How SoftBank’s $100B Fund Is In A League All Its OwnIn most cases, corporate venture capital funds (CVCs) are named after their corporate parents. True to the parental metaphor, most of these CVCs receive an ongoing allowance from their corporate sponsors, with no outside money joining the capital pool. Accordingly, it’s often thought that CVCs are beholden only to the corporation and its strategic initiatives. This is not necessarily the case with SoftBank’s investment arm. Although SoftBank does invest its own money in startups, and it has been doing so since 1995 under the aegis of SoftBank Capital, a new fund raised by the company’s founder and CEO, Masayoshi Son, blurs the traditional CVC model. According to research done by the Financial Times, Softbank’s new fund, called the “Vision Fund,” has raised quite a bit of money from partners, including:
Patreon will help fans pay their favorite artists more than $140 million this yearBefore he co-founded Patreon in 2013, Jack Conte was a musician making videos on YouTube ... and he was pissed off. The money he was able to get from the ads that ran against his videos was not nearly enough to make a living. “I’m getting literally a million views per month and I open up my YouTube dashboard: ‘You’re getting paid $166 this month!’” Conte said on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka. “And I’m like,
‘Fuck this! That sucks!’” [ Recode ] THE 7 REQUIREMENTS FOR STARTUP SCALING, WHY VCS MUST APPROACH EVERY CONVERSATION WITH A YES MENTALITY & WHY WE WILL SEE THE HUMANISATION OF TECHNOLOGY WITH RENATA QUINTINI, PARTNER @ LUX CAPITAL Renata Quintini is a Partner @ Lux Capital, one of the leaders in the rise of deep tech investing supporting scientists and entrepreneurs providing solutions to the most vexing puzzles of our time, the more ambitious the
project, the better. Before Lux, Renata was a partner at Felicis Ventures, where she worked with the likes of Cruise, Dollar Shave Club, Rigetti Computing and Bonobos, just to name a few. Prior to VC, Renata was an investment manager at Stanford University’s endowment, which invests in dozens of private equity and venture capital funds. Bitcoin Exchange Gets $100 Million Investment - at a $1.6B valuation
Coinbase Inc., the digital currency exchange that in the past two months suffered a trading crash and upset customers over how it handled the bitcoin split, received a $100 million investment from a group led by IVP. Spark Capital, Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures, Section 32 and Draper Associates also participated, according to a statement
Thursday. Coinbase plans to use the money to expand its engineering and customer support staff, open a New York office for its professional trading platform GDAX and grow Toshi, “a mobile browser for the ethereum network that provides universal access to financial services,” said Megan Hernbroth, a spokeswoman. [ Bloomberg ] InovAtiva Brasil Selects 255 Startups for AccelerationThe Brazilian Southeast was the region with the highest number of selected (113), led by the capital of São Paulo, responsible for a large part of the total selected by the program. A group of 255 startups will have the opportunity to accelerate their business through free mentoring courses. They were approved, among 926 registered, to participate in the second Acceleration Cycle of 2017 of the program InovAtiva Brazil, an initiative of the Ministry of Industry, Foreign Trade and Services (MDIC) and Sebrae, with execution of the Certi Foundation. Since 2013, the program has been promoting in Brazil free acceleration of innovative small businesses, regardless of sector and throughout the country. The capitals that had the most startups approved for the second stage of this year were São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Florianópolis. Value Voting launches from YC to supercharge the work of political advocatesValue Voting, which is graduating as part of the Y Combinator programme, develops political targeting software for advocacy groups. They show leaders which of their members are voters, how many votes they need to flip an election, and help them form alliances to get the votes they need to win. Here’s their thinking: Turnout for party primaries in midterm years is extremely low (10-14% of registered voters). Using Value Voting, advocacy group leaders share anonymized voter data with allies to know which elections they can influence, find candidates to run in those elections, and coordinate messaging across alliances. [ Tech Crunch ] Scoop: Benchmark Capital sues Travis Kalanick for fraudThe battle between Benchmark Capital and Travis Kalanick just went nuclear, with the venture capital firm suing the former Uber CEO for fraud, breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. The complaint was filed earlier today in Delaware Chancery Court. Key graph, per the suit: "Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber, to entrench himself on Uber's Board of Directors and increase his power over Uber for his own selfish ends. Kalanick's overarching objective is to pack Uber's Board with loyal allies in an effort to insulate his prior conduct from scrutiny and clear the path for his eventual return as CEO—all to the detriment of Uber's stockholders, employees, driver-partners, and customers." Why it matters: If Benchmark's suit is successful, Kalanick would be kicked off Uber's board of directors -- thus eliminating any faint hopes of him returning to the company in a substantial role. [ Axios ] What led to Benchmark’s ‘unprecedented’ lawsuit? Maybe founder-friendly provisions that made Uber founder Travis Kalanick king.When Bill Gurley wrote six weeks ago that Travis Kalanick had earned “many pages in the history books,” this probably wasn’t what he had in mind. Fresh off ousting Kalanick from the CEO role at Uber, Gurley wrote late that evening on Twitter that “very few entrepreneurs have had such a lasting impact on the world.” What was left unsaid was that Gurley and his venture capital firm, Benchmark, were fuming over what they considered a cover-up that — as the investor’s firm alleged in a lawsuit today — amounted to high-profile dupery. That rift between Kalanick and Benchmark burst into public notice in an extraordinary explosion that landed in Delaware’s Court of Chancery on Thursday afternoon. It depicted the Uber co-founder as a meddlesome conniver who was looking out for himself first and the company he built not at all. [ Recode ] Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.There are many actors in the whole Google/diversity drama, but I’d say the one who’s behaved the worst is the C.E.O., Sundar Pichai. The first actor is James Damore, who wrote the memo. In it, he was trying to explain why 80 percent of Google’s tech employees are male. He agreed that there are large cultural biases but also pointed to a genetic component. Then he described some of the ways the distribution of qualities differs across male and female populations. Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate. [ NY Times ] Equity podcast: Benchmark sues Kalanick, and what’s next for IPOs after Snap and Blue Apron’s very bad dayHello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s weekly venture-themed podcast where we dive into the numbers behind the noise. Forget the summer lull, friends. This week was chock full of news that broke right up until the very last minute. Matthew Lynley was off this week, but Katie Roof and myself were incredibly lucky to have Kate Mitchell, co-founder and partner at Scale Venture Partners on hand to help us shift the weight. [ Tech Crunch ] Funding Conditions for Tech Startups Soar to a New RecordThere's rarely been a better time for American technology startups. The Bloomberg U.S. Startups Barometer, which tracks the business conditions for U.S.-based private technology companies, reached a record high. A 44 percent increase from a year earlier was driven by a surge in the number of businesses that raised money for the first time, reflecting investors' appetite to back the riskiest companies. The index, which goes back to 2007, doesn’t account for the frenetic days of the dot-com bubble. [ Bloomberg ] |