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The investor behind startups with billion dollar exits explains how retail needs to change

Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, breaks down the retail landscape. The retail world is in transition: Brick-and-mortar stores are losing customers to e-commerce, and consumers are expecting more from the traditional shopping experience. Retail has to rethink itself. That’s the message Kirsten Green, founder of VC firm Forerunner Ventures, gave today during a presentation to Code Commerce attendees in New York City. [ Recode ]

Uber nears close of massive financing. Uber could be lining up between $2 billion and $10 billion from these new investors

Japan’s SoftBank Group, U.S. investment group Dragoneer and Chinese rideshare giant Didi Chuxing are close to finalizing their investment in Uber via a joint venture, sources tell TechCrunch. The tender offer is on track to launch by the end of the month and includes a direct investment in the company, as well as the purchase of shares from employees and early investors. The potential investors were first reported by The New York Times about a month ago. We’re hearing that the conversations are not only still happening, but that the deal is likely to include the largest secondary transaction in history, with thousands of Uber employees eligible to sell shares. Bloomberg earlier reported that Uber could be lining up between $2 billion and $10 billion from these new investors. We’re hearing that the latest conversations involve numbers toward the top of that range, around $8 billion to $10 billion. [ Tech Crunch ]

Cryptocurrency Turns Up Heat on Venture Capital

The cryptocurrency sector poses a threat to some venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, especially those who take a hands-off approach to their investments, said panelists at an event hosted by The Information in New York on Tuesday evening.

Tech entrepreneurs who once had limited options for capital now might be tempted to fund-raise through an initial coin offering instead, said Sean Neville, co-founder at Circle, a consumer payments startup, during a panel discussion at The Information’s “Future of Finance” event at the Time Warner Center. [ The Information ]

Magic Leap in talks for new funding

Magic Leap, the secretive "mixed reality" company, is seeking to raise more than $500 million in new funding at around a $6 billion valuation, as Bloomberg earlier reported and Axios has confirmed with a source. Among the expected participants is Singapore-based sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

Florida-based Magic Leap has already raised more than $1.3 billion in funding from investors like Alibaba, Qualcomm, and Google. It was last valued at $4.5 billion. The company is reportedly developing devices for so-called "mixed reality," a combination of virtual and augmented reality, although it has yet to publicly unveil any products.
[ Axios ]

Brent Hoberman launches new $85M pan-European seed fund, firstminute capital

Back in June Brent Hoberman, who famously founded and floated Lastminute.com, unveiled his new investment vehicle . The first $60m close for ‘firstminute Capital’ was announced then with Atomico being the cornerstone investor. The fund was also backed by 28 unicorns founders. In the end, it turned out to be oversubscribed and they can now announce a second close for the fund. This has brought in the huge China-based company, Tencent. The new total of the fund announced today is $85m. The new pan-European seed fund is co-founded by Brent Hoberman and Spencer Crawley will look to invest between $250 – 750k in early stage technology businesses across Europe.

The fund is a shot in the arm for a UK now pretty punch-drunk from bad news about Brexit. It’s also unusual to have attracted Chinese capital to both firstminute and Founders Factory, Hoberman’s corporate accelerator venture. [ Tech Crunch ]

Product Hunt wants to help you ship your product with its new product Ship

Product Hunt is hoping to make it easier for those who create products to market those products as well. Today, the platform where people vote up or down on startup products is launching a suite of tools for creators to generate demand for the products they make with a new suite of tools called Ship.

There’s already a lot of tools out there to help founders and creators market on the internet, but Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover wanted to simplify the process in a one-stop shop for the PH audience. [ Tech Crunch ]

Costanoa Ventures raises $175 million fund

Costanoa Ventures has raised a $175 million fund, the third fund for the Palo Alto-based venture firm. With a focus on enterprise technology, Costanoa Ventures typically invests at seed stage and Series A. The new fund brings the total capital for the five-year-old firm to $500 million under management.

Founder and managing partner Greg Sands came from Sutter Hill, and before that was known for coming up with the name Netscape, the dot-com-era web browser where he worked. Recently, the firm celebrated its exit of Intacct, the accounting software company that was acquired by Sage Group for about $850 million. They were also in Datalogix, which sold to Oracle for more than $1 billion. [ Tech Crunch ]

NFX Guild just showed 14 new companies to top investors in its latest demo day

Yesterday, three-year-old, NFX Guild, a Silicon Valley-based, invite-only accelerator program that has now worked with 80 companies, hosted its newest demo day before 200 venture investors at the Computer History Museum in unfailingly sunny Mountain View, Ca. [ Tech Crunch ]

Nestlé Targets High-End Coffee by Taking Majority Stake in Blue Bottle

In 2002, James Freeman gave up on being a professional clarinetist and began pursuing his other passion, roasting coffee. Mr. Freeman started out in a 183-square-foot potting shed in Oakland, Calif., and named his newborn business Blue Bottle Coffee, after a storied Viennese coffee house. Fifteen years later, Blue Bottle has grown beyond a one-man coffee shop. It is now one of the best-known purveyors of artisanal coffee that, in Mr. Freeman’s words, doesn’t taste like “flea shampoo.” [ NY Times ]