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Silicon Valley made Peter Thiel billions, now he leaves it for LA

Peter Thiel, the well-known investor who cofounded data-analysis firm Palantir Technologies and who bankrolled the lawsuit that ultimately drove Gawker out of business, has decided that he has had enough of Silicon Valley. Thiel is moving his home address, investment firm, and foundation 400 miles south to Los Angeles, according to the Wall Street Journal. Thiel has also apparently raised the possibility that he will step down from Facebook’s board of directors. [ AT ]

Silicon Valley’s Singularity University Has Some Serious Reality Problems

The pitch was simple: Forget accredited graduate schools and think big at Singularity University. Googleco-founder Larry Page and futurist Ray Kurzweil could be among your lecturers in the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity, named for the notion that humans will someday merge with machines. You’d work in a kind of combination think tank and startup incubator, trying to address challenges as grand as renewable energy and space travel. Kurzweil announced the program during a TED Talk in 2009, adding that the Singularity team had leased its campus from NASA, just east of the agency’s historic Hangar One in Mountain View, Calif. The team received 1,200 applications for its first class of 40 later that year. [ Bloomberg ]

30 women in venture capital to watch in 2018

In 2017, the presence of women in venture capital made feeble progress at the country's top firms. Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital were among two firms last year to take on their first female general partners.

And more and more women are founding female-led firms with an express interest in investing in female-founded startups, in order to break up tech's gender discrepancy. [ Business Insider ]

Uber exec Andrew Chen leaving for Andreessen Horowitz

Andrew Chen is stepping down as head of growth at Uber, in order to join venture firm Andreessen Horowitz as a general partner.

Why it matters: Chen is as well-known in Silicon Valley for his thoughtful business writing as for his work as an executive.

He began his professional career as a Seattle-based analyst at Mohr Davidow Ventures.
His real claim to fame came from the hundreds of online essays he published, with a focus on go-to-market strategies. Among the terms he popularized was "growth hacker."
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz reached out to Chen in 2007, when they were still just angel investors. [ Axios ]

Benchmark's Bill Gurley on VC Landscape and Uber

Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital general partner, discusses the current venture capital landscape and his views on Uber with Bloomberg's Emily Chang and Selina Wang at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco. [ Bloomberg ]

With another $70M in VC funding, LimeBike isn't just a bikeshare startup anymore

LimeBike has topped off its $50 million Series B with another $70 million. The bikesharing startup was valued at $225 million last fall following the initial Series B investment, led by Coatue Management. The company has not disclosed its new valuation.

The round brings San Mateo, California-based LimeBike's total VC raised to $132 million, more than doubling its previous total. The business is just over a year old, and it's likely they'll be the first US bikeshare startup to earn a spot in the unicorn club. When I last chatted with CEO and co-founder Toby Sun, he said the growth was much faster than he'd imagined it would be.
[ PitchBook ]

Founders And Venture Capital: Racism Is Costing Us Billions

Startups need more capital. Investors want more deals. So what's the issue? We need to change the way we invest to create more successful returns and world-changing organizations.

VCs Are Investing Less In Innovation

In 2016, venture capital financing decreased by almost one-third, from $77.3 billion to $52.4 billion. Power and structural racism have crippled the startup ecosystem, and entrepreneurs of color seeking early-stage financing are suffering the most.

Angel and seed investments have fallen below half of the accounted deals for the first time since 2012. With less early-stage capital available, it's expected to raise money from friends and family and this lack of accessibility is challenging, particularly for entrepreneurs of color. [ Forbes ]

4 potential reasons for the rise of overvaluations

The sheer size of both SoftBank's $98 billion Vision Fund and its investments has spurred plenty of conversation in the venture capital community about the future of tech investing. Two questions that seem to come up repeatedly in one variation or another: Are huge funding rounds leading to artificially high valuations? And if round sizes aren't the reason, what is?
Venture capitalist Natalie Refuah says the answer to the first question is "yes." Refuah (pictured) is a partner at Viola Growth, one of the biggest tech investors in Israel. The decade she's spent with the firm and her role as an investor in global growth-stage tech companies give her a particularly good view into late-stage deals. From that vantage point, Refuah noticed deal valuations for growth-stage transactions have been on the rise and came up with four possible reasons for the phenomenon. [ PitchBook ]

Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi perfectly sums up how CEOs feel about taking money from SoftBank

Silicon Valley CEOs mulling whether to accept an investment offer from SoftBank’s Vision Fund always seem to have one alternate history in the backs of their minds:

What happens if I decline and SoftBank funds my rival instead? Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, whose company just stared down that same question late last year as it negotiated a high-stakes deal with the $100 billion fund, gave voice to that intellectual exercise today as he offered an overview of his business to Goldman Sachs clients and investors.

“Rather than having their capital cannon facing me, I’d rather have their capital cannon behind me, all right?” Khosrowshahi said today at Goldman’s tech conference.

SoftBank insisted during the negotiations that it was perfectly willing to go invest in Lyft instead if the Uber deal fell through. SoftBank has at times negotiated with multiple competitors in order to locate the best deal — and retain leverage. [ Re/Code ]

Founders’ Co-op, a fixture on Seattle’s venture scene, is raising its fourth fund

Watch the full interview: Brit Morin and theSkimm’s Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg talked about reaching their audiences

Why founders shouldn’t be ashamed about a failed business

There is a stigma about having an unsuccessful startup, as it can quickly go from excitedly telling others about your idea to explaining why you have moved back in with your parents. But a failed startup shouldn’t be viewed so negatively by those in the business world, or by others.

Many budding entrepreneurs who decide to commence a startup are excited about potential growth while nervous about failure, but the statistics aren’t helping any fears people might have.

A report from Dun & Bradstreet shows that the startup failure rate is on the rise with a 42 percent increase in the number of startups ceasing operations. While it is challenging to make it big, people should not be ashamed for opening a startup that didn’t go as planned. Many people will look at this as a bad thing, but here’s why it is quite the opposite. [ Startup Daily ]

Startup Reflektive Raises $60 Million To Kill The Annual Performance Review

Rajeev Behera is coming after your performance reviews. “It’s an extremely broken process,” he says. “Ask anyone about them, and no one is really happy.” In 2014, Behera and two cofounders set out to tackle the problem with a new software company called Reflektive, quickly gaining the support of top investment firms such as Andreessen Horowitz. And Reflektive has set its own near-annual tradition of raising money most years since. The latest: a $60 million Series C funding round led by growth equity specialist TPG Growth. [ Forbes ]