Usend: 2021 Was the Year of Value

As companies emerge from survival mode, they’re casting a critical eye on the landscape around them, says Ran Grushkowsky, chief operating officer and chief technology officer of Usend. As this happens, they’re also assessing what they value – focusing on what matters, and abandoning what doesn’t. Read his thoughts in the PYMNTS eBook, “In a Word: 50 Thought Leaders Sum Up 2021.”

In many facets, value was the word of 2021. There were skyrocketing values based on merit, hype and scarcity. Conversely, there were decreasing values given outlooks for the future and poor business fundamentals. None of it was without debate.

The word value at its core also sparks thoughts of fundamental economics, where theoretical enterprises manufacture and sell widgets in an ideal economy of rational actors. When force majeure-level shocks bash the economy, nothing functions ideally — and we’re left with frantic market participants estimating their own level of regard or importance of a certain asset.

In many cases, people adopt the beliefs of value held by herds of others, devoid of their own nuanced analysis. So how did this manifest itself in 2021?

Many industries and companies attempted to emerge from the survival mode of 2020 and began to survey and analyze the landscape of the modified world around them. It is from here that the value of every individual concept or thing becomes a subjective analysis.

We saw the value of legacy companies reach wild peaks as individual investors banded together to create their own value by opposing the efforts of traditional financial incumbents who were betting on the value of distressed companies decreasing (AMC, GameStop, etc.).

We saw global brands shutter because they could no longer create value. Or shareholders did not believe there was sufficient value in continuing their business in its current form (Belk, Lorna Jane, Paper Source).

There were eye-popping specialpurpose acquisition company (SPAC) vehicles sprouting up overnight to capture value usually left for the large banks (Paysafe, Payoneer, Circle). SPACs outlined another powerful path to public market liquidity when executed properly. Most commonly, SPAC asset purchases ascribed high values, while public markets debate true value on a day-to-day basis. (On the whole, IPOs have 50% better price increases than SPACs since 2018.)

Entrenched players invested to grow into new geographies or to add complementary services, because they saw the exponential value it could drive to their current business with the required investment cost being proportionally a great value to them (our company Usend, with Inter).

We saw decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) gathering rapid momentum and funds seeking to assert their value over the U.S. Constitution. At the same time, we saw the value of having knowledge and expertise in a field, as the DAOs somewhat telegraphed their intentions to the field and were outbid.

Going forward, we will continue to deal with aftershocks, shortages, inflation and other impacts. The ability to use logic and reason to rationally prescribe value is essential. It is a competitive advantage normally, but even more so in an uncertain time with a greater presence of irrational actors.

Either way, in a simplistic sense, the firms that create value for their customers and ecosystems will generally be rewarded with value of their own.