13 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $285.9M - Week of June 9, 2025

💰 Crypto Comes Full Circle 💪 What Steve Ballmer Taught Me About Reinvention 🌉 San Francisco is Back

Jun 09, 2025

Happy Monday!

Here are a few great things to read/watch this week coming out of Silicon Valley:

Stablecoin issuer Circle doubles in NYSE debut after IPO — Source: NBC San Diego

💰 Full Circle of Crypto — Congrats to Jeremy Allaire and his team for a successful IPO this past week. Circle is the first major crypto company to go IPO since Coinbase listed on the Nasdaq in 2021 and I predict it will not be the only one in 2025 either. Why? Because the backdrop has changed.

The economic climate of 2025 is, surprisingly, more stable, and more stablecoin-friendly, than it was during the speculative frenzy of the last cycle.

A few trends to pay attention to:

The GENIUS Act: The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act of 2025 in typical Washington fashion is grandiose. The Act creates a new category: Payment Stablecoins. It crucially, draws sharp lines about what they are not. They are not securities. They are not commodities. And they are not investment contracts. In other words, stablecoins are finally getting their own sandbox outside the reach of the SEC and CFTC, and instead under a payment-centric regulatory regime. Only entities granted “Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer” (PPSI) status will be allowed to issue these coins. The Act identifies three issuer classes:
- Subsidiaries of federally insured banks.
- Non-bank entities supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
- State-regulated issuers operating under standards deemed “substantially similar” to federal rules.
The Monetary Superpowers you’ve never heard of: USDT and USDC now boast a combined market capitalization of over $215 billion. That’s more than the GDP of Qatar ($213 billion). More astonishing? Tether alone holds $120 billion in U.S. Treasury bills; that’s more than Germany!
From Payments to Power Players: Even Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe aren’t just waiting on the sidelines. All three are integrating stablecoin capabilities into their networks, unlocking the potential to reach over 5 billion users globally. They’re not betting on coins. They’re betting on rails. This is not just about crypto. This is about remaking the infrastructure of money itself.
Stablecoin Supply Stands at $239 billion: With an adjusted transaction count of 218 million, according to Visa. Take Huma Finance, a Race Capital portfolio company, for example: it’s processed over $4.7 billion in transactions since January 2024.
The $26 Trillion Opportunity: The addressable market is vast. Stablecoins sit at the intersection of a $10 trillion global trade finance sector and a $16 trillion credit card industry. And potentially trillions more in emerging payments, remittances, and programmable finance.

A Final Word of Caution: Let’s not forget Tether’s $41 million fine from the CFTC in 2021 for misleading statements about reserves. In finance, Trust is not a feature. It's a prerequisite.

And as Circle heads for Wall Street, one can’t help but wonder: is this the beginning of the end of crypto’s adolescence?

Read more on PayFi Ecosystem Analysis.

💪 What Steve Ballmer Taught Me About Reinvention — I just finished listening to the Acquired podcast’s interview with Steve Ballmer, and I loved it!

There are only a handful of true platforms in the world, platforms that don’t just support applications, but shape the behavior of the entire world. Microsoft is one of them. After five decades and three CEOs, Microsoft is still the most valuable company in the world, worth more than $3.5 trillion. Ballmer’s reflections are less about victory laps and more about moments of near failure and what those moments revealed.

The Underdog Years: It’s easy to forget that at one point Microsoft was the underdog. A software upstart trying to stay on the good side of IBM, battling Lotus Notes, and licensing database tech from Sybase just to stay in the game.
What turned the tide? Platforms. Specifically, Office became the first great first-party app for Windows. Then Outlook became the first truly indispensable app for Exchange.
Microsoft missed mobile: Badly. Ballmer confessed that the belief in “Windows Everywhere” was a strategic blindfold. What worked on desktops couldn’t just be shrunk to fit a phone. It was the wrong paradigm, applied to the wrong battlefield.
Microsoft missed search, too: And Ballmer was honest about it. “We had no birthright to search,” he said. They were starting from scratch, while Google had already turned search into a reflex. And in search, there was only one vertical that really mattered: Shopping. Microsoft never really cracked that code.
The Quiet Humility: He also revealed that Satya Nadella was once willing to give up his leadership role in Search and report to Qi Lu, an external hire. That move doesn’t sound like much until you realize that in most companies, titles are currency. It’s really not that easy to let go.
Microsoft once considered buying HTC?: Just imagine the alternate history where Redmond becomes a smartphone powerhouse. It’s the road not taken for sure.

In the end, what struck me most wasn’t the scale of Microsoft’s success, it was the unlikeliness of it. A company that missed mobile. A company that missed search. Yet here they are reigning at the top again. Why?

They never stopped being willing to learn, even if it meant admitting they were wrong.

Watch the full podcast on YouTube or listen on Spotify.

🌉 San Francisco is Back — Mayor Daniel Lurie is courting wealthy residents and tech executives to invest in the city, hosting power lunches at Quince restaurant and recruiting them to back his agenda of public safety, clean streets, and bringing their headquarters back to the city. Here are a few quick wins he mentioned onstage at Bloomberg Tech last week: