Venture Trends Newsletter, Issue #2
This newsletter gathers together this week’s most interesting content related to the Venture capital ecosystem. I curate this from my personal reading in Feedly and email it as a newsletter on Friday evening, Pacific time, each week. There is little or no commentary included — except for when I make comments or highlights directly in Feedly. If you would like to get this in email please subscribe using Paypal.
Venture Trends
Uber CEO Khosrowshahi Struggles to Find Formula for Success
The Information / Saved by Keith Teare As 2020 begins, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi faces what is shaping up to be a year of reckoning. Uber’s market capitalization has dropped $29 billion since it went public in May. It likely lost five to six times as much money in 2019 as it forecast in presentations to banks two years ago.
Drummond Departure Puts Spotlight on Google Venture Arm
The Information / Saved by Keith Teare When Alphabet’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, announced his retirement from the company last week, an executive who once ran the company’s main venture investment arm — now known as GV — issued an unusual public statement blasting Drummond.
The open-source movement keeps getting bigger and more interesting. If you have never heard of @risk_v, I would consider this a must read. From academia to industry. https://t.co/4beuY6bKN8
— Bill Gurley (@bgurley) January 24, 2020
Sequoia plans to float largest India-dedicated fund with $1.25b corpus The move comes as — DealStreetAsia
DealStreetAsia / Saved by Keith Teare
Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, an early investor in some of India’s biggest startups including Byju’s, Zomato, and OYO, is set to float its largest India-focused fund with a corpus of about $1.25 billion, per a media report.
Tesla’s Valuation Surpasses Ford and GM Combined
Visual Capitalist / Saved by Keith Teare Chart: Tesla is Worth More than Ford and GM Combined Tesla has been on a roller coaster ride of market sentiment in recent years, but the electric car company is starting off the new decade on a high note. Read More
Cover Story: The Future Of Venture Capital — The Edge Markets MY
The Edge Markets MY / Saved by Keith Teare The venture capital sector has enjoyed a decade of global prominence amid record levels of fundraising. This has been particularly true for Southeast Asian start-ups raising funds in the early stage. Read More
Unicorn-hunting investors might need to think again — Sifted
Sifted / Saved by Keith Teare Over the past decade, the hunt for unicorns has become an obsession of investors, the media, founders and policy makers. And in the name of the unicorn, one investment strategy has ruled: a growth-at-all-costs mentality that invests heavily in losses with almost no focus on profitability. Read More
Venture fits just right in a family office portfolio
Venture Capital Journal / Saved by Keith Teare Cambridge Associates recommends family offices to have a venture allocation of 15% to 20% and believes venture offers family offices a way to make money to pass down for years to come. Read More
Venture Capital Due Diligence: The Screening Process
Medium / Saved by Keith Teare The initial screening process can be formal or informal, depending on the number of decision makers involved in the fund. For smaller teams, the screening process is likely to include all members in the group whereas for midsized funds (six to eight), it is more common for the decision to be led by one or two partners, with investing done on the basis of these partner’s research and presentations to the full partnership. Read More
Collection of pitch decks from venture capital funded startups
pitch deck / Saved by Keith Teare
Yeah. Your startup is 99% likely going to be different. What you need to do is learn how to ‘think’ about how you approach composing your pitch deck design.The ‘narrative’ of your pitch deck is what matters. What makes your startup compelling.
Keith Teare — 139 Pitch decks that were funded
Read More
Looking for a Venture Capital Fund to Invest in You? Here’s How to Do It Right — JD Supra
JD Supra / Saved by Keith Teare January 22, 2020 Looking for a Venture Capital Fund to Invest in You? Here’s How to Do It Right Barnea Jaffa Lande & Co. Raising capital is one of the main issues that preoccupies entrepreneurs on a daily basis. Read More
Is the Cult Of The “Unicorn-Founder” Dead? — Forbes
Forbes / Saved by Keith Teare Many are of the opinion that the changing venture capital (VC) industry is ending the cult of the unicorn-founder ( and on CNBC — 12/23/19 on Rapid Fire). Others are suggesting that it is time for adults to talk with the unicorn-kids about the reality of life (Time for the Unicorn Talk, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 10/7/19, page 12). Read More
Mercom India / Saved by Keith Teare In 2019, global VC funding (venture capital, private equity, and corporate venture capital) for battery storage, smart grid, and efficiency companies totaled $2.3 billion compared to $2.8 billion raised in 2018. Read More
China tech’s venture capital boom is going cold — Fortune
Fortune / Saved by Keith Teare WeWork’s other cofounder has a plan to save the company. It’s the opposite of what Adam Neumann envisioned. Read More
Where top VCs are investing in adtech and martech
Fundings & Exits — TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare Lately, the venture community’s relationship with advertising tech has been a rocky one. Advertising is no longer the venture oasis it was in the past, with the flow of VC dollars in the space dropping dramatically in recent years. Read More
Goldman Sachs’s CEO just called WeWork’s pulled IPO — which Goldman was underwriting — proof that the market works
Fundings & Exits — TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare It’s hard to put a positive spin on a terrible situation, but that didn’t stop Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon earlier today. Asked during a session at the World Economic Forum in Davos about WeWork’s yanked IPO in September, Solomon suggested it was proof that the listing process works, despite that the CFO of Goldman — one of the offering’s underwriters — disclosed last fall that the pulled deal cost the bank a whopping $80 million. Read More
2020 Outlook: Strategies for Your Portfolio | Morgan Stanley
Morgan Stanley / Saved by Keith Teare Risk Considerations Yields are subject to change with economic conditions. Yield is only one factor that should be considered when making an investment decision. Equity securities may fluctuate in response to news on companies, industries, market conditions and general economic environment. Read More
The Power of Small Numbers
Medium / Saved by Keith Teare The Power of Small Numbers — What it means to invest with high conviction. The strongest bond we share with the founders we partner with is that, like them, we’re also in the early days of building our business. Read More
Is Venture Capital Worth the Risk?
The New Yorker / Saved by Keith Teare For a certain sort of nineteenth-century person — the sort with high risk tolerance and little revulsion to brutality — a natural career lay in whaling. The odds of success here were, by almost every measure, poor. Read More
Cynicism in Silicon Valley
Feld Thoughts / Saved by Keith Teare As I was reading The Atlantic article Silicon Valley Abandons the Culture That Made It the Envy of the World I kept flashing to the end of Anna Wiener’s awesome memoir Uncanny Valley. Read More
The Management Rights Letter
AVC / Saved by Keith Teare A friend asked me over the weekend “why do VCs ask for a management rights letter when they make an investment?” A management rights letter is a short agreement between a company and an investor to allow them certain “management rights.” These are typically the ability to attend board meetings, the ability to have access to financial reports on a regular basis, and the ability to advise and consult with the management of the company. Read More
British AI Startups Attracted Record Venture-Capital Funding in 2019 — Wall Street Journal
Wall Street Journal / Saved by Keith Teare Venture-capital firms plowed record funds into U.K.-based artificial-intelligence startups last year, shaking off factors such as Brexit and European data-privacy regulations. U.K. Read More
EoY 2019 Diversity Report: 20 Percent Of Newly Funded Startups In 2019 Have A Female Founder — Gené Teare — Crunchbase News
Crunchbase News / Saved by Keith Teare We close out the decade with 20 percent of global startups raising their first funding round in 2019 having a female founder. Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily The proportion of female co-founded companies has doubled since 2009 which stood at 10 percent. Read More
Stumbled upon this important piece from Aug. by @randfish. If you are building for SEO, it’s important to know that Google is actively working to minimize non-paid clicks off of Google (and succeeding, esp. on mobile). Trend only goes one direction. https://t.co/3Q5Nx3kasE
— Bill Gurley (@bgurley) January 20, 2020
Salaries set to increase for the first time in two years — by just 3% — Netimperative
Netimperative / Saved by Keith Teare Professional salaries in the UK are expected to increase by at least 3% in 2020 — following two years of pay freezes. With over half of UK professionals believing that their pay is not an accurate reflection of the work they do — news of salary increases above 2020 inflation rates (1.94%) will be warmly welcomed. Read More
Venture capital and health system investors are bullish on tech startups — ModernHealthcare.com
ModernHealthcare.com / Saved by Keith Teare
Mobile and digital health is an expansive category, including everything from fitness trackers and wellness tools to prescription digital therapeutics. Notably, digital therapeutics, which use software like apps to help patients prevent, manage or treat diseases, aim to augment — and in some cases, even replace — drugs or standard therapies.
The Urban Stack
Stories by Christian Hernandez on Medium / Saved by Keith Teare
A very successful real estate investor recently mentioned that they proudly build “one-hundred year assets”… I raised my eyebrow (knowing very little about real estate to be honest) and quipped “In that case I could almost guarantee those assets are mis-priced as many of them won’t be around in 100 years!”
It’s easy to ridicule overconfidence. And indeed, it has its disadvantages. But it’s just what you need if you want to take on a problem most rational people would conclude was too hard.
Fools dare where angels fear to tread, and sometimes they win.
— Paul Graham (@paulg) January 16, 2020
‘Stay humble, but raise the bar’: Goop and Farfetch investor Felix Capital plots its next steps — Glossy
Glossy / Saved by Keith Teare — Frederic Court, Felix Capital’s founder, talked to Glossy about many of the same things his team and advisers were discussing in the next room: the state of company’s portfolio, its next moves and the evolution of its processes amid rapid growth. Read More
The UK’s top 25 VCs: a guide from Sifted’s journalists — Sifted
Sifted / Saved by Keith Teare There is more money in Europe for startup founders to tap into than ever before — but that doesn’t mean it’s all cash that they should take. For early-stage founders in Europe (at seed and Series A) it’s often hard to know where to turn and how to tell a good venture capital firm from a less good venture capital firm. Read More
The window is probably open for someone to build a light-weight Crunchbase replacement
— Noah Jessop (@njess) January 19, 2020
The VC Industry Norms Which Changed Over The Past Decade
Haystack.vc / Saved by Keith Teare Having spent time around and then in the world of VC in the Bay Area during the last decade, I’ve been reflecting on how different norms in the industry have changed. At the start of 2010, there was some unwritten VC industry conventions that have been tested, challenged, and upended in the last decade. Read More
Venture capitalism and the death of start-ups — Global Banking And Finance Review
Global Banking And Finance Review / Saved by Keith Teare By Kevin Monserrat, Founder of Consilience Ventures For any entrepreneur being the next big disruptor that can grow a company from zero to a billion requires more than just a bright idea and capital. Read More
How To Invest In Startups
Howard Lindzon / Saved by Keith Teare It is easy to invest in startups today. It is really hard to make a living doing it. I think the real question in 2020 is ‘Should You Invest In Startups’. I will likely tackle this question in a few upcoming posts. Read More
Venture Capital Investment In The U.S. Increases To $34.2 Billion In Q4 2019, Pushing 2019 Total To $136.5 Billion -the Second Highest Yearly VC Investment On Record: KPMG Report — Olean Times Herald
Olean Times Herald / Saved by Keith Teare NEW YORK, Jan. 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Venture capital (VC) investment in the U.S. continued strong during Q4 2019, totaling $34.2 billion across 2,215 deals, according to the latest edition of Venture Pulse — a quarterly report on global VC trends published by KPMG Enterprise. Read More
Why Telcos Must Get in the Game for the Rise of Esports
Visual Capitalist / Saved by Keith Teare The following content is sponsored by Swarmio Media. Why Telcos Must Get in the Game for the Rise of Esports Over the last century, the world’s telecommunications companies have built out the complex infrastructure that makes the information age possible. Read More
Premium SaaS Metrics Required for Premium SaaS Valuations
David Cummings on Startups / Saved by Keith Teare When talking to SaaS entrepreneurs, inevitably the topic of valuations come up. Right now, public SaaS companies are trading at all-time highs, so entrepreneurs expect those valuations to apply to their startups. Read More
Visualizing the Biggest Risks to the Global Economy in 2020
Visual Capitalist / Saved by Keith Teare Top Risks in 2020: Dominated by Environmental Factors Environmental concerns are a frequent talking point drawn upon by politicians and scientists alike, and for good reason. Irrespective of economic or social status, climate change has the potential to affect us all. Read More
As Alphabet crests the $1T mark, SaaS stocks reach all-time highs of their own — TechCrunch
TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare As Alphabet crests the $1T mark, SaaS stocks reach all-time highs of their own Continuing our irregular surveys of the public markets, two things happened this week that are worth our time. Read More
Are there too many VC dollars seeking too few viable business opportunities in 2020?
SaaStr / Saved by Keith Teare Q: Are there too many VC dollars seeking too few viable business opportunities in 2020? Of course not. On the one hand, to any of this that have been doing this for a while, there are a ton of new funds in market (1,000+ new funds since 2016!) and the exiting funds have raised vastly more capital than before. Read More