What Would John Wooden Look for in a President?
💰 12 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $545.5M - Week of June 24, 2024 👓 How to Read a Founder? ✨ Are these new innovations or distractions for VC? 🗺️ The Enterprise AI Roadmap
Happy First Week of July!
😊 What Would John Wooden Look for in a President?
Silicon Valley admires founders who exhibit strength, ambition, and high energy, often viewing these traits as indicators of strong leadership. If that is my only yardstick to pick a President, Trump did win the Presidential Debate last week.
As venture capitalists, it’s our job is to look beyond the surface when choosing the right founders to invest in. This same vigilance should be applied when choosing a President.
It’s not easy to spot a person’s character and true accomplishment - integrity, compassion, selflessness, resilience, generosity, humility, trustworthiness, self-control. These qualities are often subtle and receive far less public celebration. The journey to building a successful company is long and hard; building a strong country is a hundred times harder. We need a leader who can make us proud to call ourselves Americans.
We should never assume that loudness equals strength and quietness equals weakness. Let’s keep our hearts open and remember these quotes from the “Wizard of Westwood” John Wooden:
Character is what you are. Reputation is what others think you are.
Never lie, never cheat, never steal.
Strive to be better than yourself - everyday. Never strive to be better than someone else, because you have no control of that.
Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla tend to agree. David Sacks and Bill Ackman are probably not.
👓 How to Read a Founder? I enjoyed listening to Lenny’s interview with Jessica Livingston - co-founder of Y Combinator. Her ability to read people was crucial for YC. Founder’s dynamics matter a lot as early-stage ideas are bound to change many times, but the people will remain the same. This Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test is very enlightening and great training for reading people. I only got 27 out of 36!
✨ Are These New Innovations or Distractions for VCs? VC has evolved over the years. Many VCs are now branching out and doing a lot more than just funding companies:
Andreessen Horowitz plans to launch a private equity fund and has already launched a wealth management arm called Perennial
Pershing Square is going IPO.
Thrive Capital is investing in film studio A24.
General Catalyst is offering venture debt (providing companies with the cash for up to 80% of its monthly sales and marketing budget) and buying hospitals.
🗺️ The Enterprise AI Roadmap. This report by CBInsights discusses how enterprise buyers assess AI ROI, use cases, and more. A few things to note:
Companies will come under financial pressure to consider how to leverage open-source models as they think more about the longer-term ROI of their AI investments.
Small language models (SLMs) have fewer parameters and require less computational power than LLMs, making them faster to train and cheaper to run compared to the generic models.
We're going to see consolidation in the GenAI space because it's not tenable to have 100 or more companies doing the same thing.
I suggest you pay close attention to AI development platform use case summaries on P.31. Other than the two deals with Google/IBM, annual spend for most of the deals are between $50K - $200K. Read more on CBInsights.
💰 Kleiner Perkins Fund 21 - Congrats to KP for launching Fund 21! Super entertaining Terminator-style fund deck. No surprise, this fund will focus on AI, but also fintech, crypto, hardware, healthcare, and consumer.
This week a total of 12 startups raised $645.5M in funding, 1 M&As:
$134M goes to 3 Enterprise startups
$70M goes to 1 Enterprise startups
$57M goes to 2 Crypto/Blockchain startups
$126.5M goes to 2 BioTech startups
$120M goes to 1 Hardware startup
$106M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup
$16M goes to 1 Construction startup
$16M goes to 1 Other startup
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Edith
X, LinkedIn
Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)
Enterprise
Odaseva (data security platform for Salesforce) raised $54M Series C led by Silver Lake Waterman
KarmaCheck (background check and compliance platform) raised $45M Series B led by Parameter Ventures
Onehouse (data lakehouse) raised $35M Series B led by Craft Ventures
FinTech
Klarity (AI accounting automation solution) raised $70M Series B led by Daniel Gross, Nat Friedman
Crypto/Blockchain
Conduit (crypto infrastructure) raised $37M Series A led by Haun Ventures, Paradigm
Ora (tokenizing AI models) raised $20M Series A from Polychian, HF0, and Hashkey Capital,
BioTech
Frontier Medicines (chemoproteomics platform for drug discovery) raised $120M Series C
TwoStep Therapeutics (targeted therapeutics for solid tumors) raised $6.5M Seed led by NFX
Hardware
Etched (AI chip maker) raised $120M Series A led by Positive Sum, Primary Venture Partners
Manufacturing
Construction
Other
Ario (AI life assistant for parents) raised $16M Seed from Wing Venture Capital, Floodgate, Bain Capital Ventures, Moxxie, etc
IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)