Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW. Announce that all depositors will be safe. Place SVB with a Top 4 bank. Do this before Monday open or there will be contagion and the crisis will spread.
Sequoia invested in a $420m round in FTX at a $25B valuation in October 2021 and a consortium with Paradigm invested $400M at $32B in January 2022.
And now it's selling in a fire sale?
This is a truly crazy event in startup world. Dot-com bust level event
I covered the Zenefits saga closely for Bloomberg & Businessweek and I have to say it was a moment that tarnished my view of media. I saw how powerful narratives are. It didn't make any sense to me that people like David Sacks and a16z would care so much about regulatory arcana
@RMac18
The people who agreed to be hardcore but then failed code review have a worse exit package than the non-hardcore people? Seems like Elon is kicking the people who defended him
Some crazy personal news: I've quit my wonderful job at Bloomberg in a pandemic to launch a subscription newsletter on startups and venture capital.
I'm calling it Newcomer
Read about here:
Craft Ventures predicts this downturn could last 1.5 - 2 years and thinks the correction is more akin to post dot-com than 2008 recession because this market turn is so tech-centric
I was terrified for my life to say anything about this before now … but Stripe has been forcibly taking a cut of my revenue since I started my newsletter
@Jason
so much spin here. if this were part of a set of clearly articulated policies combatting doxxing no one would be freaking out. it's just the bans targeted at his specific problem that are ridiculous. he didn't even ban other jet accounts at first
rooting against self-driving cars is one of the most hostile to human life progressive stances out there.
it is insane that we let humans drive cars. it is literally one of the main ways that people of all classes die.
if you ride in a Waymo, you will have little doubt that
The torching of a Waymo car was not a random act of vandalism, as certain pundits want you to think, and it did not take place in a vacuum.
In fact, it's a major escalation in the growing revolt against Silicon Valley, and may just be the beginning:
so undisclosed future a16z partner hosts event with a16z partner where a16z portfolio company does crisis PR but it's billed as this big organic thing with Elon Musk?
Tiger's fees on this fund are quite something. The firm's management fees are on net asset value. So inflated valuations mean more management fees. And Tiger gets carry on private investments deal by deal so there's a strong incentive to find winners and shrug off losers
@parkerconrad
I do think Parker let Zenefits valuation get out of control, started missing revenue targets, and things looked precarious. But the effort to dislodge him and blame him singularly for the company's problems only left Zenefits a shell of itself
@DavidSacks
Judd says Musk can do whatever he wants since it's a private website. You are the one saying free speech principles should be applied and it's hard not to point out the incoherence of that position hence the invocation of supreme court cases
How do people listen to this propaganda? just listened to the 20 minute vc with Domm Holland.
Harry Stebbings says he abandoned his "British charm and ego stroking" for the interview. if that's true, wow, i cannot imagine the more credulous version of this show
Saudi Arabia discloses that it's a limited partner in Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Craft Ventures, General Atlantic, Dragoneer, ICONIQ, Insight, and many others
Tiger Global's 1st and 2nd best private funds came in 2003 (post-dot com) and 2008 (financial crisis).
2003: 10.6X DPI (distributed cash to paid-in ratio)
2008: 7.3X DPI
Unfortunately those funds were only $73M and $1B.
Since 2018, Tiger has raised $26B+ to invest in startups
why can't vox just say "relying on experts we downplayed the coronavirus a few months ago. if we knew then what we know now i would have written the story differently. and next time we'll cast my net for a wider array of experts"
Sam Altman had been given a lot of power, the cloak of a nonprofit, and a glowing public profile that exceeds his more mixed private reputation.
He lost the trust of his board. We should take that seriously.
OpenAI board really needs to provide facts behind the allegation that Sam Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities" or team ouster is going to lose public opinion pretty quickly
Kind of amazing the Marc Andreessen is a Facebook board member but his firm is an investor in Twitter and one of a16z's general partners is in Twitter war room
Union Square Ventures ranked at the top of the first Founder's Choice Ranking.
They also have outstanding returns. I got my hands on their fund performance from the $65B Texas public investor UTIMCO.
USV has returned $1.18 billion to UTIMCO on $129 million invested.
Here's
@mcuban
with his take on
@elonmusk
@Twitter
"While Twitter seems insane. It’s not really. In a year from now, if it finds its footing, everyone will forget everything that’s being said right now
One thing we are not seeing is people leaving Twitter. Just the opposite"
Here's
@mamoonha
's track record:
USVP
Box: IPO
Yammer: Sold to Microsoft for $1.2B
Social Capital
Slack: Sold to Salesforce for $27.7B
@kleinerperkins
Figma: Sold to Adobe for $20B
Rippling: Valued at $11.25B
I can't believe The Information headlined its story this morning saying “Bolt Near Deal to Raise $450 Million at $14 billion.”
it's not clear that either number is real? this is the most bizarre deal i've ever seen. very hard to believe this company is being valued by anyone at
if you don't do enough human content moderation then you're a careless steward of your technology
if you do too much content moderation then you're traumatizing the human content moderators
@elonmusk
you could release the information in a way that reporters could look through it themselves. many past big data investigations involved many outlets receiving access to the underlying information. your chosen reporters leaned heavily on framing, hype
@nrmehta
totally. I've been hitting the SPAC world -- scooters, quantum, autonomous. but man SBF is supposed to the good guy in crypto world. really raises questions about what the bottom looks like
Here's Sam Bankman-Fried writing his investors: "I’m sorry I’ve been hard to contact the last few days—I wish I could have been more communicative during this process, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to be;things were coming together dynamically."
Andreessen Horowitz spent hundreds of millions of dollars to give Parker Conrad the practice he needed to build a company that would enrich Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, and Sequoia
Bill Gurley on Uber's autonomous cars: “We probably burned $2.5 billion on autonomous. That was a waste of money." He says they should have spent it on food delivery instead.
"tech bro" communicates just such unambiguous (and sexist) hostility / ad hominem. the fact that so much of the reporter class and other thoughtful people have stomached it (or worse deployed it) is just embarrassing. it's such a cliche at this point.
one contradiction of VCs warning about the market correction:
the people who aren't doing late stage deals -- Tiger, Altimeter, etc -- are being pretty quiet
but firms like a16z and Craft, which are loudly warning about the downturn, are still doing deals
Here are the returns for one of the most secretive tech investors in late stage startups: ICONIQ Capital.
The firm returned $5.5 billion to investors last year.
Read this story to understand how they did it:
Coatue believes that the market is failing to distinguish between technology companies.
Upbeat: Snap, Shopify, DoorDash, and Neftlix
Downbeat: Pinterest, Wayfair, Lyft, and Roku
Garry Tan centering early-stage startups as what society stands to lose without some extra depositor protections seems smart.
The All-In hysteria, not so much. stoking fear & making arguments that don't line up with any ideological priors
Where is the Twitter free speech crowd right now?
@DavidSacks
@pmarca
@antoniogm
Twitter even seems to be stifling independent coverage of censorship of the newsletter platform that shall not be named.
@Jason
shameless framing games here. when it comes to moderation or the rule of law splitting hairs matters! that's what creates fairness. you wouldn't make the same case in a courtroom about police who broke the law getting evidence or lawyers violating oaths
In a secret report to Altimeter's investors this January the firm says TikTok is "not material" to ByteDance's revenue.
The firm estimated ByteDance had $50B in cash on hand in Q3 2023.
can see why tech people get annoyed with "the media." feels like there's so much negative spin on the ball in this NYT Substack piece -- even though it is purportedly written in an "objective" style. would rather it were just an essay that made a clear argument
saying that we can't engineer our way out of the climate crisis, or really that we shouldn't try, only fans fears that the climate crowd is more interested in trying to restructure society than actually solving the problem of too much carbon in the air
Here's Fred Wilson at
@usv
at
@PrimaryVC
's NYC Summit:
"I think it's very tempting in this business to chase trends and I think it's not particularly profitable to do that."
He said idea made him want to chase crypto deals and not AI.
"When the whole industry goes one way the
any other country or government is free to try to create a better system for investing in new technology companies. but no one has found a better way so far. easy to criticize the status quo when the alternative is an unrealized utopia
GitLab's backers made a killing
@khoslaventures
stake worth about $2B. It's a more than 150X return
@AugustCapital
worth about $1.6B. More than 100X return.
@GVteam
worth more than $900M. More than 47X return.
@ICONIQGrowth
$1.8 billion private stake. More than 9X return
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
In 2017 Social Capital’s co-founders Mamoon Hamid and Ted Maidenberg fell out with Palihapitiya. Hamid left to help run Kleiner Perkins. And Maidenberg was pushed out by Palihapitiya. (Maidenberg went on to co-found Tribe Capital.)
As Hamid, Maidenberg, and others were leaving
Profound. Here's what TPG's Bill McGlashan says after he learns that his son is going to be photoshopped to look like a football kicker, according to court filing -->
McGlashan: "The way the world works these days is unbelievable."
X relies on the best photos from the media, key facts from the media, video from the media and then turns around and blames the media for the poor coverage while providing mostly distribution rather than fresh information
i like and respect many of Silicon Valley's Trump supporters but I think they are fundamentally deluding themselves that they're being principled when they're being selfish and shortsighted by supporting Trump
Coatue's hedge fund returned 82% in 2020. Then chasing that high in 2021 Coatue was one of the most prolific private investors. But its hedge fund only returned 7% that year. Then as a market downturn decimated tech hedge funds, Coatue smartly shifted to cash
This is the story of how Andreessen Horowitz disrupted the world of venture capital by cozying up to the media and then, how they purposefully threw that relationship away.
Lyft was valued at $15.1 billion just last year and now has a market cap of $22.4 billion, up 48 percent.
That's a lot! Turns out public market investors don't think the private markets are crazy.
@elonmusk
@karaswisher
What do you make of this? FT had a screenshot of FTX claiming they had Twitter shares… I mean get it’s hard to believe an alleged fraudster on anything at this point
Between OpenAI and now Inflection leadership hiring + simultaneous Inflection partnership, it feels like there's some expert antitrust avoidance on the part of Microsoft going on here.