Uber CEO: SoftBank deal will happenDara Khosrowshahi today gave his first public interview since being named CEO of Uber, at the DealBook Conference in New York City. He said that the pending investment from SoftBank — which remains stymied by governance disagreements between former CEO Travis Kalanick and VC firm Benchmark — "hasn't happened yet but it will." More highlights:
Amazon is not invincible, says Silicon Valley's most powerful Aussie Jeremy LiewThe most powerful and celebrated Aussie investor in Silicon Valley says fears of Amazon's dominance in e-commerce are overblown. Jeremy Liew, who was propelled into the top echelon of US startup investors earlier this year when his early bet on Snapchat paid off spectacularly, told Fairfax Media over coffee in San Francisco this week that Jeff Bezos' $US500 billion ($628 billion) plus e-commerce giant should not be seen as invincible. [ Sydney Morning Herald ] Where venture capitalists invest and whyEntrepreneurs looking to raise capital are often told that investors like to keep things close to home. Is that true? The question influences where people locate companies. After all, if investors are only willing to invest in their own backyard, you might be better off starting your next company as close to capital as possible. Unless, of course, the conventional wisdom is wrong and investors are more flexible than we might have thought. The argument in favor of investing locally is simple: Face-to-face meetings are much easier to facilitate when everyone’s within a short car ride or public transit trip from one another. Even in a time where video chatting is near-ubiquitous, there’s still something to be said for convening in person. Again, it makes sense. [ Tech Crunch ] CRYPTOCURRENCY MANIA FUELS HYPE AND FEAR AT VENTURE FIRMSBART STEPHENS HAS found himself in high demand lately. After four years of investing in cryptocurrency and preaching its gospel, his venture-capital peers are finally listening. During a recent briefing at a storied Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, the young analysts in the room nodded along to his words in excitement, Stephens says. But not everyone was sold. In the middle of his presentation, a gray-haired senior partner stood up, yelled “PONZI SCHEME!” and stormed out. “Most generalist venture capitalists do not believe in this sector,” Stephens says. [ WIRED ] Whatever happened to “venture is hard” ?To understand distribution of returns CA analyses the top 100 investments in venture over 18 years (1995 through 2012). Why? Because these 100 deals generate anywhere from 72% (2012) to 277% (2000) of overall returns. When we say venture is all about the outliers, there it is. The analysis of these top 100 venture investments as measured by value creation shows an average of 61 firms accounting for value creation in the top 100 investments in venture capital per year; and the composition of the firms participating in this level of value creation has changed, with new and emerging firms consistently accounting for 40%–70% of the value creation in the top 100 over the past 10 years. [ Fred Destin ] 🤝Intro: NYC Startups - New York’s Top Tech Students Hi New York Tech Scene, Hope you had a great summer (congrats on the MongoDB and Blue Apron IPOs!) and that your fall is off to a great start. I’m excited to introduce you to some of New York’s top engineering students who I’ve gotten to know through Rough Draft Ventures (RDV), General Catalyst’s student-focused program that backs founders at the university level. Each year, dozens of students reach out to RDV for help organizing visits to New York’s top startups and for advice on which companies to work for. Given how talented these students are (Penn student Bethany Davis solved one of GIPHY’s biggest engineering challenges as an intern this past summer), I knew you’d be interested in finding ways to connect with them. Below is a list of the top upcoming student treks you can participate in. [ Denali Tietjen, General Catalyst ] Reid Hoffman: It’s Time to Change Silicon Valley CultureReid Hoffman likes to say, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Usually, he’s referring to tech companies like the ones he has founded (LinkedIn), helped lead (PayPal), or advised (Microsoft) during his storied career. But he could also be talking about his own clout in the business world and his efforts to finance initiatives that aim to improve the world through civic action, education, and technology. He discussed some of those projects, including two organizationsdeveloping artificial intelligence to benefit society and an annual awardthat honors “responsible disobedience,” in a conversation with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito at the EmTech MIT 2017 conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Wednesday. [ MIT Technology Review ] How SimilarWeb Helps Investors Make Decisions About Their PortfolioOn April 27th, Amazon, the titan of global eCommerce, was lauded by a myriad of headlines all echoing a similar sentiment - Amazon had crushed its earnings. The company significantly beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, EPS and a variety of other metrics, and the stock was soaring. Had an investor been privy to some of Amazon’s impressive numbers a few week earlier, they would have been poised to ride this wave for its full value, albeit with accusations of insider trading hindering the impact. But what if there was another way to indicate significant growth using publicly available data, like for example, web traffic? According to market intelligence company SimilarWeb, their product has proven capable of just that. [ Forbes ] Private Tech Markets: Half Full or Half Empty? Sam Altman and Roelof Botha DebateWHY THE “SHARING ECONOMY” KEEPS GETTING SUEDAfter years of self-assured trampling over burdensome regulations and restrictive labor laws, Silicon Valley is belatedly paying the price for its aggressive, world-conquering disregard for the rules constraining its less open-minded peers. In the face of a series of lawsuits by their de facto employees, companies that make up the so-called sharing economy—Postmates, DoorDash, Uber, and the like—now find themselves on the defensive over the legion of “gig workers” that power the bulk of their profits. Though the practice of classifying workers as independent contractors rather than employees drew scrutiny almost as soon as it began, in recent years the litigious floodgates have opened, with Uber agreeing to pay a staggering $100 million to maintain its drivers’ classification (a settlement that was rejected in court); Lyft shelling out $27 million to do the same, and this Grubhub facing lawsuit to the same effect from its drivers, who claim the classification caused them to be underpaid. [ HIVE ] Building Dota Bots That Beat Pros - OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Szymon Sidor, and Sam AltmanEx-Google exec Matt Dunne has a plan to create a string of tech hubs across rural AmericaBolt Threads is raising $106 million from Foundation Capital and Formation 870 years of VC innovation‘When you spend $100 million on social media,’ it comes with help, says Trump strategistSkyscanner acquires London-based startup Twizoo |