Success in Venture – how to measure it.
Jean-Louis Gassée gets pride of place this week with his “Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel”. Probably the biggest technology story for a long time.
TechCrunch launched its “List” this week. It is a list of 400 Venture Funds who are writing checks, along with a list of most loved VC funds.
Ironically the day before Samir Kaji published his Master List of US Micro VC’s. This tracked the trend to small funds that we discussed last week in the article about Solo VCs.
None of these lists has any qualitative data about how the funds perform over time so the same day as Samir published I took his list and scored the funds based on their performance over 10 years, or since their formation.
The scoring draws heavily on data supplied by Crunchbase – 10 years of funding data from companies that have reached at least $500m in valuation. It does not track the companies but tracks the investors – giving them a higher score if they invested early into the successful company than if they invested later.
My data set is global and is organized by many variables. For example it can organize on fund size, on city, country or region, by date range and more. Because of this it is able to produce an almost unlimited range of leaderboards. I am releasing more data to subscribers (free subscription).
Enjoy. And if you do please consider a paid subscription
Reads of the Week
- Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel – Jean-Louis Gassée
- The Master list of US Micro-VC’s – Samir Kaji
- Leaderboard of US Micro VC’s. – Keith Teare
- The TechCrunch List – TechCrunch
- The VC’s who founders love the most – TechCrunch
- Podcast Reality Check (by the numbers) – Om Malik
- Predictions, Prognostications, and The Future – Brad Feld
- The world’s wealth is looking increasingly unnatural – The Economist
- China’s world-beating growth rate of…3.2% = The Economist
- 28 IPOs in 180 days, a trillion dollar market has exploded in China – KRASIArASIA
Politics & Technology
- How Clubhouse brought the culture war to Silicon Valley’s venture capital community – Report Door
- These Black Founders Succeeded In Spite of Silicon Valley – WIRED
- ‘Too big to fail’: why even a historic ad boycott won’t change Facebook – The Guardian
- A Twitter Hacking Spree Hits Elon Musk, Obama, Apple, and More – All Latest
- Tech firms like Facebook must restrict data sent from EU to US, court rules – The Guardian
- The background to EU citizens’ court win over US tech giants – The Guardian
- Real change or symbolism? What Silicon Valley is – and isn’t – doing to support Black Lives Matter
Venture
- Agglomerators vs. Specialists – Nikhil Basu Trivedi
- The Virtual VC – Reid Hoffman (Podcast)
- Q2 2020 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor – Pitchbook
- As VCs favor B2B startups, B2C upstarts’ venture activity falls
- Decacorns & Unicorns in 2020: Founders Fund Keith Rabois and SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin (Video + Transcript) – SaaStr
- Mapping the European B2B Marketplace Landscape (The 2020 Edition) – Point Nine Capital
Startups
- SaaS Content Marketing Framework – Yes Optimist
- BlackRock Leads Qumulo’s $125M Series E To Accelerate Data Platform
- The Early Stage Founder’s Reading List – Tribeca Venture Partners
- 5 Ways to Build a $100 Million Business – Point 9 Capital
- Keep Your Company in Crisis Mode to Stay Competitive – Medium
- UI Path: the first European Decacorn is born – Cracking The Code
- Returning to Work Post-Lockdown: 3 Things You May Have Overlooked – Battery Ventures
That Was The Week, #27
— Reads of the Week
Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel
- Why should Intel worry about Apple’s decision to base future Macs on homegrown Apple Silicon SoC ( System on a Chip ) devices?
- Not only will Apple Silicon make better Macs, it will force Microsoft to polish its Windows on ARM act, both hardware and software.
The Master list of US Micro-VC’s
When we launched our emerging manager focused effort in 2012, only a small coterie of sub-$100MM venture funds existed (<100). Our thesis was that this segment of the market would represent one of the most important components of the redefinition of the venture landscape that began in ~2009.
Our approach is fairly simple for the emerging managers. While banking services are ostensibly our offering, our core product offering for emerging managers is the delivery of a suite of services to help our clients launch and scale newer venture franchises (this includes everything from fundraising advice and assistance, to providing access to the resources, network, and data specifically tailored to this segment of the market. Please send me a LinkedIn to find out more if interested).
Today we are tracking nearly 900 active Micro-VC firms in the US, with over 100 new Micro-VC firms having been formed every year since 2015, of which nearly 60% are located in California and NY (43% and 15% respectively as illustrated in the chart below).
Raw count: California (386), New York (141), Colorado (16), Texas (35),Pacific Northwest (18), Chicago (35), Boston (50), Rest of US (207)
Leaderboard of US Micro VC’s
archimedes.studio – Keith Teare
See below for a ranked leaderboard of US Micro VC’s.
You can organize it by City, or just see the ranked list. I began working on this idea as far back as 2014. It is based on 10 years of funding data (probably incomplete) and only looks at funding into companies that reached a valuation of $500m or more.
The complete data set includes ranking for all finds globally, no matter the size. But this table is cross references with Samir Kaji’s list of Micro VCs in the USA, and so is only ranking funds that appear on his list.
The criteria for scoring is my algorithm, but it is based on a look-back through the data to score Micro VCs that successfully invested early into companies that went on to be highly valued. So it biases to stage of entry, and outcome. The earlier the better, into winners.
The TechCrunch List
- Welcome to The TechCrunch List — a directory of the most active and engaged investors in the VC industry today as recommended by founders.
- If you are a founder and want to submit a recommendation , please help us out!
If you want to reach any of the investors on the “most loved VCs” list, just send me your pitch deck to hunter @homebrew.co https://t.co/h4OvUJjAwm
— ???☕️ (@hunterwalk) July 14, 2020
The VC’s who founders love the most
- Over the past month, we have been asking founders to submit recommendations of VCs for The TechCrunch List , our newly-launched curated directory of investors who are ready to write first checks and lead venture rounds into startups.
- Beyond the final compiled list though, there was an even more elite group of investors who a wide number of founders just raved about in their recommendations.
Podcast Reality Check (by the numbers)
eMarketer, a market research firm, forecasts that the podcast revenues in the US will increase to $863 million in 2020 and $1.05 billion in 2021. This relatively modest revenue, when compared to a large number of podcasts, gives me a reason for a pause.
Predictions, Prognostications, and The Future
- As humans, we want to control our present, and one way to do that is to predict the future.
- At some level, that’s not new, as the regular end of year media rhythm for as long as I can remember is a stream of famous people being asked their predictions for the next year.
The world’s wealth is looking increasingly unnatural
- On average, however, countries with more natural capital also tend to have a higher GDP per person.
- Conversely, countries like Singapore enjoy a high GDP per person despite an utter lack of God-given resources.
China’s world-beating growth rate of…3.2%
- Daily chart China’s world-beating growth rate of…3.2% Its economic rebound is impressive but uneven AT THE START of the year no one would have predicted that China would crow about such slow growth by its lofty standards.
- Yet on July 16th it proudly reported that GDP grew by 3.2% in the second quarter compared with a year ago, rebounding from its coronavirus lockdown.
28 IPOs in 180 days, a trillion dollar market has exploded in China
- Liang Yongyu, head partner of Qiming Venture Capital, believes that the sudden explosion in medical industry IPOs sends a strong signal to investors.
- In addition, Fang Min also mentioned that major reforms to the medical industry in recent years have broken the shackles of an older, obsolete system, and enabled long-term positive trends for the healthy development of the industry to take off.
— Politics & Technology
- On July 1st, a group of venture capitalists and well-known tech elites logged on to the invite-only social platform Clubhouse to discuss a pressing issue in Silicon Valley: journalists canceling CEOs.
- “I believe in standing up for people who do not have a voice, who cannot stand up for themselves,” said Srinivasan when asked during the discussion about defending Steph Korey, the CEO of Away, who New York Times journalist Taylor Lorenz had tweeted about.
These Black Founders Succeeded In Spite of Silicon Valley
- Babatope (Tope) Awotona launched Calendly in 2013 in Atlanta, using funds from his 401(k); the following year, he raised seed money from Atlanta Ventures.
- With few outside investors in Calendly, Awotona remains majority shareholder of one of few software-as-a-service companies run by a Black founder.
‘Too big to fail’: why even a historic ad boycott won’t change Facebook
- That he would privilege the right of the most powerful person in the US to threaten violence against civilians over the right of those civilians to exercise their right to dissent remains a fundamental contradiction in Zuckerberg’s conception of free speech , one that operates in tandem with the company’s decision, announced by the company executive Nick Clegg in September 2019, to exempt the speech of politicians from its own third-party fact checking program.
- Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg , who led the company’s participation in the audit, said that the “two-year journey has had a profound effect on our culture and the way we think about our impact on the world”, adding: “It has helped us learn a lot about what we could do better, and we have put many recommendations from the auditors and the wider civil rights community into practice.
A Twitter Hacking Spree Hits Elon Musk, Obama, Apple, and More
- Those are just a handful of the major, million-plus-follower Twitter accounts that were compromised Wednesday afternoon, each in service of a bitcoin scam that has already earned the hackers behind it well over $100,000 in a few short hours.
- The trouble appears to have started in the early afternoon, Eastern time, when the accounts of several major cryptocurrency players were hacked within minutes of one another.
Tech firms like Facebook must restrict data sent from EU to US, court rules
- The ruling of the court of justice of the European Union (CJEU) does not immediately end such transfers, but requires data protection authorities (DPAs) in individual member states to vet the sending of any new data to make sure people’s personal information remains protected according to the EU’s data protection laws (GDPR).
- Tech companies like Facebook could be prevented from sending data back to the US, after the latest ruling in a long-running European legal saga found that there are not enough protections against snooping by US intelligence agencies.
The background to EU citizens’ court win over US tech giants
- A ruling of the court of justice of the European Union (CJEU) could prevent tech companies like Facebook from sending data from the trading bloc to the US, after finding that there are not enough protections against snooping by American intelligence agencies.
- June 2018: Schrems files his second case against Facebook Ireland, arguing that the standard contractual clauses and the EU-US Privacy Shield are invalid, as they do not fully protect citizens’ rights.
Real change or symbolism? What Silicon Valley is – and isn’t – doing to support Black Lives Matter
- Bigger picture: Despite all of those changes, more than 1,000 brands, including Coca-Cola and Unilever, pulled advertisements from Facebook for the month of July in protest of the company’s failure to address hate speech.
- Major technology platforms are re-examining how they interact with police forces and regulate hate speech online following the death of George Floyd and the weeks of protests that ensued.
— Venture
Agglomerators vs. Specialists
The great battle of the venture capital industry.
Next Big Thing – Nikhil Basu Trivedi
On one side of the venture capital industry are the agglomerator firms. They invest at every stage, across every sector, and many are growing even larger.
On the other side are the specialist firms, either by sector, or by stage, or both.
The industry has bifurcated, and there are several implications for its future.
The Virtual VC
Greymatter
Months into the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the top questions on entrepreneurs’ minds is whether venture capital firms are still making investments. The short answer is “Yes,” but the details are important enough that the partners of Greylock thought it was worth exploring in greater depth.
Q2 2020 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor
Q2 2020 was truly unprecedented for the venture capital (VC) industry, as the COVID-19 pandemic, nationwide lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and a major economic downturn shook the entire country; however, the venture industry largely proved resilient.
As VCs favor B2B startups, B2C upstarts’ venture activity falls
- The NVCA data provides a useful cross section of venture activity beyond the usual quarterly totals, allowing us to better understand the diverging fortunes of domestic venture investment into business-serving startups (which appear strong), and investments into consumer-serving startups (which appear weak).
- But inside the rosier-than-anticipated private capital results of the second quarter, there were pockets of weakness, and strength, that we should understand as we look to the rest of 2020 and the continuance of the pandemic-driven economy.
Decacorns & Unicorns in 2020: Founders Fund Keith Rabois and SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin (Video + Transcript)
- If you’re going faster in a way where also the unit economics/payback is improving and that’s actually true for some companies, like think DoorDash or some telemedicine companies as extreme examples, those are pretty fundable for two reasons or home fitness in some ways maybe.
- I wanted to dig in into Founders Fund and some tactical stuff but Keith, let’s step back because I know this is something that everyone’s thinking about all of the world, everyone on Twitter, tell me what you’re thinking about how do I get my arms around this slide, right?
Mapping the European B2B Marketplace Landscape (The 2020 Edition)
Medium – Julia Morrongiello (Point Nine Capital)
Almost 2 years ago, I published an overview of the European B2B marketplace landscape. Since then, the ecosystem has rapidly expanded. There are now over 300 B2B marketplaces in Europe, up from a mere 20 back in 2010. Of these marketplaces, more than 10 have raised over €50 million and 4 have raised over €100 million (Funding Circle, ManoMano, Meero and TravelPerk). In total, European B2B marketplaces have raised over €3 billion and this number continues to grow.
At Point Nine, we’ve enthusiastically followed the developments across B2B marketplaces and have recently teamed up with our friends at Hokodo to provide you with a deep dive into the industry which will be published later this year. In the meantime, here is a little taste of what is to come starting with our updated European B2B Marketplace Directory!
— Startups
SaaS Content Marketing Framework
How We Helped HelloSign Scale Their Traffic 1,308%
It was a frigid cold day in Des Moines on January 28, 2019.
Like most January days, I was just hoping to hold on a few more weeks until the early signs of Spring would start to thaw things out and give me that yearly boost of energy.
But, it turned out that I was going to get a different kind of jolt.
“Dropbox Acquires HelloSign for $230mm,” the headline read in my push notifications.
I stared at it for a long time.
A combination of shock and elation took hold as I bounded out of bed.
BlackRock Leads Qumulo’s $125M Series E To Accelerate Data Platform
- Seattle storage company Qumulo secured a $125 million Series E round of funding, putting it in unicorn status with a $1.2 billion valuation, the company said Thursday.
- Samir Menon, director at BlackRock Private Equity Partners, said in a written statement that Qumulo has tapped into a new category within the enterprise data management space and is taking on the “challenge of creating and managing digital content at a scale and performance that is only getting bigger.”
The Early Stage Founder’s Reading List
- In the spirit of sharing lessons with early-stage founders, we reviewed some of the best books on management, leadership, and entrepreneurship to offer our take on The Early Stage Founder’s Reading List .
- Our TVP Founders tell us there are so many lessons in entrepreneurship, and they’re continuously learning as they build.READ MORE
5 Ways to Build a $100 Million Business
Keep Your Company in Crisis Mode to Stay Competitive
- Here’s how to prevent the backward slide into “business as usual,” retain the right crisis-driven innovative processes, and ensure your organization can adjust to a world with new business rules.
- The businesses that will thrive in this new environment are those that will continue to leverage the tools and processes they adopted during the crisis.
UI Path: the first European Decacorn is born
From Bucharest to the World
As we boarded our flight back to London in early February 2017, leaving behind the Bucharest winter, our team was incredibly excited by the two days we spent with Daniel and his team. Yet, it was hard to imagine that a short three and half years later UiPath would become the first European Cloud Decacorn.
What an incredible journey for this company born in Romania. This new financing of $225m valuing the company at a post-money of $10.2B is an incredible milestone, rewarding one of the fastest-growing cloud software companies of this generation.
This success is the testament of the hard work and relentless ambition of the founder, Daniel Dines and his co-founder Marius Tirca. Together, with a passionate and dedicated team, they pushed the limits of global growth, democratized the access to automation technology, and transformed the way enterprises of any size could harness the power of automation.
Returning to Work Post-Lockdown: 3 Things You May Have Overlooked
- Be aware that your company culture will feel different going forward, whether you shift to all-remote work, open up WFH as a permanent but voluntary option, or return to the office.
- There have been a lot of headlines about big companies announcing that remote work is now permanent —but many companies are still figuring out where working from home fits into their future plans, and they expect many employees to return to a physical office.
