A compendium of what our partners read each week, highlighting macro industry trends, our investment focus areas, and general personal and business strategies.
News About Our Portfolio Companies
- Social Starts listed as top 5 seed investor in NYC
- Werk on 6 myths of workplace flexibility, debunked
- Boxed fulfillment center automated and no jobs were lost
- Jacksonville.com features CodeFights
- Entrypoint CEO Carissa Flocken featured in Teen Vogue
- Affinio on what sets the music streaming industry apart
- Thunder announces technology partnership with Kepler Group
- Fresco is the first TV news station to be fully powered by citizen journalism
- IRIS.TV helps double video views for The Hollywood Reporter
Industry Trends
- State of US venture industry in 24 charts + seed investing & dark dealflow + Q1 2017 LA seed deal report + booms and busts + startup economy stabilizing
- Uber has serious driver churn – only 4% of drivers that sign up are driving the following year + Lyft tried to sell to Uber for 15% stake and Uber laughed + plans to release flying cars by 2020 for Dubai and Texas + consolidation in market: Gett buying Juno + Facebook’s 10 year master plan progress
- How Amazon will become the first trillion dollar brand + AWS up 42% but Microsoft cloud services growing 2x as fast with Google behind
- Global economy is 74T+ with US at 24%+ + state by state dependence on foreign trade
- 20% of VC financing since 2004 went to unicorns + venture debt rising in line with other Series raises
- Google and ad trends but earnings up as ads surge on mobile and YouTube
- Enterprise funding up 80% in Q1 2017 + on-demand economy, a bubble?
- Can Facebook fix its own problems it created? + Instagram passes 700M users, growing 17% in 4 months + flashback to proposal for FTC to block Facebook’s purchase of Instagram
- A sarcasm, NLP database, 10x larger than any other
- Estonia and tech
- Apple’s $250B cash reserves larger than market cap of Wal-mart + Apple’s plan to launch a Venmo competitor
Artificial Intelligences
- 30 years of pain due to AI and internet economy per Jack Ma
- The mind in the machine: Demis Hassabis on AI + Facebook’s AI chief: Yann LeCun
- Why we need democratization of ML
- Which tech jobs are being automated the fastest
- The myth of superhuman AI
Commerce
- Retailers going bankrupt at record pace + retail apocalypse visual + shorting malls but the death of retail is greatly exaggerated
- Amazon’s plan to dominate logistics…with almost no humans involved + 8 straight quarters of positive net income
- Buzzfeed and e-commerce
IoT Software Stack
- IoT maturing
- A closer look at IoT 2.0 and why it is inevitable
Work Platforms
- The future of labor is working with people you trust
- Bitfusion, an AI lifecycle management platform
Content and Experiences
- Can VR help with worker empathy?
- Facebook’s AR moment for Oculus
- Mixed reality’s world of potential
- This company want’s to make the first VR movie
Blockchain Beyond Currency
- Spotify acquires Mediachain Labs
- Who controls the blockchain?
Health
- Mental Health leveraging secure messaging
- US Appeals Court blocks the Anthem-Cigna proposed merger
Business and Personal Strategy
- How to become well-connected
- Building something no one can measure
- The skip level one on one meeting
- What to do if the startup that you are working at gets acquired
- Pick the best partner, not the highest valuation
- How do investors evaluate founding teams?
- The demise of Tilt
- Adopt a growth mindset
- Math on venture portfolio size
- 68% of high-performance employees are contacted about new job opportunities at least once a month