Is the PE industry on pace for lower net cash flows?Since 2012, net cash flows of private equity funds worldwide have been positive—the last three years with full returns each handily exceeding $130 billion. With returns through the middle of 2016, however, last year's net cash flows stand at $27 billion, putting the back half of 2016 under considerable stress to even leave the year at more than $100 billion. [ PitchBook ] A new on-demand battle is speeding toward the US, and VCs are seeing dollar signsThe battle isn’t over car sharing. It’s not over bus sharing, either, though that, too, is a growing focus for investors and automotive companies that are desperate to understand how cities and transportation are changing. This clash is over the latest wrinkle in urban bike-sharing – dockless bike sharing. And it has founders and VCs around the globe seeing dollar signs, while regulators are wrestling – again — with how to ensure they’re not victims of a trend that seemed to emerge nearly overnight. [ Tech Crunch ] Female angels need to give women entrepreneurs wingsFemale-run businesses are failing to raise the money they need to succeed, says Kirsty Grant, the investment director of Seedrs, one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms in the UK, and it is all because of a shortage of female angels. Jared Kushner in Talks to Sell Stake in Real Estate Technology CompanySale of stake in WiredScore is part of effort to divest himself of many business ties. Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, is in advanced talks to sell his stake in a real estate technology company to a venture-capital firm as part of his efforts to divest himself of many business ties, according to people familiar with the matter. [ WSJ ] Unicorns don’t need the public market. Why Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Palantir, and so many others refuse to list.Consider now the pace of innovation. With artificial intelligence, driverless cars, workplace automation, etc., this trend puts too much capital and corporate control in the hands of too few VCs. For scale, there are currently two-thirds of a Trillion dollars of unicorn valuation controlled only by a handful of VCs. [ Medium ] What disruption actually is (and what it is not)‘Disruptive innovation ‘describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors’ Why We Need More Women Taking Part In The AI RevolutionIn 2011, entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen wrote his famous ,"Why Software Is Eating the World" in the Wall Street Journal. Today, that story would more likely read, "Why Artificial Intelligence Is Eating the World." The market for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies-- from voice and image recognition to chat bots to self-driving cars-- is hot. A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, and that number will grow to 62% by 2018. [ Forbes ] Y Combinator pushes startups into the net neutrality fightY Combinator brings a big brand name in the startup world to the fight over the net neutrality rules. Its head, Sam Altman, has already written in favor of the current regulatory regime. Evan Engstrom, Engine's executive director, said that the goal "is to get startups from every state to weigh in" and that the organizations are "pretty close to that goal." [ Axios ] HOW ONE TECH START-UP DITCHED ITS BROGRAMMERSGoogle has struggled. Facebook hasn’t cracked the code. And Uber, which released its first diversity report last month, certainly hasn’t figured it out. So how is it that Zymergen, a 272-person start-up in Emeryville, California, has built a technical team that is one-third female at a time when much of Silicon Valley is grappling with questions of gender discrimination and bias? We’ll explain in a moment exactly how this utterly unsexy tech company—clients include agriculture companies and chemical makers—has been able to outperform Google (19 percent of technical staff are women), Facebook (17 percent), and Uber (15 percent) when it comes to hiring women software engineers. [ Vanity Fair ] Uber Is Losing Historic Amounts Of MoneyWith its day-to-day business burning through almost $3 billion last year, the company is in the league of the true money-losing giants. The ride-hailing company lost $991 million in the last three months of 2015, according to figures it shared with Bloomberg News. Its total loss for all of 2016 was an equally impressive $2.8 billion. [ BuzzFeed ] Inside Mark Zuckerberg's controversial decision to turn down Yahoo's $1 billion early offer to buy FacebookThis is an excerpt from the book “Becoming Facebook” by Mike Hoefflinger. It’s the inside story of Facebook told by the former Head of Global Business Marketing, chronicling the 10 major decisions Facebook made that led from their disastrous stock drop in 2012 to one of the biggest companies in the world. This section comes from the chapter “How Facebook Turned Down 1 Billion”, and discusses how what made Mark Zuckerberg turn down what was ( at the time) a substantial buyout. [ Business Insider ] |