billion
To support the Microsoft Cloud growth and demand for the AI platform, MSFT will accelerate investment in their cloud infrastructure and capital expenditure will increase sequentially
MSFT returned $9.7 billion to shareholders through share repurchases and dividends, bringing the total cash returned to their shareholders to over $38 billion for the full fiscal year.
Revenue Growth
At the start of the year, we made changes to our ad platform to unify the ad experience across our service by transitioning to a click-based ad interaction across our advertising formats, and we updated and retrained our models to optimize for more in-session click-through conversions. Our revenue growth remained challenged in Q2, as some of the headwinds we experienced as a result of the ad platform changes continued into the quarter. Our brand-oriented advertising business declined 8% year-over-year, and our direct-response advertising business declined 7% year-over-year in Q2. In Q2, we saw certain advertiser verticals perform relatively better than others, including CPG, Restaurants, Travel, and Retail.
In Q2, we continued to make progress in improving our ML infrastructure and systems for ad ranking and optimization. This is a large-scale transformation that impacts every facet of our data and ML stack and will continue over the coming quarters. A significant improvement we made during Q2 involved using a broader set of features and labels for the training of our ML models. This has enabled the training of more precise and effective models that better predict click-through conversions. Additionally, we accelerated the pace of experimentation with various new model architectures. This has enabled us to explore innovative ways to enhance the performance of our ML models. For example, as part of our optimization efforts, we launched a set of unified Pixel models that have improved Click-Through Pixel Purchase conversions. The combination of these improvements has led to more relevant ads and a more than 30% increase in purchase-related conversions quarter-over-quarter.
In Q2, we also improved our privacy-centric first-party measurement offerings by focusing on the quantity, quality, and integrity of data signals. For example, we introduced our Event Quality Score (EQS) system to advertisers to measure the quality and integrity of their data, which we expect will lead to improvement in attribution and advertiser performance. For example, the median Pixel Purchase EQS for the top 50 advertisers increased by more than 20% after we shared this score with them, and they took action to improve it. We also made fundamental improvements to our privacy-preserving identity graph and modeled conversions, which will strengthen the connection between identity, attribution, and optimization.
—INTERN PROFILE—
JUSTIN
HAZARD
Wesleyan University Senior
Economics, Data Analytics, Engineering
Hello everyone, my name is Justin Hazard and I am a rising senior at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. I am from close by Glastonbury, CT, so I was eager to adventure out to Denver for this internship. At Wesleyan, I am an Economics major and am double minoring in Data Analytics and Engineering. In addition, I am also a captain of the Men’s Lacrosse team, along with being a member of the student-athlete advisory committee.
This summer I am most excited to learn more about investing and how to create financial models. Wesleyan has primarily instilled me with the knowledge of economic theories. Therefore, it will be great to use that insight and apply it to the financial markets in order to help make decisions for the fund. The companies that I am covering are General Motors Co. and Rivian Automotive, Inc. This was great to hear as in high school my grandfather invested in Tesla for me, which spurred my interest in investing, especially in the electric vehicle market. I would also like to thank my grandfather for that investment in Tesla because it has done tremendously since then.
I decided to pursue this opportunity at Blue Room due to my interests in investing and my enjoyment of learning. I believe the emphasis that Blue Room puts into researching every detail about a company and understanding the markets associated with them will really benefit me. Since my first day here, I have enjoyed the inclusiveness and culture. Everyone has been outgoing to make me feel a part of the team! In addition, I resonated with Blue Room’s goals of making an impact through its support of projects in spaces such as regenerative agriculture and housing. I think this objective is empowering and reflects the values of the company.
Some personal interests of mine include being active. Therefore, in Denver, I am looking forward to exploring the mountains and going on hikes. Last week, a few of us interns went up to Boulder, CO, and did the Royal Arch hike. It was beautiful, but I can attest that the altitude change is evident since coming from the east coast. In addition, I cannot wait to go to my first concert at Red Rocks as it has been deemed one of the “best venues” to watch a concert by some of my co-workers.
—INTERN PROFILE—
TANVI
POONDOTA
Duke University, Sophomore
Computer Science, Math, Finance
Hi everyone! My name is Tanvi Poondota and I am a rising junior at Duke University where I am majoring in Computer Science with minors in Math and Finance. I grew up in Morrisville, North Carolina, also known as Research Triangle Park, so I had the unique opportunity to live in an environment enriched by emerging technologies and innovation. As a kid I remember being especially impressed while learning about how the first cell phones were made and historic medical developments because of technologies built right in my backyard. Keeping up with today’s advancements as well is a big interest of mine so I am studying Computer Science as a way to better understand the development process. This summer, I am very excited to be covering Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and ASML Holding N.V. which are two companies that are working to advance the technology and semiconductor industries. I hope to apply and expand upon my Computer Science background as I conduct my research!
On the other hand, community and impact are very important to me. Applying my interests in business and finance to help drive revenue growth for a local fro-yo shop in my town, leading my town’s youth council and even being a camp counselor all instilled in me an interest in working closely with my community growing up. So when I moved to Durham, I sought out similar opportunities on campus. I’m involved with Duke Impact Investing Group in which I am able to work closely with sustainable Durham-based startups. I’ve built a web application to help a local produce delivery organization more efficiently serve food-insecure households in Durham. And I’ve conducted climate action research to build Duke’s first Climate Game which has encouraged students to be more environmentally conscious.
So Blue Room’s focus on impact, especially, resonated with me. The opportunity to expand upon my interest in finance, keep up with exciting companies, and learn to make investment decisions from an incredibly knowledgeable and driven team that also actively supports their community is truly unique. I am grateful to be working with the Blue Room team and alongside such a talented intern group this summer, and am very excited to see how our work contributes to the Blue Room mission!
10% OF ALL BLUE ROOM REVENUES GO DIRECTLY TO FUND OUR NON PROFIT TOGETHERISM.
WE CAN ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING TOGETHER.
These materials do not purport to be all-inclusive or to contain all the information that a prospective investor may desire in considering an investment. These materials are intended merely for preliminary discussion only and may not be relied upon for making any investment decision. Any discussion or information contained in this presentation does not serve as a receipt of, or as a substitute for, personalized investment advice from Blueroom or your advisor.
This publication does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any securities in any fund, market sector, strategy or any other product. Investing is speculative and involves substantial risks (including, the risk of loss of the investor’s entire investment). Past performance is not indicative of future results, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment, investment strategy, or product will be profitable.
For more information about us and our general disclosures contact us directly.