50 top stories this week for Startups, Venture and Angel Investors

Venture Trends Newsletter, Issue #3

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 want this in your email every Saturday click here.

Presentations — Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans / Saved by Keith Teare

Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems. READ MORE

The Surprising Truth About Raising Your Seed Round from VCs

Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

The Surprising Truth About Raising Your Seed Round from VCsThe unspoken power of signaling could ace or ruin your Series AYou’ve probably been to an Apple store. Even if you’ve only once walked past one, you would’ve noticed that Apple stores always seem packed with customers. READ MORE

State of Venture Capital Industry in 2019 (with Infographic)

Toptal Finance Blog / Saved by Keith Teare

The year of 2018 saw a total of $254 billion invested globally into ~18,000 startups via venture capital financing—a 46% leap from 2017’s figures—with 52% ($131 billion) landing in the US alone. READ MORE

Computers That Can Make Commitments

37    Andreessen Horowitz / Saved by Keith Teare

Blockchains are computers that can make commitments. Traditional computers are ultimately controlled by people, either directly in the case of personal computers or indirectly through organizations. READ MORE

The Fed Wants to Loosen Rules Around Big Banks and Venture Capital – The New York Times

The New York Times / Saved by Keith Teare
WASHINGTON — Banks could invest heavily in or even sponsor venture capital funds under a proposed change to a post-crisis rule that was intended to limit their risk-taking. The proposal, unveiled Thursday by the Federal Reserve and other banking agencies, would revamp the Volcker Rule, which was created as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.
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Europe Needs to Wake Up to the Potential of Start-ups and Scale-ups

4    Blog – Crunchbase / Saved by Keith Teare

Start-ups and scale-ups play an important economic role. These firms are drivers of aggregate investment activities, carriers of innovation, and an important source of labour demand.

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What Do You Look For In A Company?

14    Points and Figures / Saved by Keith Teare

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Venture capital has no guesses as to what 2020 has in store – Axios

4    Axios / Saved by Keith Teare

Over the past 48 hours at the Upfront Summit, I’ve met with at least 50 venture capitalists and nearly as many limited partners in venture capital funds, representing varying geographies, experiences, and specialties. READ MORE

Unicorn fever as One Medical’s IPO pops 40% after conservative pricing

100+    Fundings & Exits – TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare

Shares of One Medical are worth $19.50 this morning after the venture-backed unicorn priced its IPO at $14 per share last night. The company opened at $18 before rising further, according to Yahoo Finance data. READ MORE

Congratulations on the new funds and a terrific first 15 years!

Here are the top 10 best performing venture funds that launched at the turn of the decade, which posted returns as high as 50% – Business Insider Nordic

100+    Business Insider Nordic / Saved by Keith Teare

PitchBook put together a list for Business Insider of the best-performing venture-capital funds that were launched from 2010 to 2012.Of the funds that were launched in that period, the median average annual return was at least 11% through the first quarter of last year.But the very best funds from that period have returned an average of more than 50%.Union Square Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Menlo Ventures were among those with standout funds.Click here for more BI Prime stories. READ MORE

Redesigning Venture Capital (Part III): A Hypothesis

Stories by Dominic Hofstetter on Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

Trees have value — they clean the air, provide shading, and sequester carbon. Being able to account for and capture that value could unlock massive amounts of funding, creating a new market for assets with positive externalities and transforming the socio-technical system we call “city”. READ MORE

9 reasons why Series A is not “just a big Seed round”

Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

9 reasons why Series A is not “just a big Seed round”Through The Family AAA, I’ve spent the last 8 months diving into a particular type of startup funding round: Series A. What can I say after all that time and effort? READ MORE

Misaligned Incentives in Venture Capital

Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

The only way to raise a new VC fund is through storytelling: explaining to potential LPs how and why you have an advantage versus the rest of the market.
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SoftBank wants its on-demand portfolio to stop losing so much money

200+    TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare

SoftBank wants its competing portfolio companies to stop losing so much money and, in some cases, to merge. That’s the news out from Financial Times today, which reported that Uber and DoorDash discussed merging last year. READ MORE

Venture creation, the new VC – Wamda

6    Wamda / Saved by Keith Teare

Investment across the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) is becoming more sophisticated. The growth in the number of venture capital (VC) firms and funds keen to tap into promising startups has resulted in greater competition for high quality pipeline. READ MORE

Tech firms serving Africa raised over $2bn in funding in 2019 reveals Partech report – Ventureburn

100+    Ventureburn / Saved by Keith Teare

Venture capital (VC) investments in tech companies that serve the African market last year grew 74% over 2018 — to total over $2-billion, through 250 rounds, up from 164 in 2018, reveals a new report by Partech Africa.
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Where top VCs are investing in travel, tourism and hospitality tech

200+    Fundings & Exits – TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare

The venture community has been fixated on travel and hospitality since the dot-com era and early-2000s, when mainstays like Kayak and Airbnb were still Silicon Valley darlings. As the multi-trillion-dollar global travel and hospitality market continues to grow, VCs are still foaming at the mouth for the opportunity to redefine the ways we move and stay around the world. READ MORE

You Can’t Fire Your Investor

16    VC & Technology – AVC / Saved by Keith TeareI saw this tweet coming out of the Upfront Summit yesterday (where I will be today): Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital: we can look at every company we’ve ever funded, and learned that the time from first email/contact to term sheet has shrunk from 90 days in 2004 to just 9 today. READ MORE

Reputation

Howard Lindzon / Saved by Keith Teare

Jeff Fagnan at Accomplice, a venture firm in Boston, said this on Twitter yesterday. “In Venture Capital, you build your track record on the companies that work. You build your reputation on the companies that don’t.” READ MORE

A conversation with ‘the most ambitious female VC in Europe’ – TechCrunch

100+    TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare

A conversation with ‘the most ambitious female VC in Europe’ Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital just raised a new $185 million fund Blossom Capital, the venture capital firm co-founded by ex-Index Ventures and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown, just raised a new $185 million fund. READ MORE

More Key Takeaways From The 2019 Seed Series Interviews: Part 2 of 2 – Crunchbase News

15    Crunchbase News / Saved by Keith Teare

The Seed Series of 2019 had so much good advice we had to break it down into two pieces. Here is our second set of the key takeaways from interviews with leading seed investors as we move forward into 2020. READ MORE

Article 2: Capital Raising Pace for SaaS companies: https://t.co/LskceT6HRz

Visualizing the Current Landscape of the Fintech Industry

500+    Visual Capitalist / Saved by Keith Teare

Visualizing the Current Landscape of the Fintech Industry Since the introduction of the first credit card with a magnetic stripe in 1966, financial technology has come a long way. Silicon Valley may not have birthed the term “fintech”, but it has certainly helped catapult its applications into the mainstream.
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Apart from team/culture and over-capitalizing, what are the most common reasons that companies that achieve PMF end up failing? – Rob Go (@robgo)11:58 – 2020/01/28 READ MORE

What the First Month of 2020 Says About Proptech – Motley Fool

4    Motley Fool / Saved by Keith Teare

The first month of the year is ending, and already we’ve seen hundreds of millions in venture capital invested in proptech in 2020. The investments come as some of the more well-funded real estate unicorns of 2019 face serious challenges. READ MORE

The 10th Anniversary of the iPad: A Perspective from the Windows Team

Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

The 10th Anniversary of the iPad: A Perspective from the Windows TeamWhile the press and friends of Apple gathered for the launch event, the Windows team fresh off Windows 7 launch watched from afar. READ MORE

Casper Prices Shares Between $17 And $19 With Valuation Below $1B

26    Crunchbase News / Saved by Keith Teare

Mattress startup Casper is expected to price its shares between $17 and $19 each, according to an updated regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily READ MORE

Has VC Become So Big It Must Be Disrupted?

4    Tomasz Tunguz / Saved by Keith Teare

Nathan Heller published an article called Is Venture Capital Worth the Risk? in the New Yorker. It’s a well-researched critique of the venture industry. The key question he poses is: has the industry become so large that it needs to be disrupted? READ MORE

Data Update 2 for 2020: Retrospective on a Disruptive Decade

13    Musings on Markets / Saved by Keith TeareMy data updates usually look at the data for the most recent year and what I learn from them, but 2020 also marks the end of a decade. In this post, I look back at markets over the period, a testing period for many active investors, and particularly so for value investors, who found that even as financial assets posted solid returns, what they thought were tried and true approaches to “beating the market” seemed to lose their power. READ MORE

African venture capitalists bullish over VC sector ahead of Nigerian Interswitch’s IPO – Ventureburn

70    Ventureburn / Saved by Keith Teare

The World Bank has forecast growth in Sub-Saharan Africa to slow from 3.4% (forecast) in 2019, to 2.9% in 2020. But despite slower growth, venture capitalists remain bullish over the continent’s venture capital (VC) scene. READ MORE

European Unicorns Break Out In 2019

17    Crunchbase News / Saved by Keith Teare

In our ongoing coverage of unicorns, we now look to Europe with 2019 shaping up to be the largest year for European unicorn funding. Overall $11.9 billion was invested in European unicorn companies in 2019, up 80 percent from 2018 at $6.6 billion. READ MORE

Automaker Startup Funding Is Fast And Furious

79    Crunchbase News / Saved by Keith Teare

When it comes to startup investment, automakers are still going full speed ahead. From ride-hailing apps to driverless car technology, transportation startups have attracted unprecedented sums of investment capital from auto manufacturers in recent years.
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Teller raises $4M to take on Plaid in the U.S. by providing API access to bank accounts – TechCrunch

200+    TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare

“They’re idiots, they’re really naive,” is how Stevie Graham, the co-founder of fintech Teller, once described Open Banking Limited, the body charged with delivering open banking in the U.K.
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Startup Dashboards For Dummies – Forbes

12    Forbes / Saved by Keith Teare

A Step-By-Step Guide To Help Make Board Meetings More Effective For Venture-Backed CompaniesAutomotive dashboards are simple, legible, and informative–startups should strive for the same … READ MORE

How To Build A Family Office Deal Flow Pipeline – Forbes

72    Forbes / Saved by Keith TeareAs the younger generation has grown up and developed not only a taste for investing but also a keen … [+] understanding of new technologies, venture investing in family offices has grown. READ MORE

Five Ways Entrepreneurs Misunderstand VCs

Medium / Saved by Keith TeareFive Ways Entrepreneurs Misunderstand VCsby Jean-Louis Gassée With great regularity, entrepreneurs complain about VCs who, in turn, never fail to bemoan the prime donne who think highly — and often too thinly — about the crystalline purity of their technology or business strategy. READ MORE

India’s smartphone market surpassed the US, becoming the second-largest smartphone market globally, reaching 158M shipments in 2019, up 7% YoY (Anshika Jain/Counterpoint Research)

32    Techmeme / Saved by Keith Teare

Anshika Jain / Counterpoint Research: India’s smartphone market surpassed the US, becoming the second-largest smartphone market globally, reaching 158M shipments in 2019, up 7% YoY — – realme (255%), Vivo (76%), Asus (67%) and OnePlus (29%) were the fastest-growing smartphone brands on an annual basis. READ MORE

London-based Blossom Capital launches $185m Europe-focused fund – City A.M.

City A.M. / Saved by Keith Teare

London-based venture capital firm Blossom has launched a second $185m (£142m) fund to invest in European tech startups, less than a year after its first raise.  The new fund, which Blossom Capital said was “heavily oversubscribed”, will invest in European tech startups at an early stage, and takes the total raised by the company to $270m. READ MORE

The Challenge of Redesigning Venture Capital

Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

Redesigning Venture Capital (Part I): The ChallengeWhy the problems of the 21st century require a new approach to entrepreneurial financeLike any incarnation of the sharing economy, e-scooters hold great promise to reduce carbon emissions. READ MORE

Redesigning Venture Capital (Part II): A Blueprint

Stories by Dominic Hofstetter on Medium / Saved by Keith Teare

Photo by Andrew Ridley on UnsplashIn a recent article, I argued that the traditional venture capital model is severely limited in its ability to leverage the power of entrepreneurship to address complex societal challenges. READ MORE

Private equity firms are sitting on $1.5 trillion in unspent cash, and looking to raise more – Fortune

12    Fortune / Saved by Keith Teare

Apple’s iCloud security comes under scrutiny, as data merchants lose their grip on iPhones’ location data READ MORE

Tiger Global Raises $3.75 Billion Venture Fund – The Wall Street Journal

4    The Wall Street Journal / Saved by Keith Teare

Tiger Global Management has closed on a $3.75 billion private-equity fund, the latest sign of investors’ continued interest in private technology companies despite worries about overheated valuations. READ MORE

As the venture market tightens, a debt lender sees big opportunities – TechCrunch

100+    TechCrunch / Saved by Keith Teare – Revenue-based financing
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Europe witnessed an increase in venture capital funding activity

The FINANCIAL / Saved by Keith Teare

In contrast, the Asia-Pacific region saw an increase in VC volume and value from 1,133 deals worth US$20.9bn in Q4 2018 to 1,635 deals worth US$24.7bn in Q4 2019. Top deals announced in this region during Q4 2019 included US$3.7bn secured by Tenglong Holdings Group, US$3bn secured by Beijing Kuaishou Technology, Ltd. READ MORE

US venture capital funding decline by 42.5% in last quarter of 2019

4    TechGraph / Saved by Keith Teare

US venture capital-backed companies raised $23 billion in the last quarter of 2019, down 42.5% from the same period a year ago, according to a report by CB Insights and PWC released on Tuesday. READ MORE