21 Of The Best VC Bets Of All Time And What We Can Learn From ThemIn venture capital, returns follow the power law — 80% of the wins come from 20% of the deals. Great venture capitalists invest knowing they’re going to take a lot of losses in order to hit those wins. Chris Dixon of top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has referred to this as the “Babe Ruth effect,” in reference to the legendary 1920s-era baseball player. Babe Ruth would strike out a lot, but also made slugging records. Likewise, VCs swing hard, and occasionally hit a home run. Those wins often make up for all the losses and then some — they “return the fund.” For each company, we dove into the remarkable numbers they posted before their IPOs and acquisitions, the driving factors behind their growth, and the roles of their most significant investors. Below, we’ll show you our analysis on each specific case. [ Tech Crunch ] The Princeton PhD Program Dropout Hacking Venture CapitalVenture capitalists get plenty of good press -- but it's hard to figure out how much money they're making for their investors. That may be because you'd be better off putting your money in an S&P 500 index fund than giving VCs 2% of your investment plus 20% of the profits. To be fair, the averages tend to gloss over the outliers who outperform the industry. This month I spoke with a Princeton PhD program dropout who says he's figured out an effective algorithm for
beating the odds. Read on to learn how he's doing it. The Founder Of Bumble On The Future Of Dating & Making It In Your 20sYou have to be in the right frame of mind before sitting down to comprehend what Whitney Wolfe, the founder of Bumble, has achieved so far in her career. Because not only is she the CEO of the US's fastest-growing dating app with over 22 million users worldwide and counting, she’s also 28 years old. And, her recent Italian wedding to Michael Herd, a restaurateur who's also in the oil and gas business, even warranted a lengthy feature and whole gallery’s worth of images in Vogue. Wolfe, who also happens to be on the current cover of Forbes magazine and included on its esteemed 30 Under 30 list, is credited with having changed the dating game by letting women make the first move. [ Refinery29 ] 16 charts showing current trends in US venture capitalLast month, the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor was released. The report is chock-full of visual representations and analysis of what went on in the US venture capital industry over the third quarter of 2017. The full 30-page Venture Monitor is available to download for free, but for a quick, comprehensive look at industry trends, we've put together a collection of key charts from the report. [ PitchBook ] Tech Firms See Opening to Tackle L.A. TrafficTravis VanderZanden, an investor in autonomous car companies like General Motors’ Cruise and a former executive at Lyft and Uber, wants to get people out of cars. After moving to Southern California last year—and confronting the city’s notorious traffic—he began work on a startup called Bird. The company recently launched a fleet of lightweight, electric scooters after raising more than $10 million in venture capital, according to two people familiar with the matter. How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley EmpirePeter Thiel is a billionaire serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and the most prominent supporter of President Trump in Silicon Valley. And in a world where money is power, Thiel is not afraid to wield his power. On Oct. 28, 2015, several months before Thiel was revealed to be the funder of a lawsuit that bankrupted renegade media company Gawker, which had covered his political activities negatively and outed him as gay in 2007, the Stanford grad (BA ’89, JD ’92) giddily told several Stanford undergraduates in a private meeting at his San Francisco home about his imminent destruction of what he called a “universally reviled organization.” Four undergrads present at the meeting confirmed the story, a seemingly out-of-character — however vague — disclosure from the quite private Thiel. But why would he divulge such a thing to a small group of students? And why was he meeting with them in the first place? [ Stanford Politics ] David Karp is leaving Tumblr by the end of the yearAs Verizon’s digital media business Oath rolls on with its merging of Yahoo and Aol (which includes TechCrunch), today comes news of a significant departure. David Karp, who founded and led the Tumblr business, is leaving by the end of the year to be replaced by the social media site’s president and COO, Jeff D’Onofrio. [ Tech Crunch ] WeWork To Acquire MeetupWeWork’s acquisition spree continues. WeWork will acquire Meetup, Crunchbase News has learned, adding another purchase to the rapidly expanding rental startup’s roster. The $20 billion coworking space pioneer is set to acquire New York City-based community platform Meetup, according to an internal Meetup meeting that took place today. Meetup CEO and co-founder Scott Heiferman announced the move internally, telling employees “we are being acquired by WeWork.” [ CrunchBase ] How to Drive Product Development With DataAs product managers, we constantly use data. We use it to align stakeholders with our roadmaps, track the efficacy of what we’ve built, and prioritize what we should build next. Yet it seems we could always be doing more — cutting a dataset in one more way or interviewing an additional customer. The stakes are high. As Eric Ries says in The Lean Startup, “The only way to win is to learn faster.” Anthony Schrauth, former Chief Product and Innovation Officer at Betterment, and Xiaodi Zhang, 1stdibs’ Chief Product Officer, began our seventh session of the First Round Product Program with this quote — and both shared their tips on how to “learn faster.” What follows is a recap of this session and the lessons that surfaced for the group. [ Medium ] Stitch Fix defies odds, soars over 50% since lackluster debutIt’s been just ten days since Stitch Fix debuted on the stock market, and it has risen almost 54 percent since that time. It’s an astonishing feat for the fashion styling business, which got off to a rough start, but quickly turned things around as it started to gain momentum by its third day of trading and soared 24 percent today, better known as “Cyber Monday.” [ TechCrunch ] Herozona Venture Creation Business Expansion PanelA top Silicon Valley investor is proposing giving every US citizen a share of GDPTwo giant European VCs want founders to give more equity to employeesWhy Silicon Valley veteran Marcus Segal is heading to Sydney to share his insights with local foundersHow a demoralized startup founder turned things around by winning a high-stakes poker gameSilicon Valley's diversity efforts get mired in scandalThe Nordic Web launches an Angel fund to find the region’s under-the-radar startupsSoftBank will try to buy shares of Uber at a 30 percent discountDeparting Hulu VR VP Noah Heller Launches L.A. Tech Fund 3Rodeo (EXCLUSIVE)McAfee acquires cloud security startup Skyhigh Networks, last valued at $400MThe Parallel Between Cryptocurrency And ContinentalsOnline lender MoneyMe raises $120 million securitisation facility as Waddle raises $50 million in debt funding |