In Silicon Valley, the Big Venture Funds Keep Getting BiggerGiant venture-capital funds are piling up in Silicon Valley, a sign that foundations, pension funds and endowments are still willing to rush money into the risky startup sector despite lingering concerns about overheated valuations. The latest firm to raise a jumbo-size fund is Canaan Partners, a fixture on the venture-capital scene that collected $800 million for new investments in tech and health-care startups. Canaan’s 11th fund... [ WSJ ] Slack is raising another $500 million — and has attracted interest from a range of big buyers like AmazonSlack, the popular business communications company, is in the midst of raising $500 million at a $5 billion post-money valuation, an effort that has attracted several potential buyers interested in taking out the company ahead of the funding. Those include Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Salesforce, several of which have previously shown interest in acquiring Slack. Bloomberg reported the interest by Amazon yesterday, with a $9 billion sales price. That’s obviously an enormous amount of money, even though Slack CEO and founder Stewart Butterfield has long said publicly — and privately — that he wanted to keep the San Francisco startup independent. [ Recode ] 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 ] In a first deal of its kind, Convoy lands $62 million led by YC’s Continuity FundFor Convoy, a meet-and-greet hosted earlier this year by two prominent investment firms has resulted in one of the bigger Series B fundings of 2017. As Convoy cofounder and CEO Dan Lewis recalls it, his company, a two-year-old, tech-enabled trucking network, was invited to the full-day event organized by Greylock Partners and Y Combinator, the famous startup accelerator. Convoy already counted Greylock as a backer — thus the invite. The company didn’t know Y Combinator’s team at the time, however. Lewis knew only that the purpose of the event was to help invited startups understand how to grow and scale their businesses. You can guess what happened next. Lewis met with Y Combinator partners Ali Rowghani and Anu Hariharan, and a relationship was struck. Over the course of the last several months, Rowghani and Hariharan, who lead Y Combinator’s Continuity growth fund, began talking about leading Convoy’s newest round. [ Tech Crunch ] More often than not, pitching VC firms means pleading your case to white men. This is no easy feat for women entrepreneurs who, at best, may be easily dismissed or, at worst, may be taken advantage of. The solution, of course, is to overhaul the culture and demographics of VC firms—but as is the case with male-dominated tech companies, that’s a tall order. Below are funding options for female founders that, in most cases, were created by women and are run by women. It could take years for the VC landscape to change, so perhaps you’ll be emboldened by the avenues that are already available to you. Meg Whitman is being considered for the Uber CEO job — but she’s unlikely to take itAccording to sources close to the situation, HP Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman is on the short list for Uber’s open CEO role. Whitman has not been formally approached for the role, but she was an early investor and has been quietly counseling the company, especially former CEO Travis Kalanick with his management crisis. But an HP rep says she is committed to her job there: “As Meg has said several times before, she is fully committed to HPE and plans to stay with the company until her work is done.” It’s not clear whether Whitman would take an independent board seat if offered, but that also seems unlikely at this time. [ Recode ] Google.org launches $50 million effort to prepare job seekers for the ‘future of work’Google announced on Wednesday a new $50 million initiative to study and prepare “for the changing nature of work,” beginning with investments in the U.S. and Europe to help train job seekers and improve the working conditions for those already employed. The commitment comes by way of Google.org, the search giant’s philanthropic organization. Its president, Jacquelline Fuller, unveiled the campaign in a blog post this morning, stressing the goal is to “make sure that as many people as possible can make the most of the new jobs, industries and opportunities that are emerging—some of which we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago.” After raising $70M, Betterment expands financial advice to all usersOnline wealth management startup Betterment might have launched as a robo-advisor, but increasingly the company is turning to humans to answer its customers’ most pressing questions. On the heels of announcing a fresh $70 million in funding led by Swedish investment firm Kinnevik AB, Betterment is launching a new messaging feature that will allow users to ask questions and get answers from its team of financial advisors. With its new messaging product, Betterment is offering up personalized financial advice to a larger portion of its user base — that is, anyone with an account. Customers can send secure messages through the Betterment app to ask for financial advice and get a response within one business day from one of the company’s experts. TheSkimm has hired a digital advertising veteran to help the media startup court Madison AvenueTheSkimm is looking to move beyond the inbox. The newsletter startup has named digital advertising veteran Brandon Berger chief business officer, with the aim of helping the company expand its business beyond its daily newsletter, which reaches 6 million subscribers a day. Berger was most recently chief digital officer worldwide for the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather. Previously he served a stint as vice president of digital innovation at the ad agency holding company MDC Partners. TheSkimm was founded in 2012 by Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin, two roommates who quit their jobs at NBC once they saw an opening to reach millennial women with a daily news roundup. 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. |