Founders Fund's Geoff Lewis Leaves to Start His Own Fund Geoff Lewis, a partner at Founders Fund, is leaving to start his own fund, according to two people who have been briefed on the situation. Lewis is the second partner to depart in recent months from the fund, launched 12 years ago by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Luke Nosek left to start an investment fund called Gigafund that will help Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket company founded by Elon Musk, raise money. Lewis intends to raise more than $100 million for the new fund, a person familiar with the matter said. Founders, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco, will be an anchor investor, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the move hasn’t been announced. [ Bloomberg ] Android Co-Founder Has a Plan to Cure Our Smartphone Addiction Andy Rubin, debuting his Essential Phone this week, says artificial intelligence will let us outsource tedious tasks to our phones. During a recent outing to a fancy restaurant, Andy Rubin spotted an all-too-familiar tableau: a couple on what seemed to be a first date taking pictures of their food and then losing themselves in their smartphones for the next 10 minutes. Rubin is partly responsible for this antisocial behavior; he helped create Android, which powers 85 percent of the world’s smartphones. Rubin acknowledges the downsides to the smartphone revolution he helped unleash and says his new hardware company, Essential, is working on ways to solve the tendency to check one’s phone every five minutes. “We all lived happy lives before we had always-on internet,” he says in an exclusive interview at Playground Global, his Palo Alto, California, incubator. [ Bloomberg ] Here Are The Top Schools Among Founders Who Raise Big DollarsYou don’t need a fancy university degree to launch a startup and secure venture capital. But looking at the data on who gets funded, alumni affiliation sure seems to be a big contributing factor. For this back-to-school series, Crunchbase is taking a look at how top U.S. universities rank in terms of graduating entrepreneurs who go on to launch funded startups. We look at which institutions launch the most startups, as well as the most highly capitalized. But first, a spoiler alert: If you’re looking for surprises, stop reading now. The results largely confirm what people in venture and startup circles could probably guess. Stanfordgraduates more founders who raise more money than any other school. The rest of the list is rounded out by large Ivy League schools, prestigious technology institutes, and some big state research universities. The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the BayWade Foster is the CEO of Zapier (YC S12). This year Zapier announced their De-Location Package, which is a $10,000 offer for new Bay Area employees and their families to relocate to a home outside the Bay Area. Also discussed: Lessons learned while building a remote team and Wade’s racquetball tips. [ YC Blog ] The early Uber investor suing Travis Kalanick turned its $12 million investment into $7 billion stakeBenchmark Capital's early investment in Uber has grown exponentially since the ride-hailing company's unicorn days.Benchmark is suing Travis Kalanick, Uber's cofounder and ousted CEO, over claims that he committed fraud in 2016. Kalanick on Friday responded to the allegations and released a legal filing arguing why the suit should be dismissed or handled in private arbitration. Tucked into the latest legal filing is a new detail about the worth of Benchmark's early investment. The venture capital firm first backed Uber in 2011 when it led an $11 million Series A round. Benchmark subsequently added to that investment so that its total money in the company was $12 million. That $12 million is now worth more than $7 billion, according to the legal filing. Benchmark did not immediately return Business Insider's request for comment. The World’s Biggest Tech Companies Are No Longer Just American The technology world’s $400 billion-and-up club — long a group of exclusively American names like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon — needs to make room for two Chinese members. The Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, Chinese companies that dominate their home market, have rocketed this year to become global investor darlings. They are now among the world’s most highly valued public companies, each of them twice as valuable as tech stalwarts such as Intel, Cisco and IBM. [ NY Times ] Here's who the 5 biggest startups in the US are buyingThe five most valuable startups in the US have achieved unicorn status many times over. They have also proven rather acquisitive along the way. Taken together, the elite group has completed nearly 50 M&A deals, according to the PitchBook Platform. As these companies mature ahead of—or, perhaps, even to set themselves up for—their hotly anticipated IPOs, their approaches to scaling their businesses have also matured to reflect a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. [ PitchBook ] Facebook explains what happens to your data when you dieFacebook Inc. has more than 2 billion people using its social network, more than a quarter of the Earth’s population, and with such a large user base, it is inevitable that some users will pass away, leaving a graveyard of profiles that still contain the personal information of the deceased. Over the years, Facebook has introduced features that allow family members to turn their loved ones’ profiles into memorials that can no longer be edited, but what happens to all of that data? Monika Bickert, director of global policy management, answered that question today in another of Facebook’s “Hard Questions,” where the company tries to explain its approach to the challenges of running a global community. |