MAX LEVCHIN ON WHAT MAKES A TRULY GREAT CEO, WHY SELF-AWARENESS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT TRAIT FOR ENTREPRENEURS & WHY WHEN THERE IS DOUBT, THERE IS NO DOUBTMax Levchin is the Founder & CEO @ Affirm, the company that aims to remake consumer finance from the ground up. They have backing from some of the best in the business with over $400m in VC funding from the likes of Founders Fund, Lightspeed, Andreesen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital just to name a few. Prior to Affirm, Max held numerous exec positions including Chairman of Yelp for 11 years and sitting on the board of directors @ Yahoo. Before that, Max founded Slide, subsequently bought by Google and was the Co-Founder & CTO @ Paypal. [ 20 VC ] Women speak to Megyn Kelly about sexual harassment in Silicon Valley A recent study found that 60 percent of women who work in the tech industry have reported unwanted sexual advances. NBC News’ Megyn Kelly joins TODAY to preview Sunday’s edition of “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” in which she sits down with six women who share their stories. [ NBC ] The Most Active Investors In India TechSince 2012, Mumbai-based Blume Ventures has invested in 76 different companies, making it the most active investor in India. [ CB Insights ] Easy Come, Easy GoI saw a friend last night who has been trading fiat currencies for thirty years. He looked at the Bitcoin chart and said “I would be worried about Bitcoin if I were you.” He knows that we own a fair bit of Bitcoin (and Ethereal). My take on the selloff that continues in the leading cryptocurrencies is “easy come, easy go.” Anything that goes up 38x in six months can easily go down by just as much. I am not saying that ETH is going back to $10 or that BTC is going back to $1000. That of course could happen. I am just not predicting it. It has been too easy to make money in crypto this year. It has been too easy to raise money in token offerings this year. [ AVC ] Marc Andreessen says he’s reading these eight provocative books to better understand our worldMarc Andreessen’s (now dormant) Twitter feed was like the Venture Capitalist’s Review of Books. He issued a steady stream of dozens ofrecommendations (more than 100), revealing a catholic diet of science fiction, economics, American history, political science, and deep dives into the American hippopotamus industry. They’re still coming. In an interview with startup founders in the Stripe Atlas program at the payment company Stripe, the Netscape co-founder and VC who has backed in some of the biggest hits of the last decade (e.g. Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook), summarized the most challenging books he’s reading to better understand the world. [ QZ ] VCs determined to replace your job keep AI’s funding surge rolling in Q2
These are good times for AI entrepreneurs. Recent analysis of venture data shows that funding for artificial intelligence startups continues its upward trend in 2017, with investment hitting new highs. (For deep dives into aggregate Q2 venture performance, head here for the world, and here for just the U.S.) Venture, corporate and seed investors have put an estimated $3.6 billion into AI and machine learning companies this year, according to Crunchbase data. That’s more than they invested in all of 2016, marking the largest recorded sum ever put into the space in a comparable period. [ Tech Crunch ] Venture Capitalist Faces Challenges Fundraising Because of Past Conduct
The top 17 startups to launch so far in 2017While much of Silicon Valley has been consumed by the drama at Uber, tech's most valuable startup, a whole new class of companies launched in the first half of 2017 hoping to change the world, become the next unicorn — or just build a successful business. Business Insider spoke to founders and venture capitalists and took a look at funding data to identify some of the startups that had the biggest starts in 2017. Some names on the list are officially launching out of stealth, while others are still in their early stages. This influential Silicon Valley firm is spearheading a blacklist of venture capitalists accused of harassing womenFaced with a burgeoning sexual harassment crisis, leaders in Silicon Valley have come up with a very Silicon Valley solution: Use technology to create a blacklist. One of the region’s most prominent firms recently emailed an online reporting form to 3,500 entrepreneurs, encouraging them to blow the whistle on sexual harassment by venture capitalists. Now it is spearheading an effort to create an app that could provide reviews of financiers, akin to Yelp or the workplace-review site Glassdoor. |