After interviewing 100 entrepreneurs, a CEO found all of the most successful women had 'given up' on the same ideaWhile writing her new book, "In the Company of Women," entrepreneur Grace Bonney interviewed over 100 women who run their own businesses. On an episode of podcast So Money, she told host Farnoosh Torabi that she was surprised to find a commonality among the women she spoke with: almost all of them had "given up" the pursuit of "work/life balance." Bonney is the founder of the art and design blog Design Sponge, which has been called Martha Stewart Living for the millennial generation by the New York Times. [ Business Insider ] A new way for founders to connect with the right VCsA young Silicon Valley venture firm is taking the wraps off a piece of software that it says makes it a cinch for founders to figure out which VCs are worth approaching, based on stage, sector, and a variety of other factors. [ Tech Crunch ] K2 Global’s $183 million VC fund aims to decentralize Sand Hill RoadK2 Global is announcing a $183 million venture capital fund targeted at early stage startups with global aspirations. The fund is closing significantly larger than the $58 million the firm initially raised. With a decentralized team and no Sand Hill Road office, K2 Global aims to bring Valley hustle to international technology investing. [ Tech Crunch ] Personal and family medical issues are prompting some of the Valley's best tech minds to try to fix our broken health care system. [ Fast Company ] How Do I Feel About the Snap IPO Given I Didn’t Invest?Every tech or major news journal in the country is preparing to write their Snap, Inc (creators of Snapchat, Spectacles, etc) stories and many of them seem to want a “How does it feel to have missed this investment story.” I won’t speak to most of them due to time and also due to the fact that I simply am not the story and don’t want to pretend like I am. The story is Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy and the amazing team that supports them. The story are the early investors who had foresight to back them — Lightspeed, Benchmark, IVP, SV Angel, General Catalyst, etc. We simply aren’t part of the story and shouldn’t pretend to be. I did speak to the LA Times for a story that appeared yesterday both because I like and trusted the journalist, Paresh Dave, to do a fair story and also because we always try to support our hometown paper The LA Times. The state of M&A in 11 chartsThis investor missed out on Snap, won't buy the IPOSocial Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya dropped by USA TODAY's San Francisco bureau this week, just in time to lob a few grenades at Apple, Twitter and Snap. The former senior executive at Facebook is founder and CEO of Social Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backs companies in areas such as health care and education. It was an investor in Yammer (bought by Microsoft) InstaEdu (bought by Chegg) and Slack (valued at nearly $4 billion). [ USA Today ] Silicon Valley Tried to Upend Banks. Now It Works With Them.Brett King once hoped his company, Moven, would become “the Facebook of banking.” Today, he is selling his software to the banks he once scorned. [ NY Times ] SKEPTICAL HEDGE-FUND INVESTORS GRILL EVAN SPIEGEL ABOUT SNAP’S I.P.O.More than 400 potential investors toting bright-yellow folders crowded into a room on the 36th floor of New York City’s Mandarin Oriental on Tuesday, armed with questions for 26-year-old Snapchat C.E.O. Evan Spiegel, whose popular messaging service company will have its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in two short weeks. Snap, the parent company of the disappearing-photo and -video app Snapchat, had just cut its target valuation from as high as $25 billion to a somewhat more modest $19.5 billion to $22.3 billion, but the hedge-fund investors who gathered to meet Spiegel, chief strategy officer Imran Khan, and C.F.O. Drew Vollero were reportedly still skeptical about Snap’s trajectory and its ability to continue growing in the face of renewed competition from Facebook. [ Vanity Fair ] |