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Update Thursday, 2:13 p.m.: MNTN Inc, the advertising technology company that counts Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds as its chief creative officer, made its market debut on Thursday, in a closely watched initial public offering (IPO) that is testing investor appetite for the rapidly growing segment of ad-supported streaming television. Shares in the Austin-based company were up more than 14% in midday trading to over $24, after opening at $21. On Wednesday, the stock was priced at $16 a share, the higher end of the company’s expected range, in an offering led by Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Evercore ISI. The stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the “MNTN” ticker symbol. Based on its IPO share price, MNTNit’s pronounced Mountainhad an approximate valuation of $1.2 billion before its debut. Advertising finds a way The listing comes as streaming platforms are seeing strong growth in their ad-supported tiers, despite the friction that has caused with viewers who now often have to pay a premium to weed ads out. Netflix, the streaming leader and a longtime advertising holdout, recently said its ad-supported tier has 94 million active users and boasts more younger viewers than any traditional TV network. Amazon, meanwhile, announced a suite of new features for advertisers earlier this month at its Prime Video Upfront presentation. According to market research firm Antenna, 46% of streaming subscriptions are now for ad-supported tiers on services that offer them, representing year-over-year growth of almost 33%. During that same period, subscriptions on ad-free tiers declined 0.1%. MNTN sees a big opportunity here, pinning its hopes on a “self-serve” platform it calls Performance TV, or PTV, which offers ad targeting and measurement capabilities to small- and medium-size businesses. In filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), MNTN says it had more than 2,225 PTV customers in 2024, compared to only 142 in 2019. PTV drove $205.3 million in revenue last year, the company says, an increase of 35.5% from the year before. The relationship between consumers and content was completely transformed with the introduction of streaming television, CEO Mark Douglas said in the companys prospectus. Cable guides and DVRs are almost hard to remember how. However, the relationship between TV advertisers and the streaming networks has remained largely unchanged. We launched MNTN Performance TV to bridge that gap, bringing small and medium-sized businesses into the streaming TV ecosystem at scale. MNTN reported total revenue of $225.6 million last year, with a net loss of $32.9 million, narrowed from a net loss of $53.3 million in 2023. Stock listings heat up again after tariff-related caution Some companies had reportedly postponed their IPO plans this year in the wake of uncertainty over tariffs and President Trump’s erratic trade policies, but that hesitation may be easing, according to PitchBook, citing a high-profile listing earlier this month from digital broker eToro. Hinge Health, a digital health startup, is also expected to make its market debut on Thursday. Meanwhile, Klarna, Discord, Chime, and others are all said to be planning IPOs this year. This story is developing and was updated to include MNTN’s stock price after its market debut.
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E-Commerce
As my husband was growing his finance career, the year-end bonus became a pivotal moment: to see how much his hard work translated into cash. And rather than rushing to tell me the news, he and his close peers would gather at a local bar on bonus day to share their numbers. They wanted to know who got paid how much. You share your bonus number with your colleagues? I asked in disbelief. Why would you do that? We want to know the range of bonuses given out, he shared. This also helps us understand how we can get paid more next time around and do better. When I started my career, I remember a mentor once telling me, Dont talk about religion, sex, or politics at work, she cautioned. And dont ever tell anyone how much you make. While some of those corporate rules have changed, many of us still remain reluctant to talk about how much we make. According to one study, only 19% of employees have asked coworkers about their salaries. And most, 68%, say they avoid talking about money at work at all. Despite this reluctance to mention finances, many say that they do want to talk about pay at work: 56% say they wish discussing salaries wasnt taboo. So this begs the question: If we cant talk about our salaries openly, how can we be motivated to work harder, avoid miscommunications and misunderstandings about salaries, and ultimately close the gender and racial pay gaps? If you want to get better about talking about money, and understanding your earning potential, heres the case for why you should talk to your coworkers about how much you make: Find out if you are being paid fairly and equitably You may feel you are being paid less than your coworkers, especially compared to recent external hires. You may feel that your company is taking advantage of you, overworking and underpaying you. You may feel that you received the lowest salary increase and got the worst bonus ever this year. And these are all feelings; we need to move from feelings to facts to understand if theres an issue with our pay or not. According to the1935 National Labor Relations Act, employees have a right to talk to each other about their salaries. While companies may discourage it, it is not illegal for employees to discuss their compensation with each other. If you do decide to talk to your coworkers about your salary, you should be prepared for what you might hear. First, you want to make sure you are discussing the topic of pay with trusted colleagues, or risk having your salary being gossiped about. Second, if you find out you are being paid fairly and equitably versus your peers, you can then put your mind and ease, and go back to making an impact at work. Third, if you find out you are being paid less than peers who are doing the same job as you, be prepared to work through feelings of anger, jealousy, or resentment. While they could be better at negotiating, they also could have experiences you dont have and may be performing better at their job than you. Be prepared to consider all of that before discussing your pay with others at work. Discover whats really important to leadership If your coworker is getting paid more than you, and you are both at the same level, this is a moment to also get curious and discover whats important to leadership. In my husbands case, finding out what bonuses others were paid had him reflect on two key things: first, his coworkers performance versus his own performance. He could be self-aware and think about what he could be doing better, and what he could learn from his coworker. Second, he could acknowledge that his coworkers bonus was about their performance, but also what deals they were placed on. How much they got paid was also about what work was ultimately important and seen as valuable to leadership. As priorities continue to shift for your company in an uncertain market, make sure you are working on business deals, initiatives, and projects important to leadership. You may not have full control over this. If you have the power to pause or stop work thats no longer relevant, do that, or make the case to your boss on why you shouldnt be working on that initiative anymore. And if you have the opportunity and bandwidth to raise your hand to work on a project thats of importance to leadership, go for it. Discovering what leadership thinks is valuable work during this time is also a way to make sure you are positioned to get compensated well. Use the data to advocate for your own pay As I discuss in my book Reimagine Inclusion: Debunking 13 Myths to Transform Your Workplace, I was raised not to talk about money. My parents taught me to never ask someone how much they make or to discuss how much you make, or to ask how much something cost or was worth. It wasnt until well into my adulthood that I discovered how much my father made working as an executive and what my mother made as a teacher. It took me years to break the silence and learn how to talk about money. And the more I started to read about money, to talk about money, to think about money, over time it slowly became easier to talk about my own compensation. Talking to your coworkers about your salary can help give you data points to help advocate for your own pay. That doesnt mean you should walk into your bosss office and say, Well I discovered Mita is making this much, and so I should have my salary increased by $10,000 dollars. But it does provide another data point into how your compensation is determined, which includes what projects you are working on, what your performance is, the pay range for your current role, your expertise and experiences, what the external market is offering for your role, and more. You can use the information you receive from your coworkers to have a productive conversation with your boss when advocating for your pay. If we want to create fair and equitable workplaces for everyone, we need to get comfortable talking about how much money we each make. The pros of talking about our salaries with our coworkers just might outweigh the cons, so we all can feel comfortable and confident and know our own worth.
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E-Commerce
On Thursday, President Donald Trump will sit down for an intimate evening at his Northern Virginia golf club with 220 of his favorite people in the world: a group of cryptocurrency speculators who have spent an estimated $148 million on Trumps eponymous memecoin, making the president and his associates millions of dollars in the process. Even by Trumps standards, this dinner will be the culmination of one of the most cartoonish episodes of executive-branch graft in recent memory. Last month, Trump announced that at the end of a predetermined period, he would host an unforgettable Gala DINNER for the top 220 holders of $TRUMP, allowing winners to discuss the future of the industry with the Crypto President himself. The top 25 token holders would also get to attend an Exclusive Reception with Trump, along with a Special VIP White House Tour. (Hours after the contest went live, its website was quietly edited to promise the top 25 finishers only a Special VIP Tour, with no location specified. It remains unclear whether that event will indeed take place at the White House, or at a golf resort facility of the presidents choice.) The contests organizer, a Trump-affiliated LLC called Fight Fight Fight, maintained an online leaderboard of those jockeying for position during the sweepstakes, which ended on May 12. The website also includes helpful information about the dress code (black tie optional) and the plus-one policy (none, because if you earned a seat at the table, its because you earned it). For Trump, the logistical details were far less important than the chance to juice the market for $TRUMP, which had cratered after launching in January but then spiked by more than 50% when he announced the contest. In the two days that followed, the Trump Organization and its affiliates, which together control roughly 80% of the tokens supply, took in nearly $1 million in trading fees; by the end of the sweepstakes, that number had jumped to $3 million, according to a Washington Post analysis. In all, the Post estimates that since the coins debut four months ago, Trump and company have made $312 million from crypto sales and $43 million in fees. As it turns out, one of the perks of being the person in charge of U.S. cryptocurrency policy is the freedom to profit off of cryptocurrency without fear of meaningful consequences. The details of the frenzy to secure a spot on the leaderboard make clear just how for sale the federal government is right now. Making the top 220, according to Wired, required holding or buying more than 4,000 $TRUMP tokens worth about $55,000 altogether; those who made the VIP list held an average of 325,000 tokens worth a collective $4.3 million. Many of the people who made the cut made their purchases on exchanges that suggest they are non-U.S. residents who jumped at the chance to bend the U.S. presidents ear in a semiprivate setting. Sure enough, although the leaderboard identifies winners only by username and alphanumeric crypto wallet address, among the confirmed attendees are Justin Sun, a Chinese crypto speculator who is, in a wild coincidence, trying to settle civil fraud charges with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission; an Australian crypto entrepreneur who hopes to pitch Trump on adopting an even more industry-friendly regulatory stance; and a to-be-determined representative of MemeCore, a Singapore-based crypto collective that told New York magazine that whomever it sends hopes to ask Trump, Are you a meme, or the result of one? Fight Fight Fight calculated the value of contestants holdings based on both the amount of $TRUMP in a wallet and the length of time theyd held it, thus rewarding early investors for their commitment to padding the presidents bottom line. That said, earlier this month, the journalist Molly White found that of the wallets on the leaderboard at the time, 62% started buying $TRUMP only after he dangled the dinner invitation. Once acquiring a floundering memecoin came with a shot at a sit-down with the literal President of the United States, people who were previously uninterested apparently decided to reevaluate their investment priorities. Since the event is closed to the press, there will be no independent coverage of what Trump says to attendees, or what the attendees say to Trump, or even who the attendees are. The entire spectacle amounts to an off-the-record jam session between a bunch of people who have already gotten rich off crypto, brainstorming ways to keep getting rich off crypto. For Trump, the event is only the latest celebration of his whirlwind romance with crypto, which he spent years disparaging before realizing that embracing it could help fast-track his return to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He positioned himself as the pro-crypto candidate on the campaign trail last year, promising to create a national crypto stockpile and appoint industry luminaries to prominent administration roles. In another wild coincidence, around the same time, his adult sons helped launch World Liberty Financial, a crypto project structured to funnel 75% of revenue to the Trump family. WLF was basically a hedge against the results of the 2024 election: Even if Trump lost, he would at least have a new source of income to pay his legal bills. The fact that Trump won that election, of course, has made this alliance even more successful for everyone involved. In the hours before his inauguration, the price of Bitcoin spiked to nearly $110,000, then an all-time high. Demand for World Liberty Financials coins exploded, too, especially from foreign investors whom federal law bars from giving directly to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds. (Sun, who will attend Thursdays dinner, has spent nearly $75 million on WLF tokens, making him its single largest known investor.) More recently, Abu Dhabi announced that it would use a WLF-issued stablecoin, USDI1, for its state-backed investment firms $2 billion deal with the crypto exchange Binancea choice that just so happens to put tens of millions of dollars in the Trump familys pockets. In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Eric Trump spoke of the familys pivot to crypto in glowing terms, describing World Liberty Financial as one of the more successful things weve ever done. The numbers bear this out: In March, Fortune estimated that Trumps crypto holdings were worth $2.9 billionnot bad for an asset he was dismissing as not money, highly volatile, and based on thin air a few years earlier. Pundits often describe Trumps involvement in crypto as unprecedented, and in a sense, this is right: Given Washingtons enduring obsessions with political scandals and conflicts of interest, traditionally, sitting presidents have not developed active side hustles in industries they have the power to regulate. But Trump has never cared about adhering to norms like this one, because he has always viewed the power of the office he holds primarily in terms of its potential to make him wealthier. He agreed to shake hands with a couple hundred crypto enthusiasts this week for the only reason he has ever done anything: He saw a chance to make money, and no one stopped him from taking it.
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E-Commerce
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