12 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $466.9M - Week of September 9, 2024

Launch of 🍓 Unicorn Founders’ Average Age is 35 💰 Tech for America Recap 🇺🇸 What Kind of Founders I Want to Invest In? 💪 SB-1047 for AI ️👮

Sep 16, 2024

Happy Monday from Singapore!

Last week, in the Bay Area, over 6,000+ people attended the sold-out Acquired event at the Chase Center featuring Mark Zuckerberg. The All-In Summit, the live version of the podcast, hosted Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Sergey Brin. SaaStr attracted over 13,000 B2B founders. And I hosted the Tech for America event featuring Intel, Hanwha, MLtwist, Google, Microsoft and the FBI.

This week I’m in Singapore for Solana's Breakpoint, PayFi Summit, Asia PE-VC Summit, Milken Institute, SuperReturn Asia, Web Summit Qatar in Singapore, F1 activities plus more! Looking forward to connecting with many of you there and hopefully get a chance to catch up!

P.S. Big congrats to Huma Finance team (a Race Capital portfolio company) for raising Series A! The future of PayFi is very bright ☀️

Here are a few great things to read/watch this week:

🍓 Launch of OpenAI o1 — Last week, OpenA launched o1 (also named Strawberry), a new LLM trained with reinforcement learning to perform complex reasoning. Strawberry thinks before it answers — it can produce a long internal chain of thought before responding to the user. Meanwhile, OpenAI aims to raise at least $6.5B at a $150B valuation and Oprah interviewed Sam Altman on ABC News!

💰 Unicorn Founders’ Average Age is 35 — One of the most common stereotypes about unicorn founders is that most of them are 20-something Stanford dropouts. However, that’s not what data tells us. According to Stanford University Graduate School of Business’ research, 2,732 US-based VC-backed unicorn founders shows that their average age is 35. 1% of unicorn founders started during their teenage years and another 1% during their 70s. Most unicorn founders started when they were in their 30s. Plus, 25% in their 20s, and 20% in their 40s. Read more by Ilya Strebulaev.

️👮 The AI Bill Driving a Wedge Through Silicon Valley — The SB-1047 Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act would require developers building LLMs to:

Assess whether the LLMs are “reasonably capable of causing or materially enabling a critical harm” and to take reasonable safeguards against those identified risks.
Build a “kill switch” into any new models over a certain size in case they are misused or go rogue.
Obligated to draft a safety report before training a new model and to be more transparent
Report each AI safety incident” to the state’s attorney-general
Conduct a third-party audit to ensure compliance every year

The bill would apply to all companies doing business in California, regardless of where they are based. This bill would introduce civil penalties of up to 10% of the cost of training a model against developers. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to $10 million. Read more on the FT.

🇺🇸 Tech for America Recap — The future of Tech in America has room to improve, but it is very exciting and going in the right direction. Last Thursday, we covered so many topics from:

Impact of the CHIPS and Science Act.
FedRAMP - Securing cloud services for the Federal Government.
Founders may want to consider asking your local congressional representative for help in reaching the right people in DC.
Founders may want to work with local governments (county, city) before Federal government.
Check out our photos on Linkedin.

💪 What Kind of Founders I Want to Invest In? Founders that have Grit and Stamina. Building a company is a marathon, not a sprint. This TED talk by Angela Lee Duckworth is a great reminder.