Steve Blank explains why accelerators should mimic "Moneyball"Steve Blank has given a lot of presentations in his day. But he says he's never experienced anything quite like what happened a few weeks ago in New York, when he presented his ideas around his Lean Launchpad to an audience. Every person in the audience had access to copies of his slides, and they were all taking notes. But the minute he opened up one particular slide, half of the crowd took out their smartphones to snap a photo of it. "I realized it must be a pretty good slide," Blank says. "It was a lightbulb for us all." The slide outlined Blank's theory on data-driven startup investing. He developed a method, which I'll describe below, using a tool called the Investment Readiness thermometer. He believes that startup accelerators and maybe even venture investors will start using a version of it to prove their effectiveness and make investment decisions. [ Pando ] Drew Houston on How to Build the FutureDrew is the founder and CEO of Dropbox. Rejected once before, Drew eventually went through Y Combinator in the Winter of 2007 with Dropbox and has since grown it to over 500 million users today. [ YC Blog ] Travis Kalanick Must GoChange, say some Uber-watchers, must start at the top. The argument in a nutshell: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is a man who has built a financial juggernaut while flouting the limits of a variety of basic leadership decencies, and as such, is not the man to turn the company around. It’s not just that misogyny is widespread in tech, it’s that Uber is worse than most. (To read more about the groping, homophobic slurs, drugs, and threats of violence in service of the Uber “meritocracy,” check out this wild ride from Mike Isaac in The New York Times.) The current outcry is a response to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s horrific blog post about the sexism she experienced at the company. It's remarkable there's been a response at all. [ Fortune ] Related : Uber CEO Travis Kalanick/Lady Eng meeting How Rizvi’s Clients Will Do on Snap IPOWhen Snap goes public on Thursday, one of the investors closely watching the result will be Rizvi Traverse, the secretive firm that rose to prominence amassing large stakes in Twitter and Square. Chances are Rizvi will do well on the offering—and probably better than people who invested in Rizvi-arranged funds holding Snap stock. Rizvi put together at least four “special purpose vehicle” funds to buy Snap stock in 2014 and 2015, securities filings show. Fees on at least one of those funds are steep enough to erode investor profits by about a third, according to an analysis of investment-related documents obtained by The Information. That’s assuming Snap sells shares in the IPO at $15, the middle of its proposed pricing range. [ The Information ] There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home CareHomeHero hangs up its cape, says goodbye (for now…) WeWork Could Soon Be Worth More Than SnapchatThe co-working business, which counts more than 150 locations in 15 countries, is said to be raising funding at a roughly $20 billion valuation. Japanese investment firm SoftBank is reportedly closing in on a nearly $4 billion investment in WeWork, CNBC reported on Monday. The investment would come as a primary $2 billion round, followed by a subsequent round of up to $2 billion, and could value WeWork at as much as $20 billion. [ Inc. ] Machine Learning For Investing In Consumer Goods StartupsOur portfolio company CircleUp has been building a marketplace for startup investing, by accredited and institutional investors, in consumer goods companies (natural foods, personal care, beverage, home goods and apparel). In four years of operation, over $300mm has been raised by entrepreneurs to scale their consumer goods startups on CircleUp. [ Fred Wilson, AVC ] Anu Hariharan on Network EffectsAnu Hariharan is a Partner at Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. She was previously a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Anu and Craig go over the core learnings from her research on network effects, discuss examples, and share advice for entrepreneurs. [ YC Blog ] SKEPTICAL HEDGE-FUND INVESTORS GRILL EVAN SPIEGEL ABOUT SNAP’S I.P.O.More than 400 potential investors toting bright-yellow folders crowded into a room on the 36th floor of New York City’s Mandarin Oriental on Tuesday, armed with questions for 26-year-old Snapchat C.E.O. Evan Spiegel, whose popular messaging service company will have its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in two short weeks. Snap, the parent company of the disappearing-photo and -video app Snapchat, had just cut its target valuation from as high as $25 billion to a somewhat more modest $19.5 billion to $22.3 billion, but the hedge-fund investors who gathered to meet Spiegel, chief strategy officer Imran Khan, and C.F.O. Drew Vollero were reportedly still skeptical about Snap’s trajectory and its ability to continue growing in the face of renewed competition from Facebook. [ Vanity Fair ]The 43 most powerful female engineers of 2017 |