Venture Capital Episodes

While I talk about big round raises and startups and venture all the time, we haven’t really done a deep dive into where venture is at at the moment. So, who better to talk to than Crunchbase, and in this case, Crunchbase’s Jason Rowley. Today… the state of venture in 2019, and we especially get into the modern world of megarounds, even hypergiant rounds… raises of $250 million or more. Those never used to happen. They happen all the time now… we just talked about one this week… Softbank contrib...

So, I hope you read the piece I mentioned in the long reads, Called Outgrowing Advertising, by Andreessen Horowitz's general partner Connie Chan. Link in the show notes. Again, I think this points a way forward for the one trick pony-ism that I've bemoaned on this podcast. A model for new startups now that the low hanging fruit of "let's just get to a billion users and throw some ads up" is kinda, sorta, done.

Ali's Medium Post: Land of the Super Founders On this bonus episode, we’re going to revisit a past weekend longread suggestion and talk to the author of that longread to go further in-depth. Do you remember I recommended Land of the Super Founders a medium piece by Ali Tamaseb who spent 300 hours gathering data on unicorn startups to answer the simple question what did billion-dollar startups look like when they were getting started? What common traits did they share? This episode has a full tra...

Facebook wants to buy some cybersecurity, Washington wants to know what Silicon Valley will do for its country, Fred Wilson wants you to ask yourself if your investors are bad actors, and stealing a Tesla by hacking the entry fob. Links: Facebook on Hunt for Big Cybersecurity Acquisition (The Information) Who Are My Investors? (AVC) Thieves steal a Tesla Model S by hacking the entry fob (Engadget) A tech executive's video of his Tesla Model S being hacked and stolen is going viral (Business In...

NVIDIA announces its next generation GPUs, Apple wants developers to get SaaS-y, what if we just rebuilt the cable bundle with streaming channels, Tinder founders file suit and is Kevin Durant teaming up with Marc Andreessen? LinksNVIDIA Reveals Next-Gen Turing GPU Architecture (AnandTech)How an invite-only meeting at Apple's luxury loft in New York set the stage for one of the biggest subscription businesses in the world (Business Insider)Banks and Retailers Are Tracking How You Type, Swipe and...