VC Data Spotlight – Lightspeed Venture Partners [ Investments, Exits, Fund Raised Data ]Lightspeed Venture Partners is having an amazing year with some of their recent exits. Here are few coverage in the media : The Snap IPO means a huge payday for two VC firms [ CNBC ] Here are the breakdown of their recent data below : 500 Startups Demo Day (Batch 20) - May 11May 11, San Francisco Meet One of the Most Brilliant Investors in Silicon ValleyWho is the man behind some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, D-Wave, and Synthetic Genomics? His name is Steve Jurvetson, and if you’re a tech enthusiast, then you’re intimately familiar with his daring venture capital work. Steve Jurvetson is the “J” at DFJ,
a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage investments in consumer, enterprise, and disruptive technologies. Meet the millennials making big money riding China's bitcoin waveThe cryptocurrency may have no physical form but the returns from trading it can be very real – and for some they’re worth giving up your job for. For the past six months, 27-year-old Yang has worked mainly from home, mainly from his sofa, tracking and trading bitcoin, and watching the money roll in. The flat itself is modestly sized; Yang moved in in his pre-bitcoin days when he worked variously for a crowdfunder start-up, a branding consultancy and dabbled in hedge-fund management, all of which he describes as “creative financial work”. Now, though, his main focus is bitcoin, which is “much younger, more fun, and much more money”. Yang claims to make up to 1m yuan (£116,000) a month, under the radar of the taxman, purely from trading the online crypto currency. [ The Guardian ] Inside the War Between Facebook and SnapThe rivalry between Facebook and Snap reached a very public boiling point in recent weeks as Facebook ramped up its blitz to mimic Snapchat’s app. It’s even gotten a little nasty. There have been public shots like saucy anti-Facebook rants from Evan Spiegel’s fiancée, model Miranda Kerr, and jabs at Instagram by Snapchat’s product chief Tom Conrad. Facebook employees have been passing around memes making light of the “Snapchatization” of the company’s apps. But the rivalry—including new behind-the-scenes details told to The Information—is equally interesting for the big questions it exposes for each, as the companies
search for their next phase of growth and to define the next generation of the consumer internet. HOW TO CREATE FOMO FOR INVESTORS, HOW TO MANAGE VC CONVERSATIONS & A REPEATABLE PROCESS FOR LEARNING NEW THINGS WITH ANNA SHEDLETSKY, FOUNDER & CEO @ INSTRUMENTAL.AIAnna Shedletsky is the Founder & CEO @ Instrumental, the startup that helps consumer electronics companies ship high-quality hardware, on time. They have funding from some of the best in the business including First Round Capital and a huge thanks to Phin Barnes @ First Round for the intro to Anna today. As for Anna, prior to Instrumental, Anna was a product design lead and manager for the Apple Watch and before that, a product design engineer for the Apple iPod. [ 20 Minute VC ] KKR Among Lyft Investors at $7.5 Billion Valuation for StartupLyft Inc., the San Francisco-based ride-hailing company, said it has closed a $600 million round of financing, valuing the company at $7.5 billion. New Lyft investors include private equity firm KKR & Co., asset management firms Baillie Gifford and AllianceBernstein LP and the Canadian pension fund PSP Investments, the company told Bloomberg News. Why Squarespace's Founder Finally Raised $39 Million After Holding Out for 6 YearsIn 2016, Anthony Casalena's company generated more than $200 million in revenue, but the founder of website-building platform Squarespace doesn't want to spend a penny he doesn't have to. How did you know your idea could be a viable business?I started programming Squarespace in 2003. Originally, I wasn't intending to start a company. I was creating it because I wanted to make a website for myself, and I was really frustrated that it required so many kinds of software. I didn't understand why all those things weren't in one place. I quickly realized that the thing I was making for myself was something other people could use. You asked your dad for $30,000 to buy servers for the business. How did that conversation go?My dad recalls some version of his saying to me, "We've always supported you. We're always ready to back your ideas." I remember it more like a huge fight. He didn't understand why I needed two servers instead of one. I have to credit my mom a little bit for helping me talk him into it. [ Inc. ] Fighting Factions: How Startups Can Scale Without MutinyDavid Loftesness and Alexander Grosse know a thing or two about hypergrowth. You might say they wrote the book on it. Between them, they’ve held engineering leadership roles at Twitter, SoundCloud, Amazon/A9, issuu and Nokia — in many cases, during periods when hot products demanded that those companies stretch in new ways, and fast. Now Grosse, Director of Engineering for BCG Digital Ventures, and Loftesness, the Head of Platform at eero, have lived through both the brilliant and bleak moments of scaling teams. [ First Round Review ] How an Immigrant Millennial Lawyer Is Disrupting the $400 Billion Legal IndustryFirst-generation American Nehal Madhani left his 6-figure salary job, taught himself to code, and started one of the most innovative legal tech companies. [ Inc. ] |