Google Paid $3.2 Billion for $300 Million in Sales

Google Paid $3.2 Billion for $300 Million in Sales

Nest was doing about $300 million a year when Google wrote a $3.2 billion cheque — more than ten times sales. Amazon paid over $1 billion for Ring. Vivint went public through a $4.1 billion merger. Three exits, three buyers who already owned an ecosystem.

Ten times sales is what you pay for software, not for a box with a screen. So look at what the buyer actually got: a permanent sensor inside the house, reporting when you wake, when you leave and when you come home, plus a subscription that renews whether or not anyone ever buys another device. Nobody was valuing the hardware.

The category has since stopped being early. 64% of US households now own at least one smart device. Thirty-five percent have a smart speaker. Video doorbell ownership reached 16% of households, double the 8% of 2020 — a doubling in five years, in a product category that did not meaningfully exist a decade earlier.

Then the ground shifted underneath the whole thing. A standard called Matter arrived to make devices work across brands, and adoption moved fast: from under 5% of newly shipped devices in late 2023 to 40% two years later, with more than 3,000 certified products. Average selling prices fell 22% since 2021. Buying a Google thermostat no longer commits you to Google.

Which is why the buying has not stopped. ASSA ABLOY took Level Lock. Resideo took Snap One. Schneider Electric took Sense Energy. Amazon and Google together still hold more than 60% of the voice assistant layer, and every one of those deals is a platform owner paying cash for a piece of the house it does not yet occupy.

Here’s why it lands on your desk: in this category the independent device maker is not really building a company to run for thirty years. It is building an installed base, and the exit is a platform writing a cheque — which is exactly what happened to the last three that mattered. That structure is unusual, and it is worth recognising when you see it.

Source: CSA / eMarketer / Strategy Analytics

The Shark Who Didn’t Pass This Time

Daymond John is betting big on a $2.50 smart home company — and he has good reason after the Sharks’ previous biggest miss in history.

Kevin O’Leary and the Sharks passed on Ring — only to watch Amazon buy it for over $1 billion. A 67,765% return, gone.

Why is this Shark betting big on this startup?

Because the smart home space is absolutely booming!

Ring doorbell? Sold for $1.0 billion to Amazon
Nest thermostat? Acquired for $3.2 billion by Google
Vivint smart homes? Went public via a $4.1 billion SPAC merger

The Next $1 Billion+ Smart Home Company? Here Are The Details

This company is growing fast — $20M+ in revenue, 70% annual growth, with 10 patents secured. They’ve landed partnerships with Amazon, Best Buy, and Home Depot.

And over 4,000 investors are already backing them with over $15M+ raised to date.

And now, retail investors can buy shares before it goes public — just like early Uber and Airbnb investors.

The price changes on August 31. Thousands have already requested access to this $2.50 opportunity.

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Wells Fargo Is Putting Deposits on a Blockchain This Fall

The country’s fourth-largest bank, with about $2.3 trillion in assets, said this month it will offer tokenised deposits to corporate and commercial clients this autumn. A year ago that would have read as a pilot. Now it reads as catching up.

The rewiring is happening one institution at a time and it is no longer speculative. BlackRock — whose chief executive calls tokenisation the next generation for markets — introduced two tokenised money market products this month. Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have launched tokenised funds on private chains. Nearly 200 institutional issuers, including Franklin Templeton, Siemens and JPMorgan, have put real capital on-chain.

Hold the scale in your head, because both halves matter. Roughly $24 billion of real-world assets sit on public blockchains — triple where it stood at the start of 2023, and a rounding error against a $27 trillion Treasury market. Tokenised money market funds are around $8.7 billion. Tokenised Treasuries about $6.7 billion. Forecasts for 2030 range from $2 trillion to $16 trillion depending on which consultancy you ask, which tells you the range is a guess and the direction is not.

The constraint is fragmentation, and there is a date attached to fixing it. A token issued by one bank cannot currently be paid to a customer of another — which makes each of these launches an island. The Clearing House network is being built to connect them, with a reported target of the first half of 2027 and multinational corporations as the first users. Until that lands, tokenised deposits are a faster ledger inside one institution rather than a payment system.

The rulebook is arriving on a similar clock. Stablecoin licensing, capital and custody requirements under last year’s legislation carry key deadlines through this year, and the broader market-structure rules from the SEC and CFTC are expected to bite in late 2026 or 2027. Firms are being told to classify assets and prepare for registration now, before the framework is fully live.

The distinction worth holding: tokenisation changes how an asset moves, not what it is worth. It cannot create liquidity where none exists or turn a wrapper into the thing it tracks. But when banks, asset managers, exchanges and clearing houses are all building the same rails at the same time, with a 2027 date on the interconnection, it stops being a technology experiment and starts being infrastructure.

Source: Forbes / Congressional Research Service / company announcements

He Passed on Bitcoin at $800

Editor’s Note: Legendary tech investor Andy Howard spotted Kaspa at half a penny in December 2022 before it surged 4,040%. Today, he’s identified another potential asymmetric opportunity in what he calls “Digital Oil”.

Get the ticker symbol in my free presentation or read more below.

In 2017, I had the chance to buy Bitcoin at $800 and passed.

That mistake taught me one thing…

When a massive financial shift is staring you in the face, you act. Fast.

Since then I’ve called Injective at $4.55 in March 2023 before it surged 1,064% in one year. And Sui at just 57 cents in August 2024 before it rocketed 840% in six months.

But nothing has got me more excited than when I heard Trump signed a new law shifting our entire $382 trillion financial system onto a brand new blockchain-based “Money Grid”...

And every transaction that happens on this Grid? Burns something we call Digital Oil.

Every. Single. Transaction.

Just like oil surged in the 70’s, investors in this new “Digital Oil” could see historic gains.

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the biggest asset manager on Earth, calls the New Money Grid “the next major evolution in market infrastructure”.

And that’s why BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale are already positioning — because the legal deadline is less than 12 months away.

With the April 2027 legal deadline approaching and institutional buyers already accumulating, the window to position yourself at ground-floor prices is closing. Here’s how to get in now…

P.S. The legal mandate requires all $382 trillion in U.S. financial assets to migrate to this new grid by April 2027. BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale are already in position. Watch the briefing before this asset reprices.

Costs Fell 5% While the Price Rose 24%

A large producer’s all-in sustaining cost runs near $1,475 an ounce. Gold sells above $4,400. That gap is not a rounding difference — it is the entire business, and it has never been this wide.

Mining is a spread business wearing a commodity costume. The miner does not sell gold so much as sell the difference between what the metal fetches and what it costs to pull out of the ground. When that difference widens, profit does not rise proportionally — it rises on the gap, which is a much faster line.

Run the arithmetic on a single ounce. At $2,000 gold and a $1,475 cost, the producer keeps $525. At $4,400, the same ounce out of the same hole, with the same crew and the same truck, throws off roughly $2,925. The gold price rather more than doubled. The margin per ounce went up more than five times.

And the cost side helped rather than fought. Across the sector, all-in sustaining costs came down about 5% in a period when the metal rose 24% — the two lines moving in opposite directions at once, which is the rarest and most profitable configuration in this industry. Record margins near $2,800 an ounce followed. One large producer has been projecting free cash flow of $9.5 billion.

The distinction worth holding: cash of that size does not sit still, because a mining company that hoards it is simply a fund with a payroll. It buys back stock, raises the dividend, or buys something that still has ounces in the ground. Only one of those three does anything about the reserves it is spending down every quarter.

Source: Company guidance / sector cost data

A Dollar of Gold for Thirty-Six Cents

Right now, you can buy a dollar’s worth of gold for about 36 cents.

That sounds impossible. Here’s how it’s real.

The major gold miners are throwing off record cash flow — even after gold’s recent pullback. The four largest have never had this much free cash on hand. Ever. At today’s gold price, they’re running margins as high as 75% — the most profitable they have ever been.

Which hands them a problem.

Go here to see the problem — and why the majors are about to go on a shopping spree for the ages.

When a major gold miner makes record profits, it does one of two things: hand the cash back to shareholders, or buy the best junior mining assets to secure future production.

And here’s the piece the market is missing:

The best junior assets are still priced as if gold were stuck at $1,800 an ounce — not north of $4,000, where it trades today.

So the majors are staring at their own future production shrinking, sitting on record cash, looking at top-tier junior assets trading at a fraction of what that gold is worth at today’s price.

They don’t have a choice. They buy — or their output keeps shrinking until they’re out of business.

That’s how you buy a dollar of gold for 36 cents: you own the junior before the major is forced to pay up for it.

The gap between what these assets are worth and what they trade for has a name. I call it the Golden Anomaly. It only appears early in a gold bull market, and it closes fast — usually the moment the majors start writing cheques.

So you can pay full price after the gap closes…

Or buy the dollar for 36 cents while the Anomaly still exists.

My name is Garrett Goggin, CFA, CMT, and it’s why Porter Stansberry recently called me:

“THE most knowledgeable gold investor in the world.”

Best,
Garrett Goggin, CFA, CMT
Lead Analyst and Founder, Golden Portfolio

Nvidia Reports Tonight. Warsh Speaks Tomorrow.

The two events this newsletter has been pointing at for a fortnight arrive within twenty-four hours of each other, into a market that has priced neither as a risk.

Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote as chair beginning tomorrow. The symposium exists so a chair can signal, and this is a chair who has spent his tenure arguing that signalling is the problem — he scrapped conventional forward guidance and floated cutting the number of policy meetings each year. Either he makes a statement or he demonstrates that he will not, and both are information.

He arrives with the market relaxed. Odds of a September rise sit near 27%, roughly half where they stood a fortnight ago, with no move fully priced before the start of next year — despite three officials dissenting in favour of a hike in July. The index is at record highs and volatility near its 2026 lows.

Nvidia lands first, after tonight’s close. The read-through runs well past one company: the AI build-out is what has been holding up power demand, chip capital expenditure and a meaningful share of index earnings growth all year. A soft guide followed by a hawkish speech would compound rather than cancel out.

If you are drawing income from savings, the thing to watch is not either headline but the distance between what is priced and what is possible. A record-high index expecting nothing, going into two events that could say something, is a narrow place to be standing.

Source: CME FedWatch / Federal Reserve