That optimism was on full display at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco ' where the cybersecurity gathering turned the city back to its pre-COVID days, with thousands of folks walking the streets of SoMa and packing bars and restaurants. Hope and good vibes from VCs were almost as abundant as drinks. Deals like the giant $32 billion wedding of cloud security unicorn Wiz and Google parent Alphabet and cyber giant Palo Alto Networks' move to start the show made it seems their dreams of actual DPI ' distributed to paid-in capital, or the capital paid to funds' LPs after exits by those funds' portfolio companies ' may come true this year. The numbers somewhat support that idea. A third through the year, 32 VC-backed cyber startups have been purchased. They include cyber risk firm Vulcan Cyber and Oosto, which identifies threats in real time. !function(e,n,i,s){var d="InfogramEmbeds";var o=e.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];if(window[d]&&window[d].initialized)window[d].process&&window[d].process();else if(!e.getElementById(i)){var r=e.createElement(n);r.async=1,r.id=i,r.src=s,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,"script","infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js");...
Good day & happy Tuesday! Today's issue is incredibly packed and super interesting as we're diving deep into Robinhood's latest Q1 2025 financials (unpacking the most importnant numbers, what they mean, see how the FinTech giant transformed from meme stock enabler to financial services powerhouse & what's next for HOOD 0.00%'), and learn how Fifth Third bank is leveraging AI (how their homegrown AI transformed from a COVID-19 emergency solution to a sophisticated customer service tool, what this tells us about the future + bonus deep dive into AI Playbooks, The Ultimate Beginners Guide to AI, and more inside!). So let's just jump straight into the interesting stuff '' Earnings time ' FinTech giant Robinhood HOOD 0.00%' just posted its Q1 2025 earnings that reveal a company that has successfully metamorphosed from pandemic-era trading phenomenon to a legitimate multi-faceted financial platform. While the market's lukewarm response (stock was down 3.6% post-earnings) reflects skepticism about earnings quality and near-term headwinds, the underlying fundamentals suggest a business model approaching sustainable maturity with expanding competitive moats....
A global system of full economic integration'the aspiration of decades of negotiations and the worldwide underpinning of corporate strategy'has never been fully realized. The latest round of global trade talks sputtered to an inconclusive end in the early 2010s. But even as views on the benefits and fairness of the system diverged among countries, there was no overt challenge to the framework of global trade. That changed on April 2, 2025, when US tariff announcements revealed in stark fashion some of the underlying discontent with this construct. This article is a collaborative effort by Sven Smit, Shubham Singhal, Olivia White, Ezra Greenberg, Jan Mischke, Matt Watters, Cindy Levy, and Rebecca J. Anderson, representing views from McKinsey's Geopolitics and Strategy & Corporate Finance Practices and the McKinsey Global Institute. In the weeks since the announcements, share prices and the US Treasury market have gyrated. Expectations of US inflation have spiked. Consumer confidence has plummeted back to lows last seen in 2022, as inflation surged after the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first quarter, the US economy shrank by 0.3 percent, as companies pulled forward imports and inventories grew. Many analysts have raised their estimates of the probability of a global recession. After two years of nearly 3 percent real GDP growth, is the momentum in the US economy strong enough to work through these headwinds'...
Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the United States' top public health official, recently claimed some religious groups avoid the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine because it contains 'aborted fetus debris' and 'DNA particles'. Kennedy said 'aborted fetus debris' in MMR vaccines is the reason many religious people refuse vaccination. He referred specifically to the Mennonites in Texas, a deeply religious community, who have been among the hardest hit by the current measles outbreaks. Many vaccines work by using a small amount of an attenuated (weakened) form of a virus, or in the case of the MMR vaccine, attenuated forms of the viruses that cause measles, mumps and rubella. This gives the immune system a safe opportunity to learn how to recognise and respond to these viruses. Kennedy's claim about fetal debris specifically refers to the rubella component of the MMR vaccine. The rubella virus is generally grown in a human cell line known as WI-38, which was originally derived from lung tissue of a single elective abortion in the 1960s. This cell line has been used for decades, and no new fetal tissue has been used since....
