Silicon Valley should be making products for Middle America, investor Jeremy Liew saysLiew says the Valley needs to come to terms with the fact that it’s a bubble that doesn’t represent “normal America.” Before he was a venture capitalist, Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew spent nearly two years managing Netscape — the post-Time-Warner-merger version, that is. And it taught him a powerful lesson about what separates the people who use technology from those who create it.“Of course, Netscape was my homepage,” Liew said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “I would see the same article every day as the header on the Netscape homepage. I went to our editor in chief and [asked], ‘Why is this still on our homepage, on the fourth day in a row?’ It was like, ‘Top Ten Ways to Do Something,’ I don’t know. She said, ‘I’ll change it when people stop clicking on it.’” “The point is, we use the internet differently than normal people do,” he added. “It was my homepage, and therefore because I was the general
manager of the site, I was seeing it 10 times a day, 20 times a day. I was sick of seeing that same article, but normal people at that time were not logging onto the internet multiple times a day, every single day. It was new to them.” Google and Intel had the most active corporate VC firms last yearGV, formerly Google Ventures, tied with Intel Capital as the most active corporate venture capital firm globally in 2016, according to a report out today from research firm CB Insights. GV individually ranked as the most active corporate venture firm in the U.S. In total, the firm made 60 investments, according to CB Insights. The largest of those investments were:
Y Combinator W17 Launch: Hogaru, Elemeno Health, Playment, Hivy, and Bulk MROHow to land an Associate job in VCAlex Taussig of Lightspeed Venture Partners Around this time of year, I receive a couple emails each week asking for advice on breaking into VC. Here’s some boilerplate guidance to get you started on your search. DONALD TRUMP HAS inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Breaking Down Jared Kushner And His Family's $1.8 Billion FortuneAMONG THE NEW FACES in the Oval Office: Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump's husband and a senior advisor to President Trump. The position makes Kushner, 36, one of the most powerful people in the country; he has long belonged to one of its richest clans. [ Forbes ] Andreessen was right: Hardware is hard“Hardware is hard. It's called hardware for a reason.” So said (Pando investor) Marc Andreessen at a PandoMonthly in 2013. He was talking about a mantra that had appeared in Silicon Valley among founders and investors: “Hardware is the new software.” Software, to quote another Andreessenism, was eating the world, thanks to new tools and cloud-based services that were making it cheap to launch a software startup. At the time, some were seeing the same dynamics starting to work in consumer hardware as well. [ Pando ] Silicon Valley Tried to Upend Banks. Now It Works With Them.Brett King once hoped his company, Moven, would become “the Facebook of banking.” Today, he is selling his software to the banks he once scorned. [ NY Times ] 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 |