7 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $112.5M - Week of July 7, 2025

💰5 Mistakes I See Founders Make When Pitching Silicon Valley Investors 📺 Marc Benioff: Still The Most San Francisco Guy in Tech 🧠 Meta’s AI Dream Team: 100% Were Born Outside the United States

Jul 07, 2025

Happy Monday and hope you had a wonderful July 4th weekend. 🇺🇸

Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Are Breaking Up With China - The New York Times — *Source: NY Times*

💰 5 Mistakes I See Founders Make When Pitching Silicon Valley Investors — and How to Hack Each One

Malcolm Gladwell likes to say success is a "constellation of advantages" — being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people.

In venture capital, that constellation is firmly anchored in Silicon Valley. But for startup founders outside of the Valley, especially those in Asia, breaking into this orbit presents a unique set of challenges.

As a Silicon Valley investor for the past 15 years, I've had a front-row seat to this dynamic. After meeting thousands of founders and investing in nearly 100 companies — including Solana, Agora.io (Nasdaq: API), Placer.ai, Otter.ai, Goodnotes, and many others — I've witnessed the same pattern play out repeatedly.

When founders from Hong Kong, Osaka, or Seoul try to plug into the Valley's galaxy — where over $178 billion, roughly 57% of the world’s venture capital, was deployed in 2024 alone — five gravitational forces constantly pull them off course.

Here are the most critical mistakes I see founders make when trying to enter the Silicon Valley orbit, and how to avoid getting pulled off course.

Read more in my first (in a series) long form article on by clicking here.

📺 Marc Benioff: Still The Most San Francisco Guy in Tech

I recently watched an interview with Marc Benioff, and it reminded me just how much of a San Franciscan he really is.

He jokingly calls himself the “Taylor Swift of Tech” — well, and wishes he were. Born and raised in SF, with deep civic roots (his grandfather was a city supervisor and attorney), Benioff wrote his first piece of software at 15 — a program called How to Juggle. Because… of course he did.

And yes, as he proudly puts it: his heart has a rainbow in it. 🌈

🧠 Meta’s AI Dream Team: 100% Were Born Outside the United States

I did a deep dive into Meta’s core AI team — where they worked and where they studied.

No surprise: many came from FAANG companies. The surprise? 100% were born outside the United States and studied overseas — even though several later completed their PhDs in the U.S.

It’s a reminder that while the AI race is fueled by U.S. capital and compute, the talent driving it is deeply, unmistakably global.

Where they worked: