New Breed of VCs Brings Startups In-HouseMegan O’Connor hadn’t fully developed the concept for Clark, an app that connects tutors with students, when Human Ventures invited her in 2015 to build the company out of the venture capital firm’s New York office. Through Human Ventures, Ms. O’Connor found a business partner and hired her first employees, while gaining insights into how to run her business. The hands-on approach taken by Human Ventures is becoming more common in the venture capital world, with a new breed of VCs playing a much bigger role in the startups they fund. Under what some term the “studio” model, investors and startup veterans guide founders through the logistics of growing a company. In return, the so-called startup studios receive a larger equity share than a typical venture capital firm. [ The Information ] The new Y Combinator: $1B fund represents fresh investment thesisY Combinator is in the process of raising up to $1 billion for its newest VC fund, as first reported by Axios. The massive vehicle illustrates YC’s expanded investment thesis: The firm was founded as a startup accelerator and has since become the quintessential Silicon Valley seed-stage incubator (notable graduates include Dropbox and Airbnb), but over the last several years it’s also become a big-time venture investor in later stage companies. 20 Book Recommendations by Top Venture Capitalists CB Insights, a venture capital database, used their special Investor Mosaic algorithm to create a great list of top 100 VCs. We scanned the Twitter profiles of the top venture capitalists for book recommendations to discover what books are they reading. In short: super interesting books 👌 Make sure to visit the Top VC’s bookshelf for more books. [ ParrotRead ] Meet The Immigrant Who's Creating a Venture Capital Fund for Fellow ImmigrantsSemyon Dukach is a serial entrepreneur. In 1997, he started Fast Engines, a company that produced performance enhancing software for online apps. He sold it for $35 million in 2000 — when he owned a nearly 50 percent stake in the company, according to Forbes. Then, he became a prominent angel investor and went on to lead TechStars Boston, the most prestigious startup accelerator in town. Now, he’s working on a new project, One Way Ventures — a venture capital fund specifically for immigrant founders. A Venture Capitalist and His Famous Father. One Family, Many Revolutions: From Black Panthers, to Silicon Valley, to TrumpBen Horowitz is helping define the modern tech age. His father shaped the ’60s radical left — before taking a hard right turn. Family chats get interesting. For generations, the Horowitz family has cheered on the revolution. Phil and Blanche were New York schoolteachers who belonged to the Communist Party, and dreamed of a socialist heaven on earth. Their son, David, went on his first march in 1948, at age 9. As a young man in the 1960s he helped create the New Left, which pushed for the rights of the oppressed and struggled to end the Vietnam War. David worked closely with the Black Panthers, who believed a violent uprising was at hand and they would help lead it. David’s youngest son, Ben, sought his fortune in Silicon Valley, a generally liberal place that traces some of its roots to the rebellious spirit of the ’60s. Ben became a leading venture capitalist, investing billions of dollars in start-ups like Twitter and Facebook that seek to topple the status quo. His firm’s investment thesis is “software is eating the world” — as disruptive a vision of the future as the old Marxist dream of the state withering away. [ NY Times ] INVESTING $200M IN FACEBOOK, THE 3 STAGES OF FOUNDER DEVELOPMENT & WHY CREATING A NEW USER BEHAVIOUR CAN BE UNIT ECONOMICS INEFFICIENT WITH RAHUL MEHTA, MANAGING PARTNER @ DSTRahul Mehta is a Managing Partner @ DST, one of the world’s leading late stage venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Spotify and Alibaba just to name a few of the incredible companies they have backed. As for Rahul himself, he leads the firm’s efforts in the US, Indonesia and India where he led deals in Snapchat, Slack, Ola Cabs, Houzz and Zalando. As a result of this incredible portfolio, Rahul was listed to the Forbes Midas List in 2016. [ 20 VC ] Four years ago OMERS bought Civica for $635 million, today it sold it for $1.72 billionOMERS Private Equity has signed a deal to sell software company Civica to investment manager Partners Group for 1.055 billion pounds or roughly $1.72 billion. The private equity arm of Ontario pension fund acquired Civica in 2013 when it was valued at 390 million pounds, or about $635,000,000. Civica provides business software to both government organizations and the private sector in highly regulated sectors around the world. OMERS manages investments on behalf of 470,000 members from city governments, school boards, emergency services and local agencies across Ontario. SimilarWeb raises $47M at valuation approaching $800M to take on Nielsen in digital market intelCompanies are increasingly dependant on digital platforms for their business growth, and that is giving a boost to analytics firms that are helping them make better sense of that digital landscape. SimilarWeb — which offers analytics and insights about the performance of websites and apps, as well as competitive intelligence about how other apps and sites are doing (covering 80 million websites and three million apps across more than 190 countries in all) — is today announcing a significant fundraise of $47 million. Or Offer, SimilarWeb’s CEO, said the funding will be used to continue building out its analytics, business development and acquisitions. SoftBank Seeks Multibillion-Dollar Stake in UberSoftBank Group Corp. is pushing to take a commanding stake in the ride-hailing market, angling for a piece of Uber Technologies Inc. after spreading its bets across a trio of Asian startups. The Japanese tech giant has approached Uber about taking a multibillion-dollar stake in the San Francisco company, people familiar with the matter said, an offer that would muddy an already confusing mix of alliances and competitors in the... [ WSJ ] The List of Black Women in VCWhen I first arrived into the venture community, my first instinct was to find my people. As an outsider in this new, foreign space, it was important that I build a sub-community within venture in which I felt safe. So, I started building the Women of Color in VC network with Siri Srinivas. Since our first dinner last November, I have had the privilege of getting to know so many amazing women. |