Congrats to Perceptive, the Boston-based company behind the AI-powered robodentist that completed the first-ever autonomous dental procedure on a human. The robot completed a two-hour procedure in 15 mins, but can it replicate a human dentist’s friendly but deeply wounding admonishments to floss better? Once that’s a yes, we’re on board.
In today’s email:
The experience economy: It keeps bringing home the gold.
Digits: The world’s fastest puzzlers and largest bed pan collection.
Around the web: A wild dominoes display, a movie guessing game, and more.
👇 Listen: Recapping the past month’s biggest AI development, including OpenAI’s SearchGPT test.
The Big Idea
Sports and music tourism are exploding into a $1.5T industry
Packed stadiums can have outsized effects on local and global economies.
2024-08-05T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
It’s summer, which means your Instagram feed is proving that everyone is in Europe except for you.
Between events like the Paris Summer Olympics, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and Formula One, those trips are adding up.
The sports and music tourism economy is projected to hit $1.5T by 2032, according to research from Collinson International Ltd. viaBloomberg:
Sports tourism alone, valued at $564.7B in 2023, is estimated to reach $1.33T in eight years.
Music tourism, currently valued at $6.6B, is expected to more than double to $13.8B.
Of the 8.5k+ people surveyed, 83% have flown to a sporting event, and 71% have either flown to a concert in the past three years or will in the next 12 months.
The trend makes sense given that the majority of Gen Zers and millennials would prefer to spend their money on experiences rather than save for retirement.
Golden tickets
When travelers visit for a concert or a game, they’re not just swiping their credit cards inside the stadium — ~80% stay one to three days after the event and 77% arrive one to two days before.
More than half of sports fans spend $500+ before they’ve even left the airport, with one-third of travelers ages 25-34 spending $1k+.
The F1 Las Vegas Grand Prix in November 2023 brought $1.5B to the local economy, 50% more than the 2024 Super Bowl.
The Paris Summer Olympics sent Airbnb bookings skyrocketing 133% YoY, and international tourists are estimated to spend ~$5k for hotels, airfare, and event tickets.
Taylor Swift fans drove airfare sales to tour destinations up 45% YoY during concert dates, according to United Airlines. The tour led to larger booking spikes at Paris’ luxury hotels than the Olympics.
Even youth sports tourism reportedly generated $39.7B in direct spending in 2021, with a total economic impact of $91.8B.
And fandom can have a major impact on local economies: Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s acquisition of the Wrexham AFC football club led to a ~$1.3B boost for North Wales.
Free Resource
Seedlings to inspire your next side hustle
We hope you love that we took the liberty of pinpointing 50+ of the finest startup ideas from the My First Million archives, including absolute light bulbs like:
Divorce Island
Last-minute gift delivery
“Club-ifying” boring businesses
Addressing the pet care frenzy
A slew of smart AI-powered apps
Episode links included (of course), so you can listen in on the original pitches — courtesy of The Hustle founder Sam Parr, Milk Road founder Shaan Puri, and the worker bees here at HubSpot Media.
Saudi Arabia’s 2034 World Cup bid includes a proposed 46k-seat stadium. This is normal. The stadium would sit atop The Line, the kingdom’s planned 105-mile-long skyscraper, with the soccer pitch sitting 1.1k+ feet above the desert floor (for context, the Empire State Building is 1.25k feet up). This is not normal.
SNIPPETS
What’ll this week bring? Stocks tanked Friday following a weak US jobs report and a surge in unemployment. Tech earnings reports struggled last week, while the Fed gave cause for optimism. The only sure bet: more turbulence.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold 49%+ of its $84.2B Apple stake last quarter, which helped up the conglomerate’s cash pile to $277B. Apple remains Berkshire Hathaway’s largest stake.
Googleyanked an ad for Gemini, in which a child uses the chatbot to write to US Olympian Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, following backlash that it encouraged relying on AI over authenticity.
Airbnb chief business officer Dave Stephenson suggested the company may start offering luxury amenities — e.g., personal chefs, massages, etc. — to lure customers back from hotels.
Chevron is moving its headquarters from San Ramon, California — where it’s been since 2002 — to Houston, Texas.
Rough times at Intel: The former top chipmaker, which lost $1.6B in Q2, is shedding 15k+ workers and stopping all “non-essential” projects in an attempt to bounce back.
The “godfather” of Corvettes, Tadge Juechter, retired after 47 years at General Motors. He’ll leave a lasting mark — literally — with a silhouette of his head etched into all new Corvettes starting with the 2025 models.
The Deadpool & Wolverine juggernaut keeps going: The Marvel movie made $395.6m at the domestic box office and $824.1m internationally over its first 10 days.
Game Informer has shuttered after 33 years, its website replaced with a goodbye note. The video game publication was acquired by GameStop in 2000.
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How can you break into the multibillion-dollar cybersecurity startup space? The founder and CEO of Dune Security offered us a helpful primer on his industry.
By the Numbers
Digits: Professional puzzlers, an unexpected Barbie boost, and more
A trove of bedpans, competitive jigsaw puzzlers, and more odd numbers.
2024-08-05T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Rylah
154%:Estimated increase in online searches related to the definition of gynecology the week after Barbie premiered in 2023, per a survey from researchers at Harvard Medical School. Why? Spoiler alert for the six people on Earth who haven’t seen Barbie: After Barbie becomes a human woman at the end of the film, she makes an appointment to see a gynecologist for the first time, as Barbie dolls obviously don’t have genitals.
~38 minutes: How long it took Alejandro Clemente León to complete a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, winning him last year’s champion title at 2023’s World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Spain. This year’s competition in September anticipates 3k+ puzzlers who will employ various techniques and strategies to wrap up a puzzle as quickly as possible. And yes, just like you, many of them do start with the edges first.
163: Bedpans owned by Mary Jacobs, a 77-year-old British woman who’s been collecting them since 1984. Jacobs “just wanted to collect something different” but now has no room for the portable waste receptacles, which she says are all clean and in “fantastic” condition. She attempted to sell them via auction, but no one wanted them. If anyone here wants to start a bedpan museum, well, now’s your chance.
3.5%:Average increase in bookings for hosts who smile in their Airbnb profile photos, per a new study. This is especially true for less experienced hosts and men, who can see demand increase by 8%+ thanks to a grin. Kannan Srinivasan, one of the study’s co-authors, said a smile may “enhance trust and reduce uncertainty” among consumers, and that this finding is crucial for online platforms where trust is important to customers.
Fit The Bill
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: Formed by a 1939 merger of engineering pioneers, this company naturally spun out some impressive inventions, introducing the world to the double-coil light bulb, laptop PC, and DVD Player.
Clue 2: It once had a sprawling technological empire, building everything from refrigerators to nuclear power plants, but this century has not been kind so far — a 2015 accounting scandal and the 2017 bankruptcy of its American nuclear energy arm dented its reputation.
Clue 3: After 74 years on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, this Japanese tech company was delisted late last year after a $14B private equity takeover.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
AROUND THE WEB
🤿 On this day: In 2002, divers found the gun turret of the USS Monitor, 140 years after the warship sank in the Atlantic Ocean amid the Civil War.
Today’s Fit the Bill answer is Toshiba (Market cap for its public subsidiary Toshiba Tec Corp: $160.64B)
Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman. Editing by: Ben “Saves a lot of cash by rooting for teams that suck” Berkley.