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CertiK is backed by Tiger Global and Coinbase. They classified Nancy Guthrie's alleged abduction as a wrench attack by proxy and referenced a six-million-dollar Bitcoin ransom demand. Their report used the phrase proxy target selection — language that implies the attackers may not have found the person they were looking for.Nancy Guthrie is eighty-four. She has no known crypto holdings. She lives in Catalina Foothills, a neighborhood where the houses and the people inside them are worth targeting. The question this conversation puts on the table: did whoever showed up at Nancy's door have the wrong address? And if they did — who in that neighborhood was the intended mark?Three searches near the Mexican border. Twenty-five unmarked graves. None connected to Nancy. Retired law enforcement officials pointing to the Tohono O'odham reservation as a plausible route south. This case is not what most people think it is. Jennifer Coffindaffer, contributor to Hidden Killers, walks through what CertiK's classification actually means for the investigation.Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE ADVANCE EPISODES & EXTRAS!: https://hiddenkillers.substack.com/Want to comment and watch this podcast as a video? Check out our YouTube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8-vxmbhTxxG10sO1izODJg?sub_confirmation=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenkillerspod/Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenkillerspod/Tik-Tok https://www.tiktok.com/@hiddenkillerspodX Twitter https://x.com/TrueCrimePodThis publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.#NancyGuthrie #CertiK #CatalinaFoothills #WrenchAttack #BitcoinRansom #MissingPerson #Tucson #TrueCrime #HiddenKillers #JenniferCoffindaffer
The Great private Capital Reset is upon us. Markets are volatile and driving new economic imperatives. Are VC funds still VC funds, even if they raise billions per fund? What happened to the rest of the market? What is driving VC investments? What do Limited Partners think? What is on their minds? This and more, in episode 76 of Tech Deciphered. Navigation: Intro The State of the Reset: The Hangover from the Party? LP Fatigue and VC Differentiation What Really Matters: Performance.. Returns The Mega Fund Question The Case for Smaller… Rightsized Funds What Comes Next? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Introduction Welcome to episode 76 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will be about the great private capital reset. As you know, or you have probably heard, there is significant structural transformation in the world of venture capital, and we are probably witnessing a fundamental reset of the private capital stack. We got a huge bubble in 2020, 2021. Fueled by near-zero interest rates. We got inflated fund size, compressed due diligence, and now a generation of zombie funds and zombie startups. Now that rates have normalized, exits have not been as much as expected. LP patience is a warning sign, and I guess the industry is being forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: most VC funds raised since 2017 might not return what their LPs expected. You know, how do we start? Nuno This is going to be a relatively nuanced episode. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of haves and have-nots, both in terms of VC funds, also in terms of startups. And so I want to start with that. This is going to be more nuanced than all transformational and disruptive. Bertrand It’s not the end. It’s not the end. Nuno State of the Reset: The Hangover from the Party? It’s not the end. There’s still huge mega funds that are raising more and more. It’s clear that the music has stopped, right? So if we’re playing the game of chairs, the music has stopped. Around ’22, ’23, we started seeing the first signals that funds had raised way too much money. Firms collectively raised around $669 billion globally in 2021 alone. If we fast forward now to last year, 2025, depending on the sources, we did some internal analysis at Chameleon. We came up with $75.6 billion was raised last year by 493 funds, right? So That’s a significant drop, right, in terms of fundraising. Other sources would say a little bit more. There’s a little bit of a discussion around how much did the top 30 funds capture. If you believe some of the stats out there, they would say that actually top 30 funds captured 75% of all capital raised last year. We did again some internal analysis at Chameleon, and the conclusion we came to, it was closer to 50 to 55%. So not as dramatic as some of the sources out there, but still pretty dramatic. There’s a lot of capital concentration on the top funds. Again, the top 30 funds would’ve raised 50 to 55% of capital or up to 75% according to other sources. So definitely a tremendous amount of concentration. There was a lot more fragmentation in terms of capital raised if we’re looking at the years from 2010, 2011, all the way through 2021. So 2021 would’ve been sort of the peak of non-concentration if you look at that. And that again, now we are getting more and more concentration. There’s more and more of this arbitrage around, I’ll give money to the top funds, I will not give money to the smaller funds, or I’ll give less money to the smaller funds. There’s a little bit of a movement around concentration. We’ll talk about it later and what that means. Are mega funds really better? Are the small funds still the way to go? We’ll talk a lot about that later in today’s episode. There seems to be a little bit of a bifurcation. We could say it’s either bifurcation around top-tier VCs or larger VC funds versus smaller VC funds. My perspective is the bifurcation that we’re seeing right now is more of a bifurcation between funds that are no longer just stepped into the VC space, but they’re actually becoming more and more private equity firms with full asset management range from early stage all the way to late stage. Think of it almost like a private equity hedge fund, quasi, versus classic VC funds. And I think what we’re seeing is the Andreessen Horowitzes, the a16zs of the world, the NEAs, the Sequoia Capitals, just to name a few, becoming more and more broad asset class managers across private equity, whereas you have more classic VC happening in earlier stages. And so that’s the real bifurcation that I think is actually happening. Bertrand And maybe not really hedge fund, because they are always still long-only funds. So there is no hedging happening, at least as far as I know. Nuno Well, some of these guys have become RIAs, like A16z has become an RIA, so they can do secondaries. Bertrand That’s true. Yeah. Nuno And they can also sell stuff, etc. So I don’t know how aggressive they’re going to be in terms of secondaries and selling and actually doing other kinds of services you can do if you’re an RIA. But it’s not, I think, out of the realm of possibility that they would sort of acquire and sell stock more rapidly. In that way, to your point, Bertrand, maybe they actually become beyond just long guys, right? Bertrand Yes. Another trend I have seen is some of the larger VC funds seems to have no problem investing in multiple competitors. This was not possible before. I mean, if you’re a VC fund, you had some sort of duty not to invest in the competitors, but now some invest OpenAI, Anthropic at the same time. Do you see that as part of this evolution? Nuno For sure. And I think there’s a lot of people like the ostrich putting their heads below the ground and it’s like, “Eh, no, no, nothing to see here.” But that does constitute a conflict of interest. And if I’m a startup raising, this assumption that you will not invest in one of my competitors is no longer there, certainly for the mega funds, because of that notion of deployment of capital. Now, some funds will still hide under the notion, actually formally from a fund perspective, we’re not investing in competitors. It just happens that different types of our funds are investing in competitors. Like maybe my growth fund is investing in a competitor to my early stage fund, right? But our funds are relatively independent. So I think there’s a little bit of hide and seek that will go on if you talk to some of the fund managers. Well, they say, well, we’re not investing out of the same fund into these competitors. But between you and I, as we know, a lot of these partnerships actually do a lot of stuff together at the general partnership level. So are there really actual Chinese walls between the funds? Well, it really depends on the partnership. And to be honest, most of the partnerships don’t have very significant Chinese walls between the funds, right? The managing general partners sometimes actually occupy investment committee roles across different funds. So I think the conflict of interest is there. So that’s why I say there’s a little bit of ostrich behavior. Put your head behind the ground or below the ground and just pretend nothing is happening. Just sharing maybe a couple of interesting stats. Global fund closings for 2025, according to our numbers at Chameleon, 1,098 closed. In 2025. Closed is when you start deploying capital, right? Whereas— so it’s not closed down, it’s closed like we start deploying capital. And that number, 1,098, is dramatically down from 1,600 in 2024. And it’s actually the lowest number of closings that we saw since 2014. So again, this is bad, right? It means there’s less funds doing fund closings and deploying capital in the market than since 2014 and dramatically below the 2024 numbers, right? Where we already saw some market readjustments. The number of active VC firms in the US that did 2+ deals, which is not a huge bar, has dropped 38% back to numbers in 2023. So we don’t have numbers that are a little bit more up to date, but basically in 2023, those numbers are already dramatically dropped. So there’s less and less active funds. So there’s funds that might be in the market, but they’re not actually deploying that much capital, not doing that many investment. They’re sort of either zombie funds or relatively passive funds that have passed their investment period. For those listening to us, the investment period for a VC fund is normally between the first 3 to 5 years of the fund, which is when you build your portfolio, when you can invest in new companies. After that time period, everything that you do up to normally what would be year 10 is follow-ons. You put more money into the companies that you’re already invested in, that you already constructed portfolio with during those 3 to 5 years. Bertrand Yeah, that’s a pretty scary change. And obviously, I guess we’ll come to it, but the time it takes to fully liquidate investments is getting longer and longer. In the old days, we used to talk about VC funds having a 10-year life, maybe a +1/+1 in terms of extension of the fund life. But it looks like it’s taking 16 to 18 years actually to get full liquidity from a fund investment. Nuno LP Fatigue and VC Differentiation And I think that’s the scariest piece. I mean, just to share some numbers, we in venture capital talk about vintages, right? Which year did your fund start in? Normally when you did your first close onto the fund, as we were saying before, close is when you get all your investors at that moment in time to come in and you do your first close so the next fund starts running. 2018 vintage funds, right? This is now almost 7 years ago. So you should start having— actually 8 years ago almost at this point in time. You should start already getting distributions or you start getting cash back if you’re a limited partner and investor in those funds, you should start getting cash back. Half of all 2018 vintage funds have returned $0 to their LPs. So they’ve had no distributions to their LPs. 2020 vintage, which was a very hot vintage, only 42% have begun any distribution. So 58% have distributed $0, right? 2021, only 25% have done any distributions. Now, I happen to have a 2018 vintage fund and a 2021 fund. My 2018 fund has already distributed over 3x net of fees in distributions, and my 2021 fund’s already over 10% distributed back in distribution. So we’re very proud of that. But in general, the numbers are awful. There’s no liquidity back to LPs. And to your point, that’s kind of a big deal because some of these funds have been going on for 7, 8 years, and where’s the liquidity going to come from? On the other hand, if you look at TVPI, so DPI is distributions to paid-ins cash on cash. But if you look at TVPI, which is total value to paid-in, which also includes the book value or the value that you’re marking it on your books, basically the paper value as we call it for the company, even on that, the median 2017 fund, so 2017 vintage fund has a TVPI, total value to paid-in, of only around 1.76x, which is well below what should be, which is sort of the 2 to 3x benchmark of a really good performing fund. So the median funds are doing very, very poorly overall. So if you add that to the fact of what’s happening and distributions are taking a long time, back to your point, Bertrand, it’s taking like— this should be a 10-year asset class, maybe 11, 12 years, and now it’s looking a little bit like a 15, to 18-year asset class, which is not what most limited partners sign up for. Part of this dynamic, I think, is that we’ve had tremendously overvalued private companies over the last few years, right? Secondly, these companies have just stayed private longer. And I was having a discussion recently with a friend of mine, it’s like, hey, what’s this thing about companies are staying private much longer? Is there some dynamic around secondaries? And the reality is there is a dynamic around secondaries, right? Because if I’m a very large fund and I can get away with doing secondaries on my portfolio, I will get liquidity at some point, right? But someone else is stuck with private stock, which hopefully will IPO, but who knows, right? And so there’s this funny dynamic right now of because of secondaries, because of a couple of other things that are happening in the market, actually a lot of these startups are staying private for tremendous amounts of times, and some of them will IPO and they’ll be huge deals. Some of them might not and might not warrant the latest private valuations that they’ve exercised. And so there’s this tremendous noise that we’re seeing in the mid to late funnel of privately held companies where some are just waiting to be public. Some of them might not be able to go public at anything that is an up round versus private valuations that they’ve had in previous moments and in previous rounds. Bertrand And obviously the 2 to 3x returns that funds are targeting, and obviously more 3x than 2x, I mean, that was good and nice if it’s a 10-year fund, but if it’s the same 3x for 15 to 18 years, it’s not at all the same rate of return annualized. So it’s a really, really, really big issue if you keep the return the same, but you extend the duration of the fund. Concerning going IPO, there is a lot of complexity going public, the IPO process itself, but also after that when you’re a public company. It changed how you can run the business. Some would argue that we have had an issue with more companies delisting than companies listing on the public market. So I think there might be also separate issues about the efficiency of the public market and maybe a need for change. We went very strongly in one direction for the public market, have post and run, but was it really ultimately the right thing to do? I’m actually not so sure. Nuno Yeah, I mean, just to be clear, this is anecdotal, but when we tell prospective LPs at Chameleon about our returns, the last few funds, 2018, 2021, the first reaction is, “You must be lying, right? Surely you can’t have distributions already for 2021,” et cetera, et cetera. So clearly there’s almost a state of disbelief right now from limited partners. And liquidity does matter. So clearly you have to move forward. So how did we get to this point where we had this bubble 2021 all around that time space and now things don’t look so good. Well, the macro conditions have changed dramatically. I mean, rates when they were near zero, safer assets yield nothing or yield nothing. So basically you had to push capital into longer duration risk assets like venture capital. And so you had to push it. So the opportunity cost of capital also has fundamentally shifted. Obviously a 3x VC return in 15 years over 10 actually competes very poorly against 5% annual credit returns over several years. So there’s been a readjustment of stuff. And then the public equities in particular, the tech public equities have had a lot of volatility, but some of them have done extremely well, right? Chipsets, things like NVIDIA, the Amazons of the world, Alphabets, et cetera, et cetera. They’ve done very, very well. So why would I invest in a long-term illiquid asset that takes now longer to give me money back, and in some case doesn’t give me back, if I can invest just in public equities, and a variety of other things. The venture debt costs have increased dramatically. The burn rates that were sustainable back in the day with sort of the addition of venture debt, private credit, et cetera, now are overblown at this moment in time. At the end of the day, there’s been a lot of movements also overall in the pipeline in terms of valuations, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I would put a grain of salt into all the numbers I just told you. There still is a little bit of the haves and have-nots in startup land. Certainly in early stage where if you’re a hot AI company, you can get away with raising a Series C or $480 million. This is actually a true story. Series C, right? Not Series C, a $480 million at $4 billion pre-money valuation. Whereas if you are maybe in a space that’s less hot, you’ll have more difficulty in raising money at this point in time, might not be able to even raise a Series C, right? So there’s a little bit of the haves and have-nots happening on the VC side in early stage that has been really amplified by the macro regime and where we’re at, which is actively zero-rate era is done and now the new regime is quite different. And so I can get better returns by doing something else. Bertrand Kind of makes sense. I mean, if you have some ways the SaaSpocalypse in the public market because there is that fear that AI is going to completely change the game for especially for the more typical software companies. Good luck raising private money to quote unquote just build traditional software companies. You cannot expect a warm embrace from the private market if the public markets are completely destroying that category. I’m not saying that this is there forever, uh, things might change over time, but for sure what’s happening on the public markets always have a very strong impact on the private market. Nuno Indeed. So what’s happening in this relationship between limited partners and VCs, the general partners? Again, limited partners are the people that give venture capital firms and venture capital funds their capital to actually deploy. And they are a variety of different players, right? Could be endowments, like university endowments, pension funds, family offices, very high net worth individuals, fund of funds, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, in particular, if you look at the institutional investors, the endowments, the pension funds, the fund of funds, they have allocations that they do to different asset classes typically. And the feedback that we’ve received from the market is they are increasingly frustrated with what’s happening in terms of distributions. They’re not getting capital back. It’s like, I gave you capital 8 years ago, 9 years ago, 2017, 2018 vintages, and I’m not getting any capital back. So what the hell’s happening? On paper, it looks maybe the fund’s doing okay or it’s doing great in some cases, but where’s my money? And so that creates a little bit of wait-and-see kind of game on portfolio allocation. As we’re thinking through their re-ups, putting more capital into funds that they’re already actually put capital or putting in capital into new slots, into new fund managers that they want to put money into. They’re like, well, let’s wait and see. I want to get my money back or get some money back first before I redeploy it. Again, this is a little bit the haves and have-nots because we’ve seen, for example, a couple of top-end LPs in terms of returns that have a little bit the opposite problem, right? Because they are into funds that are performing extremely well. They actually are over that period and they want to actually redeploy. But to be honest, the average in the industry right now is a wait-and-see game. It’s like, I want to wait and see, which leads to what can only be characterized— I was hearing someone the other day, one of the top advisors in the LP community, saying this is the worst fundraising environment ever for venture capital. Not the last 20 years, 30 years, like ever, right? Since this became an asset class more institutionally in the late ’60s, early ’70s, Pulse Robo 2 as it was created, this is the worst fundraising environment ever. Oh, wow. Bertrand And concerning TVPI, let’s not forget that typically it’s not mark-to-market. So the metrics in terms of TVPI, correct me if I’m wrong, you know, but the metrics in TVPI are based on typically the last fundraise. So if the valuation went down but there was no additional fundraise, we wouldn’t know by looking at the TVPI metrics. It will only be updated if there is a new Financing, equity financing, or an exit. Nuno Yeah, normally most funds act like that. Some funds are a little bit more aggressive and do do mark-to-market, but normally funds would be conservative and say, hey, I’m being conservative, it’s whatever is the last known valuation of the company. And if there wasn’t a priced round, it’s a little bit more obscure than that, right, Bertrand? Because it might actually be the company has raised money on a note, or either convertible note or a SAFE note, and that wouldn’t count as a priced round. So I would say actually, even if it was a cap that’s below with a significant discount, I won’t recognize the assets as a down round. I won’t recognize the asset with a lower valuation because formally it wasn’t a price round. So it’s on the one hand conservative, on the other hand, it’s only relating to price rounds or exits to your point. So it’s sort of, you can be like, hmm, well, we opt to do that because we think it’s actually the most conservative route. Mark-to-market is extremely difficult to do. And who would do the mark-to-market for you, right? It’s like it’s some valuation firm, et cetera. Bertrand I’m not saying a mark-to-market is easy, but I’m not sure I would call using the last valuation something conservative in the context that most startups will fail. So it’s not clear. Nuno Well, in some cases it is, some cases it’s not, right? Depends on the startup situation, to be honest. Yeah, yeah. Bertrand But yeah, at least that’s how it’s done. So for instance, to evaluate the impact of the SaaS apocalypse, it’s tough to know. We will have on the private market. I mean, we will see that in a few quarters. Because if companies still exist in that environment, if they still do additional truly price rounds after that, that’s when I will start to know. Nuno I mean, just to share a little bit more data, like VC fund close time stretched to 15 months. Basically, it’s just taking a long time to raise money. It’s taking a long time to do your first close, get your fund running. When entrepreneurs complain to me that their fundraising is difficult, I always say, you have no clue how difficult it is compared to ours. First-time funds have collapsed. We had some numbers that only 77 first-time funds actually closed. I assume this is in 2025 versus 215 in 2023. So that’s a huge number. We did some internal analysis on our side and we did some analysis that emerging fund managers, emerging fund managers are normally people that are in their first one or two funds. Basically emerging fund managers gained some ground until 2017. Reaching by then a slice that was 63.7% of all capital raised in 2017. But since then, the capital deployed to emerging managers has been largely reduced to actually 24.2%, right? So it’s gone from 63.7% in 2017 to 24.2%. So this has been a culling of sorts on emerging managers and almost like a slaughterhouse of emerging managers. Compared to previous situations, which is obviously incredibly concerning if you’re an emerging manager starting your VC firm, et cetera, et cetera. So really tremendously problematic for those. We think capital’s not leaving VC. I think we see a lot of the institutionals saying— there’s some numbers as high as 33% of institutional investors plan to invest more in venture in the next 12 months. So I don’t think capital’s leaving VC. I think it’s really concentrating. We’ll come back to the concentration issue later in the episode. And part of that concentration comes from a topic that has been widely spoken in venture capital recently, which is differentiation. How do you differentiate in venture capital if you’re talking to a limited partner, right? How does my firm differentiate versus the firm next to mine? And that’s incredibly, incredibly challenging. Bertrand, what are your thoughts on that? Bertrand Differentiation is always a question. I mean, if you’re an entrepreneur, Typically, you think fully about the best possible partner for your stage and for your type of business model. You want a VC who understands fully your business model, because if they don’t, then it’s going to be troubled down the line. But that’s true that another piece of the puzzle is that the best VCs help you get more visibility in terms of achieving potential customer deals, in terms of attracting the best talent. And that’s where VCs’ brand names can help. If you can say you have backing by some of the top, most visible names in the industry, and usually these are the mega funds because others have trouble to be as visible, then they have some sort of unfair advantage compared to others. So I can see that there is some level of concentration happening naturally, especially in the later stage from Series B onwards. Nuno What Really Matters: Performance… Returns Yeah, I mean, we did some analysis internally about What are the top funds that invested in the top performing companies in early stage, Series C, Series A? And we looked at it by size of fund and the top performing normally are funds below $100 million, but in some cases very closely followed by funds between $100 and $500 million. And actually funds above $500 million, so $500 million to $1 billion and then $1 billion and above are actually tremendously underperforming. So this notion of the industry that says, well, the mega funds still see The top investments early on, because they still deploy in Series C and Series A opportunistically, in some cases even spray and pray if they have their own incubation and acceleration programs, is not true. Actually, we verified that over the last 12 to 13 years. It is not 12 to 13 years in vintage, right? So up to a 2021 vintage fund. So we went basically 12, 13 years back from there. And it’s not true. Actually, the most performing are 0 to 100 and then 100 to 500. And as I said, there’s 100 to 500 in a couple of years actually are a little bit better. Than the $0 to $100 million ones. So that’s the first thing that’s a conclusion. And actually, that’s not shocking. If we remember back in the day, Kleiner Perkins used to raise funds up to $600 million, Benchmark raised their $425 million funds. It seems like the sweet spot for a VC fund would be around $500 million at the top end, like maximum. And now somehow people are saying, well, I’m raising a $3 billion VC fund. It’s like, well, it can’t be a VC fund. The return profile is totally different, right? You can’t deploy that capital just based on early stage investing. And by the way, you’re not seeing the guys at early stage, all that you’re seeing, you’re going to make your returns in mid to late stage, right? Back to what we said at the beginning of the episode. So there’s a little bit of the haves and have-nots there. The big guys are raising more and more money, but they’re no longer venture capital. And I think limited partners that are a little bit more evolved, that are a little bit more conscious of this, that have been in the market longer, are realizing that shift. So it’s like if they want to have the alpha of venture capital, they need to deploy to the sub-$100 million funds or the sub-$500 million funds, right? That’s where they need to actually focus their VC capital. They can still deploy to mega funds, but they’re deploying to a different asset class. They’re deploying to a private equity, mid to late stage asset class, which looks maybe a little bit more like a growth fund or something like that. The second part of differentiation is the honest truth is most VC funds are like, I have proprietary network access, right? I’m ex-Stripe or I’m ex-Google or I’m ex-Facebook or whatever, and I have access to that. I mean, we know proprietary networks from that standpoint are no longer true. The whole thing that created Silicon Valley back in the ’70s of what I used to call the country club deals where there were a few people coming out of the big companies, the Fairchilds of the world, later on the Intels of the world, et cetera, et cetera, that made some money along the way that sort of bootstrapped their next companies, were well-known quantity to the existing VCs and raised money relatively easy on ideas, that doesn’t work anymore. Someone was telling me the other day one interesting thing that I wasn’t quite aware of, a lot of it had to do with the NDAs. I don’t know if you knew this, Bertrand, but like the fact that in California, it was sort of the Silicon Valley community sort of imposed this, we don’t sign NDAs thing and Boston continued signing it. And this whole NDA enforcement issue and non-compete, actually not the NDA thing, but more strongly that California did not enforce non-competes. I could leave Fairchild and start a company that magically was doing something that could be considered competitive to Fairchild. And that was sort of part of the acceleration actually of venture capital in California versus, for example, Boston, which was sort of hand in hand at the beginning. Bertrand Yeah, I mean, I’m a big, big believer in California success coming from not enforcing or banning non-compete agreements. I think it’s a key part of the game. If you lock people into not doing something similar in the next 6 months to 24 months. And the industry has always been moving fast. So this is a significant time where you are blocked to do something very similar. I think it was really an issue. So I think it’s a key part of the game and it has been there. I don’t know how it started, but I think that non-enforcement of non-compete has been a key part of the success of California. I’m actually pleased to say that Washington State is going in the same direction. They are just signing a non-compete ban. And you might remember that at the federal level, I think in 2024, there was also a ban that was put in place to ban non-compete, but this has been reversed by the courts. So this is not there anymore. So that’s why we see a state like Washington State putting their own ban, and we might see more state by state moving in that direction. I think it was not helping at all, this non-compete. I mean, there is obviously stuff that needs to be done, like you cannot steal secrets, you cannot steal IP. Nuno Yeah. Bertrand Even stealing employees, there should be some restraints. We need to find the right balance, but you have to be careful there. That was key for the success of California, and I’m glad to see that this is a trend that’s going to go beyond California. And I hope most states will have a ban on non-compete. Nuno Maybe just to close on the differentiation process, two things. One, I think there’s this notion When you talk to some LPs, that seems to be a little bit ingrained, some LPs that prefer specialized funds. We’ve also done some significant analysis internally and have talked to a couple of datasets other than our own, or people that own datasets other than our own, and the feedback has actually been not so fast. Actually, generalist funds over time cannot perform specialist funds. There seems to be a little bit of a sweet spot around generalist funds. We like to call ourselves multi-specialized at Chameleon, but ultimately from the perspective of specialized versus Generalist funds, the picture’s not as clear as specialized funds outperform generalists or generalists outperform specialized. We’ve seen there are pockets where actually generalists outperform specialized, in other pockets where specialized of a certain size can outperform generalists. So that’s one topic on differentiation that is a little bit broader. And then the final topic on differentiation, it’s really an industry that hasn’t innovated dramatically on where it creates the most value, which is really the picking stage, right? So it’s having great deal flow, very optimal, productive, efficient due diligence with very few resources and the ability to then get into those deals. That’s where most of the value is created. And then hopefully liquidating the asset if there’s an opportunity to do so at the right time, either through secondary trade sales or an IPO or something else. And what we’ve seen is the industry has innovated very little. I mean, the only thing I could point out in terms of core innovation at the top of the funnel has been the creation of the mega funds, the well-known funds, right? Like a16z, Union Square Ventures, et cetera, et cetera. But there needs to be more innovation on that cycle. And that’s why we certainly at Chameleon believe that the future is to have quant and AI-native VC firms that develop their own tooling, their own platforms. We have Mantis in our case that allow you to have this unfair advantage in how you source deals and how you do due diligence, how you get into the deals, et cetera, and how you take it to the next level. And we think that’s the beginning of the next stage is that the industry becomes more tech-enabled, shockingly enough, an industry that has made all its returns on tech or almost all of its returns on tech. That we need to be more tech-enabled ourselves. But I think the writing is on the wall there, and that will be a source of differentiation certainly over the next 3 to 5 years. Bertrand One thing the industry has innovated somewhat and maybe could innovate even more is providing liquidity beyond trade sale and an IPO, because it’s clear that if VCs want more liquidity without waiting 18 years, you need that liquidity at different stage, not just when it’s time to do an exit, a full exit for the business. And for employees as well. I mean, it’s one thing to stay for a company for 4 years, which is your typical vesting. Maybe you extend that to 6 years, to 8 years, you have a great time at the company. But to think that maybe you have to stick around for 15 to 20 years in order to get liquidity on your stock options. I mean, that’s too much to ask for most people. I mean, people have a life, they have other things to do, other plans, they might want to move, they come at a different stage of life. So you need to provide them liquidity. The new game is we are not going to exit until 15 to 20 years, else it’s truly unfair. It’s not just unfair, but people will say, you know what, I’m going to go across the street, go work for Amazon or Google. I will have RSUs at best regularly that are liquid, and why bother? I mean, we need to find pathways to liquidity for both investors but also employees. There has been a change in that direction, but I think we need more of this change, and maybe not just reserved for the absolute biggest, most successful companies like OpenAI or SpaceX, but also us as well. Hopefully we can find a way. Nuno Well, now we have these AI companies that actually grow so fast that they will IPO in one year. Now, isn’t that what’s going to happen? They raise They raised $500 million in Series C or $1.4 billion in Series C, and they’re going to IPO in 2 years. No? Is that not the new reality? I’m being facetious. Bertrand At the same time, I mean, there are rumors that some of them are going to IPO this year. I mean, we talk about OpenAI, about Anthropic. I mean, OpenAI is quite old, but Anthropic is a relatively new business, quote unquote. So I think it’s a good time. Nuno The Mega Fund Question So maybe it will be true after all. Moving to the next section, are mega funds still venture capital, Bertrand? Are they still venture capital funds? Bertrand Yeah, I guess venture capital is a term that can encompass from small to very big funds. I truly don’t know. I mean, once you reach a growth stage, are you truly a VC fund? I don’t know. I think some of these definitions are kind of arbitrary from my perspective. What is clear is that you as a business need different providers of capital. And as we just discussed, you as a business, probably need to keep going and stay private for longer. One reason being, again, there is a tremendous cost to being a public company. There are some true strategic disadvantages. And at the same time, just practically, I mean, you need to get bigger and bigger in order to have a chance of a successful IPO. So you cannot just go IPO at a $500 million valuation. I mean, that’s like committing suicide, at least in the US market on NASDAQ. So my point is, you truly have no choice. You need to extend and If you need to extend, then you need to have capital providers that are there at later stage and therefore have more money. Is it still true venture capital? Is it true venture? I don’t know. At some point, it makes sense that from the startups to the capital providers, everyone adjusts to a reality where the life cycle is getting longer. Nuno We don’t think it is. We don’t think mega funds are venture capital. We have actually some data that shows that they’re not in terms of actual returns. The alphas you can generate, the IRR that you can generate is actually not comparable. We did some analysis again with some of our datasets and from 2012 to 2022, so that’s the datasets that we used so that we had actual distributions and stuff we could take into account and so on and so forth. And looking at IRR, just to share some numbers in terms of IRR over those 10 years on sub-$100 million funds versus above $1 billion funds, the differences are incredibly stark. And this is true for global and US IRR, right? So just to quote some numbers in terms of average, sub-$100 million funds, global IRR of 22.9%, US IRR of 21.6% versus above $1 billion, 9.1% and 9.0%. Median IRR, if we just looked at median, 7.3% and 16.6% for sub-$100 million funds, 7.5% and 8.1% above $1 billion. Top quartile IRR, sub-$100 million, 31% versus 30.4% US IRR. And then above $1 billion funds, 14.7%, 15.5%. So it’s very clear if you sort of cut this in different ways, averages, medians, top quartiles, et cetera, over all these years that sub-$100 million funds are in a very different asset class than above $1 billion funds. They’re in different alpha that you can generate and so on and so forth. Now to the point you made, Bertrand, I don’t fully disagree with the point you made of the bigger funds should become bigger. I just think they’re becoming different things. Now, again, some of these funds will hide under the facts like, well, wait a second, we have all these assets under management, but they’re over different funds. Sequoia, we’re still raising small early-stage funds, $500, $600 million funds. And then we have larger funds for growth, et cetera, et cetera. Andreessen Horowitz, a little bit less clear what they’re actually doing. We heard that they’ve raised $15 billion across funds. I’m not sure if that’s the exact number at the end of the day. But the point is, if I’m a multi-asset class manager, like early growth, et cetera, et cetera, then it still applies what Nunu is saying. I’m still going after the $500 million, $600 million early-stage funds. Well, not so fast, right? Because you still have all this capital with managing general partners that are maybe across funds for which their incentives in particular, both carry and management fees are coming from the larger funds. Et cetera, et cetera. So there’s necessarily conflicts of interest. In many cases, the funds are just straight up big, right? And so they are above a billion. And so I don’t think a lot of these guys are in early-stage investing anymore, right? It may appear that they are, but I don’t think that’s where the returns necessarily are going to come from. And so if you are a limited partner, if you’re looking at your asset class allocation, again, you’re absolutely free to put money into mega funds because that’s the kind of asset class you want to play in. In terms of a blended private equity asset class that has a little bit of growth, a little bit of whatever, or actually a lot of growth, a lot of late stage, and maybe a little bit of early stage. And I want something that’s a little bit more blended, right? But if I still want the alpha venture capital, I need to deploy to funds that are early stage, right? And that’s like up to $100 million, up to $500 million. I think that’s my two cents on that topic. We see crossover things coming around, like guys who do both public and private markets. Again, that starts feeling a bit like a hedge fund. A lot of these funds have also become RAs, as we discussed earlier. So I feel the writing’s on the wall. The mega funds are going more and more after either some mechanism of edging or a mechanism that’s a little bit more blended in terms of private equity than classic venture capital. Bertrand Yes, I think a few things. One, if you’re an LP, I can imagine that dealing with multiple $100 million funds might be more difficult. You, you need to know the partners, you need to have some background, uh, visibility. You need potentially to change regularly of VC investments. So I can see some level of simplicity if you just focus on the bigger ones, especially if you have a lot of assets you have to put to work. Another piece of the puzzle, I would guess that the bigger funds are able to return money faster because they are at later stage of the cycle. So instead of that 15 to 18 years, maybe they are more in a 5 to 10 year range, while the smaller funds being there more early might be the one who are taking longer to deliver. So I can see that Yes, there is an IRR picture, but there is also time to liquidity that is not the same. So that can probably also influence. And in terms of crossover PE hybrid model, I mean, for sure we have seen some of the public equity investors doing crossover, meaning going into private equity firms like Coatue, like Tiger Global and others. And for companies that are preparing for IPO, there is a lot of value to work with these firms because they have very good visibility and understanding of the public markets. And their presence in the cap table is also a sign of quality, typically for public market investors. So there is a lot of value and logic for them to be there on both sides of the puzzle. But again, the fact that firms keep delaying IPOs, that the market is not so much startup-friendly, makes this model a bit more difficult. But personally, I think there is value there. Nuno Yeah, I think on the mega fund, just so that I’m not boo-booing everything, I mean, but there’s definitely angles in terms of the asset class that make a lot of sense. And there’s the scalability of the model. The ability to go after Series B, Series C, as well as mid-stage, as well as late-stage, even secondaries over time, to your point, in some cases even public equities. And that level of skill I think matters. We’ve also seen, as we’ve known, we won’t mention any brands, but people will know who they are, that late-stage hedge funds and investors, even if they’ve done okay-ish in growth in private equity, don’t necessarily do well in venture. So it’s clearly a very different asset class, right? So once you start getting venture teams together, The returns are not quite the same. Actually, sometimes they’re not even quite the same as the growth investments. So clearly they’re very good at the growth side, but not so good in early stage. But definitely there is a case for it. The Case for Smaller…Rightsized Funds But if we switch gears maybe to the small, or I would call right-sized funds, maybe just to quote a couple of numbers and then open up the discussion. Small funds do seem to outperform larger funds. There’s a lot of data in the market that shows some of that dynamic outperformance frequency. All the Very historical numbers from Cambridge Associates from 1981 to 2010. 19 out of 30 vintages were won by sub-$150 million funds. We did our own analysis as I was sharing before. Funds between $0 and $100 won most years between around 2010 and 2021. And the years that they didn’t outperform in terms of investing in the top-performing companies in early-stage Series C, Series A, they were outperformed by the $100 to $500 million funds. The $500 to $1 billion funds and $1 billion or above were never even in the same league in terms of performance, of having identified those top performers in terms of quantity over those early-stage investments. Top 10 funds by vintage, 2004 to 2006, 2016 numbers. Top 10 funds, 73% were sub-$100 million. 2004 to 2016, top 10 funds by vintage, 73% of those were sub-$100 million. So there seems to be a little bit of a case that actually smaller funds, sub-$100 million, sub-$500 million in some cases, are outperforming the larger funds over time. Now, these funds are complex in and of itself. The positive of it is small fund GPs like myself, we are deeply invested in our own funds. We’re not there to just make management fee monies. I mean, we’re not making $1 million, $2 million a year in management fees of salary ourselves, like some of the larger funds. So we are there to really get the carry and be less focused on management fees. And so I think there’s a little bit of alignment around that and really taking that kind of perspective on portfolio construction and liquidation, being also more aggressive on the individual time that we spend with our startups. On the negative side, obviously a lot of these smaller funds, not the case of Chameleon, but others out there are single GPs, very little teams or very small teams. And so it’s sometimes difficult to actually do a lot for portfolio companies as well. And this is where the mega funds, for example, a16z notably would say, hey, we have 600+ people that can support you, right? On market development, business development, communications, talent recruiting, all this stuff. Question mark whether that’s the right way to do it in terms of operating model, if technology is not a better way of supplying that value back to your portfolio companies, or if there’s no better way of doing it. But still, that’s one of the appeals of actually dealing with a larger mega fund if you’re a startup, right? That they will have the resources, also the financial resources to put more capital in you. But also, again, if there’s entrepreneurs listening to this right now, and hopefully there are, it’s a two-edged sword, right? Because if you have Andreessen Horowitz putting money in you, or NEA, or General Catalyst, or whatever, putting money in you on a Series C and then not doubling down on the Series A or the Series B, there will be questions, right? Because like they have the capital, they have other funds, so why the hell are they not putting more money in? Um, so, so it’s a little bit of a two-edged sword. Bertrand Yeah, I think that one is a pretty big one. And on top of it, as we discussed, some of these big firms have multiple funds managed technically by different teams. So you might have convinced the early-stage teams, they have investors, they’re happy, but you don’t convince the growth-stage firm. As you say, it might raise questions because people might think that there is some communication between the early-stage team and the growth-stage team. So why the heck are they not deciding to invest? And as we also discussed, even worse possible situation, what happens if the growth-stage team has invested in your competitor? It’s even more trouble. So I think trying to understand how firms behave, what’s the reputation of the firm, what’s the reputation of the partner you are working with, I mean, can have tremendous importance and impact. When it’s time for you to work with a firm. Nuno Indeed. I mean, at the end of the day, we still believe that the smaller fund— we at Chameleon discuss the notion that our limit should be $500 million per fund, right? And that’s the logic of it. We think that model is the model that works well in venture capital. We do recognize, as I said before, why mega funds keep raising more and more money, right? It becomes a harm’s race at that end of the market. As I said, probably a slightly different asset class, or if not a significantly different asset class as well. So seeing a little bit both sides of the market, I mean, we often compete with the mega funds, but honestly, a lot of the mega funds are kind to us and they let us in. And this whole notion of elbows out, we haven’t felt it that much in the market. And people see our value at the table. And in many cases, I, I do see the larger funds more and more seeing the value of smaller funds coming in on the same rounds and even in some cases co-leading early stage rounds like Series C. So it’s not like elbows are out everywhere across the board. So I don’t mean to say this is like an all-out war between small funds and big funds and the small funds need to win or the big funds need to win. I think actually there’s a lot of potential for coexistence. My point is more that the asset classes and the returns are quite different over time, and that’s how I would think through it. And if you’re an entrepreneur, you should think about that as well, right? What are the implications of taking money from certain funds versus others in terms of the expected returns, expected time allocated to you? For example, if you’re not doing very well as a as a company, right? Will the big funds spend the same amount of energy on you if you’re not doing great and all of that? So it’s a little bit sort of a beware, open your eyes, both for limited partners and for startups. What do you actually want, right? What do you want from your VC firm if you’re a startup? And what do you want from your VC firm if you’re an LP? Bertrand I must say, as an entrepreneur, uh, a board member, I have seen some situations where the bigger funds are actually trying sometimes to elbow out the existing investors. Like, uh, we have that much money to put to work, we cannot do less. And you’re like, yeah, but I don’t need that much money. And then they’re like, okay, just don’t let your existing investors do their pro rata. I don’t think it’s great because an entrepreneur, if your investors, your VCs, trusted you earlier stage when it’s more risky, and when it’s becoming less risky, you don’t give them the right to their pro rata because you have to let this big guy come in. That’s not great. Or even if there is not this pro rata issue, when an investor tries to put more money to work than it’s really necessary, it’s also not a good idea as an entrepreneur to take more capital than you could use. It will dilute you more, it will set higher expectations in terms of valuation, it will push you to use that capital faster than maybe would be reasonable. So I think that’s something you want to be careful with the bigger funds. So don’t talk to funds that are in some ways beyond your stage and try to make it work in that context. Or don’t accept to have your strategy change dramatically for no good reason by funds that just want to put too much money to work in your business. And that for me is surprising because it should also be in their best interest not to invest in businesses that are not ready to accept that much capital. But as we have seen, there were in the past some funds that believe that capital is a moat. Was a good idea. So hopefully, I guess we’re a bit behind that. But yeah, I would say entrepreneurs, be careful, find partners that are the right partners for you at your current stage. Sometimes some big names look great, but at the same time, if it comes with a lot of issues, from too much capital to also taking the risk that these partners don’t understand the stage of the business you are in or your industry, Just be careful. There is a lot of value to have firms that are very focused on your stage, on your industry, are finely attuned to that situation. Nuno What Comes Next? Maybe to end in terms of sections, what comes next? And maybe we can come up with some predictions that are a little bit provocative on what’s going to happen to the market. You, if you’re listening to us, feel free to interact with us on LinkedIn, on X. If you have our email address, shoot us an email as well. We’d love to hear from you if you think these are the right predictions or if we’re totally off. Maybe I’ll throw in the first one, Bertrand, and we’ll go one by one. So we’ll each put one at the table and see where we head. My first one is that we’ll have a huge culling of VC investors. We had this rapid expansion of the VC asset class with arguably at least tens of thousands of firms globally, maybe even over 10,000 in the US. I think we’ll have a culling and the culling will continue and we’ll have several firms sort of getting eliminated over the next couple of years that will have either because they’re having tremendous difficulty doing their first close in their next fund, or the returns are not there, or it’s a firm that has done 3, 4 funds, but for some reason the returns have just gone out of whack in the last few years during the bull years. And so therefore, actually they can’t justify to raise more funds out there. So I predict there will be a significant elimination of active firms in the next at least 2 to 3 years. So maybe by 2028, and we’ll be below, I don’t know, 30% of number of active firms that we are today. The other side of it is I do think if we look beyond that, 2029, 2030, and so on, we’ll have the reemergence of not micro funds, but nano funds where people will start deploying capital very, very early and writing small angel checks, but doing it in a way that it’s sort of not this cottage industry that we’ve had of angel investors. So I think angel investment will be disrupted by people that will use more and more of the AI toolification out there to actually manage their portfolios of 10, 15, 5K investments in a way that is a lot more professional, creating sort of an advent of nano funds. Bertrand Yeah, makes sense. On my side, in terms of prediction, I think there is a possibility that the mega fund model keeps expanding and looks more similar over time to some PE models. So do we have the top 10 VC firms that look more like a Blackstone than a Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia used to be? That for me will be an interesting question and development. I think that there is some possibility that it keeps going in that direction. A lot of incentives are pushing things that way. Nuno My next prediction is that DPI, distributions to paid-in cash on cash, just cash back, will become essential for limited partners. I think TVPI, total value to paid-in, that also has in there, as we just said, paper valuations. There’s a lot of disbelief now around the TVPI metric if there isn’t distributions going alongside it. For those who, again, don’t know what TVPI is, it’s total value paid in, but it also includes DPI. So it’s cash on cash component plus a remaining valuation to paid in, an RVPI. And the problem is the RVPI really, in reality, it’s that kind of on-paper valuation that never gets attributed. I think LPs, they’ve seen the writing on the wall and they’re like, dude, just show me your DPI numbers. I don’t care about TVPI. Some LPs will still ask about TVPI just to make sure that the rest is sort of looking in order. Like, show me the money, show me the cash. Actually, it’s not money, show me the cash, right? I want money back. Bertrand But that’s an issue. I mean, if you’re supposed to raise financing every 3 or 4 years, good luck getting DPI to show for that. So you need to be at least on your third fund in order to be able to show DPI, I guess. Nuno I mean, my corollary to that, Bertrand, is if you allow me just to have a corollary kind of prediction, is that we’ll see certainly for funds like $50 million and above, $100 million, $200 million, et cetera, even increased concentration, right? I really need to have anchors that believe in me over time. And we might start having, again, the advent— we had it some decades ago, the advent of cap table kind of VCs, right? Like Sutter Hill Ventures, right? Where they’re not really raising funds anymore. And so we might have the advent of that, that we’ll have structures that are created that have more permanent capital allocated to them, or at the very least more concentrated capital by very few players. Bertrand Interesting. Me on my side, as I shared before, I believe secondaries are, are important and here to stay. Um, in the past, some could argue, is it a distress signal or something? I, I don’t think it’s true anymore. In a world where your average startup might take 15 to 18 years to exit through M&A or IPO, we need to have other options. For funds, for employees, they cannot be expected to stick around for so long and have no liquidity. I mean, it’s just pure madness. It’s just bad alignment at some point to do that. So I think secondaries are becoming the third liquidity pathway for VCs, for employees, and it should be more and more a key part of the game, a key infrastructure in the VC/startups tech industry. Nuno I mean, on specialized versus generalist funds, I believe we’ll continue seeing the coexistence of those two models where the specialized funds will in many pockets actually outperform generalist funds, but where we’ll continue seeing that the large franchises, the tier one franchises will likely be generalist funds. I mean, we just saw it in the cycle. The AI cycle went upon us. We had a 2021 fund. We could easily adapt and go into AI and figure out that AI was growing very fast. I mean, if you have an ultra-specialized fund and that’s your remit and that’s the only thing you can invest on, very difficult to change even during our investment period. I will put a caveat on that. We don’t call, for example, ourselves at Chameleon generalist. We call ourselves multi-specialized because our scoring models for the verticals that we track are specialized within Mantis. Because the partnership is specialized, we all focus on different areas. And because we have the Kin network that allows us to tap into that level of expertise, Again, I think the world will be specialized coexistence. Some pockets specialized will do very well, certainly on the smaller fund size, but the big franchises will likely look a little bit more generalist. And as I said, multi-specialized from our perspective is the future. We’ll start seeing more and more funds that are multi-specialized like ourselves. Do you want to talk about AI and how it’ll distort the metrics? No. Bertrand Yes. I think AI is an exciting moment in the tech industry. It feels in some ways that the same way we had a big distortion coming with COVID and work from home in 2020, 2021. 2021, where suddenly everyone and their mother will build a SaaS company or invest in a SaaS company. AI feels a bit of the same. I mean, to be clear, I truly believe it’s deserved. I mean, we are facing a dramatic shift in how computing is being done in terms of value you can get from software. So at the same time, AI will probably distort this matrix for a long time. We clearly see a split where investments are going, in what startups are being created. So I think, yeah, we will see some distortion. And we know that maybe 50% of all deal value is going to AI in 2025. We have seen single rounds reaching 40 billion, like to OpenAI. We have seen, as you discussed, some seed stage investment of 400 million. So AI investing and AI startups are definitely a beast on their own. And will distort VC metrics for a long time. And we might need two sets of metrics in parallel, you know, AI versus everything else. So that would be an interesting bifurcation in the industry in some ways. I would say it’s fair to separate AI versus non-AI. We reach a point where it’s two different beasts. Nuno Conclusion So in conclusion, AI has changed the world and it’s changing VC as well, as we discussed earlier in the episode. We have a tremendous momentous occasion for the asset class where venture capital is really bifurcating into very large funds, which no longer are in venture capital or seemingly may be distributed between different asset classes, and the smaller funds, sub-$500 million and sub-$100 million, that keep having the better returns, but also with much smaller scale. We’re seeing a culling of the industry where the industry is definitely getting smaller and smaller and more concentrated at both ends, number of VC firms, as well as a number of limited partners per fund and the interest that some of these limited partners have of being more and more concentrated in their own portfolio allocations. And last but not the least, the discussion around specialized versus generalist, where it seems like there’s some clear winners on some asset classes, on some sizes, in some industries, but on others, there’s other kinds of winners. And so maybe the future is multi-specialized, as I framed at the end. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to check us out and if you want to comment, feel free to send us messages on X, LinkedIn, to both myself and Bertrand, as well as send us an email. Thank you so much, Bertrand. Bertrand Thank you, Nuno.
Ryan was a successful lawyer with a massive problem. He couldn't find a task management tool that worked for his firm, so he built one himself. He thought he'd solved the problem, but for 8 agonizing months, he couldn't sell a single subscription.In this episode, Ryan breaks down the gritty reality of bootstrapping Filevine into a $3B legal tech startup doing over $200M in revenue. He shares how a random Instagram ad campaign ended his sales drought, how he fought off a Tiger Global-backed competitor built on Salesforce, and how he's completely rewriting his company's architecture to win the AI legal tech war against the likes of Harvey and Legora.Why You Should ListenHow 8 months of zero sales almost broke him.Why building customizability into your core product is the ultimate defense.How to recruit top engineers when you have zero funding.Why SMBs often have "beer money but champagne tastes."How to pivot from SaaS to AI.Keywordsstartup podcast, startup podcast for founders, legaltech, product market fit, bootstrapping, B2B SaaS, enterprise sales, AI startup, founder story, finding pmf00:00:00 Intro00:07:20 Recruiting an Amazon Engineer with No Funding00:11:52 The First Conference and the "Terrible" MVP00:15:23 The Dark Months: Zero Sales from Cold Calling00:19:28 The GTM that Saved the Company00:27:36 Why In-Person Events Beat Cold Calling00:36:19 Moving Upmarket to Avoid Demanding SMBs00:37:32 Beating a $50M Salesforce-Backed Competitor00:46:45 Rewriting Filevine for the AI EraSend me a message to let me know what you think!
In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, we unpack how escalating Middle East tensions are putting fresh pressure on Indian IT's diversification strategy and business travel. SEBI chief Tuhin Kanta Pandey cautions investors against chasing IPO listing pops and addresses concerns around the Tiger Global tax verdict. We also track Groww's AI co-pilot GR1 rollout plans and how Iran-Israel tensions are disrupting India's peak summer outbound travel season.
This week we chat with Eric Newcomer!Eric is the founder and writer behind Newcomer, which is a deeply reported newsletter on the inner workings of the startup industry. He's widely regarded as one of the sharpest independent journalists and observers of power, money, and ambition in tech. He's built Newcomer from a Substack newsletter into a must-read publication with over 100,000 subscribers.After spending six years at Bloomberg, Eric took the leap in 2020 to build Newcomer full time - breaking stories that shape how founders, investors, and operators understand the startup world. From leaked slide decks at Coatue and Tiger Global to deeply reported interviews with top venture capitalists, his work consistently uncovers breaking news. Eric is also the host of the Newcomer Podcast, which launched with a debut episode featuring Reid Hoffman, and the co-creator of major tech events like the Cerebral Valley AI Summit, bringing together CEOs from Stability, Runway, Hugging Face, and leading partners from firms like Sequoia and Greylock.Earlier in his career, Eric was the first employee at The Information, where he broke news including Amazon's acquisition of Twitch. A Harvard graduate with a background in philosophy and a journalist's instinct for truth, Eric has built a platform that founders and investors can't afford to ignore.✨ This episode is presented by Brex.Brex: brex.com/trailblazerspodThis episode is supported by RocketReach, Gusto, OpenPhone & Athena.RocketReach: rocketreach.co/trailblazersGusto: gusto.com/trailblazersQuo: Quo.com/trailblazersAthena: athenago.me/Erica-WengerFollow Us!@ericnewcomer https://www.newcomer.co/@thetrailblazerspod: Instagram, YouTube, TikTokErica Wenger: @erica_wenger
On Episode 787 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Ajay Kedia, Director at Kedia Commodities, Himanshu Sinha, Head of Tax Practice at Trilegal as well as Shankkar Aiyar, veteran economic journalist and author.SHOW NOTES(00:00) Stories of the Day(00:50) Fear is driving up gold and silver prices even as the dollar stays weak.(05:09) India is an oasis of macro stability says India's economic survey(10:39) Gold demand is set to fall because of subdued jewellery purchases.(15:56) Will the Union Budget address the fallout of the Supreme Court's decision to deny tax treaty benefits in the Tiger Global case?Register for India Finance and Innovation Forum 2026https://tinyurl.com/IFIFCOREFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter |Instagram |Facebook |Linkedin |Youtube
A recent Supreme Court ruling has put the process of how India taxes foreign investors in focus. The top court ruled in favour of the Income Tax Department by setting aside the Delhi High Court's judgment quashing the tax demand of Tiger Global. Tiger Global and Indian tax authorities have been locked in a legal tussle over its 2018 stake sale in Flipkart to Walmart worth ₹14,440 crore $1.6 billion. The deal was part of the U.S. retail company's $16 billion acquisition of Flipkart that year. Indian tax authorities argued Tiger Global wrongly used the India-Mauritius tax avoidance treaty to not pay any tax on its profits, the investment firm argued it can do so as the treaty exempted such a transaction. The tax authorities say the Tiger Global Mauritius units served merely as a conduit for Tiger Global U.S., a description the investment firm says is incorrect. The Supreme Court has been hearing the case since January 2025 and the ruling has raised wider questions about tax treaties, anti-avoidance rules, and how India balances tax fairness with investor confidence. Guest: Vinod Joseph, Partner, Investment Funds practice at Economic Laws Practice Host: Nivedita V Edited by Jude Weston Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On Episode 776 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Rahul Charkha, Partner at Economic Laws Practice. We also feature an excerpt from our recent India Energy Week interview featuring Atanu Mukherjee, President and CEO at Dastur Energy.SHOW NOTES(00:00) The Take(05:43) Markets operate in technical territory as they wait for fresh triggers(05:59) WEF, Davos kicks off today but is unlikely to provide much hope to global business and trade.(08:11) Copper hits record highs too(09:14) How energy markets adjusted for geopolitical risks in 2025 and what that means for 2026.(14:49) The Supreme Court ruling on a Tiger Global sale of shares to Walmart from 2018 has created a stir. What does it mean for other transactions?Register for our Exclusive live event on the Budget 2026https://tinyurl.com/pod21212 Register for India Energy Week 2026https://www.indiaenergyweek.com/forms/register-as-a-delegateFull Interview with Atanu MukherjeeFor more of our coverage check out thecore.inSubscribe to our NewsletterFollow us on:Twitter |Instagram |Facebook |Linkedin |Youtube
The Supreme Court has ruled that capital gains from Tiger Global's 2018 exit from Flipkart are taxable in India, even though the investment was routed through Mauritius and backed by a tax treaty. In this video, ThePrint explains why the court held that the offshore structure lacked real commercial substance, how India's General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) overrides treaty protection, and what this means for foreign investors, private equity funds, and cross-border M&A deals.
Supreme Court rules in tax department's favour in Tiger Global case The Supreme Court has held that Tiger Global's capital gains arising from its 2018 stake sale in Flipkart to Walmart Inc. are taxable under domestic law in a setback for the US investment firm. The Apex court overturned a Delhi High Court ruling that allowed Tiger Global to claim exemptions under the India-Mauritius tax treaty. The decision is a win for local tax authorities, who argued that Tiger Global used its Mauritius entities to avoid paying taxes. The ruling can set a precedent for how India applies tax treaties to offshore exits, potentially increasing uncertainty for global investors seeking clarity on capital gains. Tiger Global first invested in Flipkart in 2009 with an initial $9 million. Over the following years, it steadily increased its exposure to about $1 billion, building a stake of roughly 20% in the company. In 2017, Tiger began monetising the investment by selling part of its holding to SoftBank Group Corp. December trade deficit widens as imports surge 8.8%, export growth modest at 1.86% India's goods trade deficit widened significantly in December 2025 to $25.04 billion from $20.63 billion in previous December as exports increased 1.86 per cent (year-on-year) to $38.51 billion while imports grew at a higher 8.8 per cent to $63.55 billion, per data released by the Commerce Department. Exports to the US declined a marginal 1.83 per cent in December 2025 to $6.89 billion amid the 50 per cent tariffs applied by Washington on most Indian exports in August-end. “In the US we are still holding on as there is more focus on areas where tariffs are low. Where tariffs are more, exporters are showing more resilience and holding on to the supply chains,” Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said at a media briefing on Thursday. On the proposed India-US bilateral trade agreement (BTA), the Secretary said the negotiations were on in a virtual mode and efforts were on to close gaps in the “remaining issues”. SEBI weighs oversight of unlisted share market as focus shifts to disclosure gaps The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) is examining whether it should step in to regulate the fast-growing unlisted share market, which currently operates largely outside its direct oversight, Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey said on Thursday. Speaking on the sidelines of the Association of Investment Bankers of India's (AIBI) annual convention, Pandey said SEBI is discussing the issue with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to assess whether the regulator has the legal authority to oversee companies that are not listed on stock exchanges, and if so, how far such regulation can extend. “SEBI first needs to examine whether it has the legal authority to regulate companies that are not listed on stock exchanges and how far such regulation can extend,” he said. Mumbai civic polls heat up as Fadnavis, Thackeray brothers trade barbs As polling took place in Mumbai on January 15, the political temperature rose sharply, with a fierce exchange of words between Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and the Thackeray brothers amid a tightly fought election to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray appealed to Mumbai's voters to turn out in large numbers, calling the civic polls an opportunity to unseat what he described as a corrupt BJP regime.Uddhav's party, along with Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), also deployed so-called “Bhagwa Guards” in several constituencies to keep a watch on alleged dual voting. State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare said that after voting ended at 5:30pm, that the turnout so far is 46-50 per cent, which is higher than the figure for the 2017 civic polls. The results of the Mumbai civic polls will be out on Friday, January 16.
Tiger's last fund did well with investments in OpenAI, Waymo and Databricks. But it warns investors that AI valuations are already 'elevated.' Skild AI is developing a hardware-agnostic foundation model for robots that can be customized for various uses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
Produced by Foundersuite (for startups: www.foundersuite.com) and Fundingstack (for emerging manager VCs: www.fundingstack.com), "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders and investors who have raised capital. This episode is with with Naveen Verma of EnCharge AI, a startup developing energy efficient analog in-memory-computing AI chips. In addition to being CEO, Naveen is a Professor at Princeton and so we discuss his journey from academia and research to leading a startup to an over-subscribed $100 M Series B. Learn more about EnCharge at https://www.enchargeai.com/ EnCharge most recently raised over $100 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Tiger Global and included participation from Maverick Silicon, Capital TEN, SIP Global Partners, Zero Infinity Partners, CTBC VC, Vanderbilt University, Morgan Creek Digital, and others. Previous investors participating in the Series B round include RTX Ventures, Anzu Partners, Scout Ventures, AlleyCorp, ACVC, and S5V. The round also included strategic investors including Samsung Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Samsung, HH-CTBC, a partnership between Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) and CTBC VC, In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit strategic investor advancing technologies for the U.S. national security community and America's allies; RTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of RTX, a leading manufacturer of aerospace and defense systems and technology solutions; and Constellation Technology Ventures, the venture capital arm of Constellation, the nation's largest producer of clean, emissions-free, reliable energy. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $21 Billion since 2016. If you are a startup, create a free account at www.foundersuite.com. If you are a VC, venture studio or investment banker, check out our new platform, www.fundingstack.com a startup developing proprietary analog in-memory-computing AI chips
One of the biggest names in the startup ecosystem is launching a new investment fund targeted at a $2.2B raise. We dig into the news, and how the AI boom is transforming the Venture Capital and Megacap investing landscape Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
In the next episode of SFNet presents In the Know, host Barry Bobrow talks with Chad Farrell, Managing Director in the Commercial and Industrial business at Tiger Global. Chad is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of Tiger's Commercial & Industrial division, as well as guiding its strategic direction and growth and developing new market […]
In the next episode of SFNet presents In the Know, host Barry Bobrow talks with Chad Farrell, Managing Director in the Commercial and Industrial business at Tiger Global. Chad is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of Tiger's Commercial & Industrial division, as well as guiding its strategic direction and growth and developing new market […] The post SFNet presents In The Know: Meet Chad Farrell with Tiger Group appeared first on Business RadioX ®.
In the next episode of SFNet presents In the Know, host Barry Bobrow talks with Chad Farrell, Managing Director in the Commercial and Industrial business at Tiger Global. Chad is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of Tiger's Commercial & Industrial division, as well as guiding its strategic direction and growth and developing new market initiatives. In a wide-ranging discussion, Chad and Barry talk about the movement in asset valuations resulting from the current economic environment, tariffs and other trends impacting specific industries. They also explore the impact of AI on the valuation business, how banks can best take advantage of appraisal services, and much more. Chad has over 25 years of experience in the disposition, valuation and auction of machinery, equipment, inventory, and real property, having executed thousands of auctions, selling more than $1 Billion of surplus and distressed assets in the energy, transportation, construction, manufacturing, mining, metals and other industrial sectors.
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Andrew Feldman is Co-Founder & CEO of Cerebras, building the world's fastest AI inference and training. Cerebras recently closed a $1.1BN Series G round at an $8.1 billion valuation, backed by top names including Fidelity, Atreides, Tiger Global, Valor Equity and 1789 Capital. Under his leadership, they've leapfrogged GPU limits in inference, operate at trillions of tokens per month, and are filing to go public soon. AGENDA: 02:43 Why We Did Not IPO and Raised $1BN From Fidelity 05:03 Analysis of Chip and Compute Landscape Today 07:14 NVIDIA Showing Signs They Are Running Out of Ideas 13:57 The Real Questions to Ask on Chip Depreciation 24:54 Energy Requirements for AI: Is it Feasible? 29:25 Mag7 Value Concentration: Feature or a Bug 31:57 Talent is the Bottleneck and Trump Makes it Worse 32:55 The War for Talent: Secrets No One Sees 34:22 Evaluating the Data Centre Economy: Many Will Lose Money 38:01 Three Changes the US Could Make to Beat China in AI 42:30 Why 80% of our Revenues are in the UAE 47:26 Quick Fire Questions 58:59 Why Work Life Balance is Total BS
Here's the thing. Most of us still picture a hotel lobby with a counter, a queue, and someone typing furiously while we wait after a long flight. In this episode, I sit with Richard Valtr, founder of Mews, to ask whether that scene is quietly fading. Backed by Tiger Global, Goldman Sachs, and Battery Ventures, Mews recently raised 75 million dollars to scale an AI-powered platform that already processes more than 10 billion dollars in payments each year. Richard argues the real bottleneck in hospitality isn't software. It's mindset. If hotels rethought workflows around guests rather than systems, the front desk would feel less like a checkpoint and more like a welcome. Richard shares the origin story of building for hoteliers as well as guests, and why the property management system should function like a central nervous system. He explains how automation handles the repetitive pieces of check-in so staff can actually look people in the eye and start a conversation. That's the promise of AI here. Not gimmicks, but orchestration across bookings, payments, inventory, and service so the boring parts disappear into the background and the human parts come forward. We also talk about underused tech. Richard uses a memorable comparison for many hotel platforms that have Ferrari-level capability but get driven like Volvos. The data is there. The intent to serve is there. What's missing is the leadership confidence to rewire the stack, measure outcomes, and keep pushing. When that happens, hotels stop thinking only in terms of rooms and start monetizing the full journey. Daybeds, coworking passes, last-mile upgrades, spa time after back-to-back meetings. AI can surface the right offer at the right moment without turning the experience into a sales pitch. By the end, Richard paints a picture of hospitality where screens fade, transactions happen on the guest's time, and every interaction feels more personal precisely because the admin has been taken out of the way. If you want a grounded view of how AI will change hotels without stripping away the reason we love staying in them, this conversation is a helpful place to start.
Brett had a drug dealer's car for 13 days. By day 11, the death threats started coming. This is the reality of building ServiceUp, the "DoorDash for auto repair." Brett literally stole DoorDash's entire playbook—city launches, three-sided marketplace, everything—but discovered even if he got 90% right, 10% of B2C customers can end you. He raised from Tiger just as the firm exploded. The DoorDash partnership that seemed like salvation turned into their worst nightmare. But then they pivoted to B2B and saw their average order value grow 5x overnight."Work-life balance is BS. If you can work seven days a week, you'll fail faster, fix faster, and find product-market fit faster."Why You Should Listen:Why just 10% of your customers can destroy your business How to close funding in the middle of a macro crisisWhy work-life balance is BS if you want to build something bigHow stealing another startup's playbook can lead to 5000% growthWhy your worst customers might actually show you your best pivotKeywords:startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, ServiceUp, Brett Carlson, marketplace startup, B2B pivot, Tiger Global, auto repair tech, fleet management, startup growth00:00:00 Intro00:01:40 Failed auto shop becomes ServiceUp idea00:03:27 Pulling co-founder out of retirement00:09:30 Raising $2M seed from angels00:13:23 Building the MVP in Puerto Rico00:15:01 Early Bay Area operations and getting shops00:17:50 The drug dealer death threat incident00:21:17 Tiger Global loses $8B during Series A00:26:57 DoorDash partnership disaster00:28:36 Pivoting from B2C to B2B fleets00:30:00 Finding product-market fitSend me a message to let me know what you think!
CommanderAI launched in early 2024 as a customer relationship manager and sales prospecting platform built for waste management — and other industrial services like dumpster rentals and industrial recyclers – to fill that gap. Also, Silicon Valley-based Cerebras announced it raised a $1.1 billion Series G round on Tuesday that valued the AI hardware company at $8.1 billion. The round was co-led by Fidelity and Atreides Management with participation from Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, and 1789 Capital, among others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
While many robotics companies are building human-sized robots, or working to automate entire factories, MicroFactory is instead trying to think big by building small. Also, Smartphone startup Nothing announced today that it closed its Series C round of $200 million, which was led by the investment firm Tiger Global. With this round, the consumer electronics company is now valued at $1.3 billion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, we bring you the top stories shaping the world of startups and technology. Girish Mathrubootham officially exits Freshworks after nearly 15 years. Urban Company's cap table gets a boost with Tiger Global and Accel offloading shares ahead of its IPO. We track how online credit card transactions are set to overtake offline swipes, and wrap up with Amazon and Flipkart's festive sale dates.
In 2017, Andrew Parker launched Papa with a 1-800 number, offering 'grandkids-on-demand' in Miami. By 2021, the company was valued at $1.4bn (backed by SoftBank and Tiger Global).This is a YC-backed gig economy company operating in the regulated elder care market at unicorn scale. On paper it shouldn't have worked -- and yet it did.LinksPapa: https://www.papa.com/Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io
AI startups in 2025 have raised $122 billion, with the United States accounting for $104 billion of the total. In the second quarter, AI companies secured $50 billion, nearly half of all venture capital invested during that period. Major deals include Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, Anduril's $2.5 billion round led by Founders Fund, and Safe Superintelligence's $2 billion from Greenoaks, Alphabet, and Andreessen Horowitz. The sector is seeing increased investment in infrastructure-heavy AI projects, supported by a proposed $92 billion federal funding package. Overall venture capital funding has declined to $101.5 billion in the second quarter due to an ongoing IPO drought, with major AI firms such as Databricks and OpenAI remaining private. Capital is increasingly concentrated among leading AI startups, making fundraising more difficult for smaller companies, while investment firms like SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Sequoia, and Lightspeed continue to lead in AI investments.Learn more on this news by visiting us at: https://greyjournal.net/news/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hoy conversé con Sebastián Noguera, cofundador y Presidente de Habi, la plataforma que digitaliza cómo se compran y venden casas en Latinoamérica.En Colombia y México, más de $3T están atrapados en viviendas que no se compran ni se venden. Es el principal ahorro de la clase media, pero sigue siendo inaccesible. Antes de Habi, Sebastián lideró la transformación digital del Banco de Bogotá y fue inversionista en uno de los fondos más importantes de Colombia. A la fecha, Habi ha levantado más de $450M entre capital y deuda de fondos como: SoftBank, Tiger Global y la International Finance Corporation (IFC).Hoy Sebastián y yo hablamos sobre:El desafío de liberar $3T atrapados en viviendas latinoamericanasCómo la IA reduce en 40 % el costo de servir a clientes inmobiliariosPor qué la verdadera barrera para digitalizar la vivienda es la confianza, no la tecnologíaNotas del episodio: https://startupeable.com/habiPara más contenido síguenos en:YouTube | Sitio Web En Startupeable, hacemos más con Notion, la plataforma todo en uno para organizar tu startup. Docs, tareas, bases de datos—todo en un solo lugar y ahora con IA para trabajar más rápido y mejor.Nos aliamos con Notion para regalarte 3 meses gratis del Plan Business + IA ilimitada, hasta 100 empleados
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Bassem Handy, CEO of Briq.com, survived the VC apocalypse by firing 215 humans and replacing them with robots, growing from burning $1M/month to hitting $25M ARR with just 135 employees. After raising $50M including a peak-bubble Tiger Global round, he took a flat $150M valuation in 2024 and used his own robot technology to automate 80% of his sales team, achieving the lowest customer acquisition costs in company history. In this episode, he reveals exactly how he got 600 companies to pay him $2,000-$5,000/month for robots that process 2.6 million automation minutes monthly, and his plan to double revenue without hiring a single human.
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: 04:11 Owner's New $120M Round at $1BN 06:05 Why Series A is F****** Today 14:55 Could Tiger Global Be Saved by OpenAI and Scale 22:43 Why SBF is the Greatest Investor of the Last Decade 31:34 Why No Individuals Should Invest in Venture Funds 36:27 Why Microsoft Laying 3% of Their Workforce Off is not Enough 41:38 OpenAI's New CEO: Non-Technical CEOs Running OpenAI 44:48 Why Big Funds are Investing in Perplexity 54:43 Why Clay Should Raise a Warchest and Go to War 01:00:05 The Impact of AI on Marketing and Sales
Rachel Hirsch is a powerhouse, who has defined her own unique path. She is the founder of LA's beloved Empowered Yoga Studio - the culmination of a yoga journey she started a long time ago while being at business school in London - which now has two sites in California.She is also an investor - founder of Wellness Growth Ventures, where she partners with visionary female founders who are transforming the wellness industry.Rachel has built her life at the intersection of wellness and investment. From her early days at UBS Investment Bank and Tiger Global, to collaborating with Lululemon as an Ambassador. Part investor, part yogi, and full-time community builder - Rachel's story is an honest, relatable and inspiring account of following your authentic path.On this episode - we get personal. We talk about everything from not being able to see your own success, to how to start a yoga studio on the side, how to start a proper studio, why she's passionate about supporting female founders, and why she doesn't feel the need to choose between finance and wellness. It's an inspiring episode for anyone looking to make the leap into the scary unknown and come out with a deeper knowledge of yourself. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
ICON, which builds homes using 3D printing, has closed on $56 million in Series C funding co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Tiger Global, the company has confirmed to TechCrunch exclusively. The raise represents a first close for the Austin-based ICON, according to a spokesperson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Jacob and Nikhil sit down with Daniel Perez, the Co-Founder and CEO of Hinge Health. Hinge Health is a digital clinic for patients with joint and muscle pain, having raised $800M+ from investors like Coatue and Tiger Global. They discuss Hinge Health's strategy for selling to employers, how digital health solutions can reach and retain users, the role of software x hardware in disrupting healthcare, and more. [0:00] Intro[2:34] The Evolution of Employer Health Solutions[4:03] Challenges and Strategies in Digital Health[7:07] Focus on Musculoskeletal Care[9:51] Engaging and Retaining Patients[16:17] Marketing and Awareness Strategies[19:31] The Role of Independent Validators[22:27] Clinical Validation and R&D Excellence[23:04] Healthy Competition and Market Differentiation[23:59] Product Superiority and Customer Validation[26:05] Team Dynamics and Tough Decisions[29:49] Future of Hinge Health and Healthcare Automation[31:44] AI and Technology Integration[36:18] Hardware Innovations and Market Impact[39:19] Value-Based Care and Outcome Guarantees[41:14] Regulatory Challenges and Innovation Constraints[43:38] Closing Thoughts and Entrepreneurial Advice Out-Of-Pocket: https://www.outofpocket.health/
This series aims to demystify Medicaid, starting with insights from federal and state agencies, FQHCs, and managed care organizations, before exploring successful founders' strategies. Readour primers on the key players and innovations here, and stay tuned for upcoming posts featuring interviews with key opinion leaders, purchasers, and startup founders.Cityblock Health is a value-based healthcare provider focused on the complex clinical, behavioral health, and social needs of dually eligible and Medicaid recipients. Cityblock offers the only fully integrated and multi-modal solution that directly delivers clinical care to one of the most at-risk and hardest-to-reach populations. Powered by advanced technology that provides its care team with a data-driven understanding of member needs and risks, Cityblock has demonstrated industry-leading engagement, member retention, meaningful reductions in avoidable hospital readmissions, and reduced total cost of care.Founded in 2017, spun off by Sidewalk Labs, and based in New York, Cityblock has raised nearly $900M to date from investors such as SoftBank, Tiger Global, Maverick Ventures, General Catalyst, Thrive Capital and 8VC, among others. It is now valued at $5.7B. Cityblock currently serves more than 100,000 members, and partners with four national Medicaid health plans and several health systems in 15 cities across seven states.Mike's career has spanned both legal and healthcare leadership roles, starting as a commercial litigator before joining UnitedHealth Group as National Vice President of Medicaid Policy and Product. He went on to serve as CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Ohio, then as Chief Transformation Officer and President of Government Programs for Optum BH Solutions, and later as Chief Growth Officer and SVP of Growth and Product at UnitedHealth Community and State. In 2024, he joined Cityblock as President to help drive the company's next phase of growth.Mike holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame, a JD from Notre Dame Law School, and attended an Executive Education Program at Stanford Graduate School of Business.In this episode, we learn about how health plans evaluate startups, the complexities of improving access for Medicaid and dual-eligible populations, and Cityblock's innovative approach to building trust and engagement.
Pinn Lawjindakul, Partner of Lightspeed Southeast Asia and Jeremy Au discussed: 1. Bain Consultant to Grab Head: Pinn recounted her shift from Bain & Company, where she started as an intern in 2011, to joining Grab in 2015 during its rapid expansion. She highlighted the operational and cultural differences between consulting in San Francisco and Southeast Asia, noting the latter's more hierarchical and less mature environment. At Grab, Pinn tackled challenges such as competing with Uber, Easy Taxi, and Rocket Internet, emphasizing the importance of localized operational advantages. 2. Tiger Global to Lightspeed VC Partner: Pinn reflected on her pivotal time at Tiger Global (2016–2019), where she immersed herself in growth-stage investments like Flipkart. The fast-paced environment and exposure to trend-driven, data-backed decision-making helped her realize the impactful nature of venture capital. This experience solidified her passion for working closely with entrepreneurs and shaping transformative businesses. Transitioning to Lightspeed Ventures, she embraced a focus on early-stage startups in Southeast Asia, drawn by the opportunity to guide founders from the outset and help them adopt a regional mindset critical for success 3. Southeast Asia vs. China & India: She highlighted Lightspeed's report, which debunked the longstanding comparisons of the region to China and India. The report argued that Southeast Asia's fragmented markets, diverse consumer profiles, and smaller economic scale require a unique approach, defying the traditional narratives borrowed from larger, more homogenous markets. They also championed Singapore's underestimated potential as a key driver of economic growth, countering the conventional wisdom that focuses almost exclusively on larger markets like Indonesia, e.g. Gojek vs. Grab. Pinn also highlighted the need for a more rational approach to capital allocation, underscoring how sustainable growth requires founders and investors alike to balance ambition with market realities. Jeremy and Pinn also discussed her perspective being a parent has changed her perspective on startups, what they learned as Bain interns and what advice she would give her younger self. == Pinn is a founding member of Lightspeed Southeast Asia, a global early-stage investment fund. Prior to Lightspeed, she was at Insignia Venture Partners and Tiger Global Management, where she focused on consumer and financial technology across SEA, India and China. She worked closely with Flipkart (sold to Walmart), Ola, Policybazaar, Hike, Games 24x7, Razorpay, Uxin (IPO exit). Pinn started her career as a management consultant at Bain & Company and also founded Grab's motorcycle-on-demand in Bangkok, Thailand. Pinn graduated from Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania with a double degree in Psychology and Finance. === Watch, listen or read the full insight at www.bravesea.com/blog/navigating-sea-markets Nonton, dengar atau baca wawasan lengkapnya di www.bravesea.com/blog/navigating-sea-markets 观看、收听或阅读全文,请访问 www.bravesea.com/blog/navigating-sea-markets Xem, nghe hoặc đọc toàn bộ thông tin chi tiết tại www.bravesea.com/blog/navigating-sea-markets Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea Spotify English: https://open.spotify.com/show/4TnqkaWpTT181lMA8xNu0T Bahasa Indonesia: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Vs8t6qPo0eFb4o6zOmiVZ Chinese: https://open.spotify.com/show/20AGbzHhzFDWyRTbHTVDJR Vietnamese: https://open.spotify.com/show/0yqd3Jj0I19NhN0h8lWrK1
This Week in Startups is brought to you by… OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. TWiST listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.CLAconnect.com/tech * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss the reporting that Tiger Global's 2021-era fund is not only posting poor results, it's lagging peers from the same timeframe. Then, the pair also interview Suvir Wadhwa, founder and CEO of Flite, a former Launch accelerator company, and dug into the Cruise-GM news along with a peek at the next head of the FTC. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (2:19) Tiger Global's investment strategy and performance (5:49) Challenges of quick capital deployment and market timing (10:13) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist (11:15) Impact of losing key investors or advisors on startups (12:24) Public market trends affecting private investments (16:09) Market downturns' effects on startups and investors (20:05) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (21:16) Political influences on market and technology sectors (29:32) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (31:10) Trump administration's business policies and immigration (38:20) Changes in the FTC leadership and impacts on startups (41:40) Finix's addition to the TWiST500 (44:53) GM's scale-back on Cruise and future implications (51:25) Self-driving technology's impact on car ownership (52:39) Flite's Suvir Wadhwa joins the show (54:18) Flite's business model, AI benefits, and market reach * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: Check out Flite: https://www.flite.city/ Check out the TWiST500: https://www.twist500.com/ Check out Tiger Global: https://www.tigerglobal.com/ Check out E1207: How Tiger Global is outpacing VC with fast, cheap capital ft. Founders Fund's Everett Randle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koDKxjHe_Kk * Follow Suvir: X: https://x.com/suvirwadhwa LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suvirwadhwa/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:13) OpenPhone - Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist (20:05) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (29:32) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916
In this episode of Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss the opening of the autonomy IPO market and investors increasing desire to own autonomous vehicle companies. On October 23rd, Tesla's stock rallied 20% following earnings that beat the street and Elon Musk's continued commentary about Tesla's robotaxi ambitions. WeRide completed its NASDAQ IPO raising $440M on October 25th, the same day Waymo announced a massive $5.6B funding round led by Alphabet with participation from Tiger Global and Sliver Lake.Episode Chapters0:00 Capital Markets are Open3:07 Tesla Robotaxi Service in Palo Alto?5:43 The Interrelationships and Risks of the Elon Musk Companies10:43 WeRide IPO19:37 Waymo's Latest Funding Round23:17 Lucid is Finding Out Autonomy is Hard29:40 Wayve32:02 Cruise Goes Driverless in Houston33:16 Uber37:02 Next WeekRecorded on October 25, 2024--------About The Road to AutonomyThe Road to Autonomy® is a leading source of data, insight and commentary on autonomous vehicles/trucks and the emerging autonomy economy™.Sign up for This Week in The Autonomy Economy newsletter: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-economy/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Alphabet -owned Waymo just announcing a new $5.6B funding round led by its parent company with participation from investors including Fidelity, a16z, Silver Lake and Tiger Global. The robotaxi service has seen daily rides grow ten-fold in the past year, to more than 100,000 weekly paid trips.
Hoy conversé con Matías Muchnick, cofundador y CEO de NotCo, una empresa que utiliza inteligencia artificial para replicar productos animales con combinaciones de plantas. NotCo ha hecho alianzas con marcas globales como Burger King, Starbucks, Papa Johns y Kraft Heinz. Hasta la fecha, han recaudado +$400M de inversionistas como Jeff Bezos, Kaszek Ventures, Tiger Global y General Catalyst.-Este episodio es presentado por:Deel, la única plataforma de HR todo en uno diseñada para equipos globales. Deel te permite contratar fácilmente en más de 150 países. Desde México hasta Australia, explora cómo puedes contratar tanto empleados como freelancers de manera segura y legal.Visita su guía gratuita de contratación aquí: https://rebrand.ly/SDLDSPEP1-Por favor ayúdame dejando una reseña en Spotify o Apple Podcasts: https://ratethispodcast.com/startupeable-Hoy Matías y yo hablamos sobre:Cómo hacer terapia te puede potenciar como emprendedorCómo funciona la industria de alimentos desde adentroCómo crear una marca que brille en un mercado ultra competidoNotas del episodio: https://startupeable.com/notcoPara más contenido síguenos en:YouTube | Sitio Web -Este episodio es presentado por:- Deel, la única plataforma de HR todo en uno diseñada para equipos globales. Deel te permite contratar fácilmente en más de 150 países. Desde México hasta Australia, explora cómo puedes contratar tanto empleados como freelancers de manera segura y legal.Más información aquí: https://rebrand.ly/SDLDSPG-Distribuido por Genuina Media
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover 1) OpenAI closing a $6.6 billion fundraise 2) A look at the investors, including Softbank, Tiger Global, Cathie Wood, and Altimeter 3) Will OpenAI need to raise again shortly? 4) Is an IPO next? 5) Investors can get their money back if OpenAI doesn't convert to a standard for profit company 6) What's next for OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft? 7) Meta's quiet election 8) Is social media's collision course with politics sad? 9) AI girlfriend apps on the rise 10) AI slop has taken over the internet 11) Ranjan's weird Facebook experience 12) Depression and bewilderment --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here's 40% off for the first year: https://tinyurl.com/bigtechnology Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
Send us a textMiguel Armaza travels to SF for an interview with Rujul Zaparde, CEO & Co-Founder of Zip, a leading SaaS & Fintech platform recently valued at $1.5 Billion that's focused on bringing smarter procurement and spending software for small and large enterprises.Founded in 2020, Zip today serves hundreds of clients, including giants like Snowflake, Coinbase, Reddit, Canva, Databricks, and Discover. Zip has raised $180m in equity from CRV, Y Combinator, TwentyTwo VC, and Tiger Global.We discuss:The strict process and criteria they first used to validate Zip as a potential large business, before getting startedThe importance of moving fast, learning, and iteratingWhy Rujul loves rewarding and promoting talent from within the companyNailing enterprise sales… and a lot more!Want more podcast episodes? Join me and follow Fintech Leaders today on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app for weekly conversations with today's global leaders that will dominate the 21st century in fintech, business, and beyond.Do you prefer a written summary? Check out the Fintech Leaders newsletter and join ~70,000+ readers and listeners worldwide!Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder and General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.Miguel on LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3nKha4ZMiguel on Twitter: https://bit.ly/2Jb5oBcFintech Leaders Newsletter: bit.ly/3jWIp
The First 100 | How Founders Acquired their First 100 Customers | Product-Market Fit
Juan Pablo Ortega is the founder of Yuno, which enables any company to manage all payment methods and fraud providers through a single integration. Yuno has raised to date more than $35 million from notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek Ventures, and Monashees. This is Juan's 2nd startup. Before Yuno, he co-founded on-demand delivery unicorn Rappi (which as of last July was valued at $5.25 billion).Where to find Juan Pablo Ortega:• Website: Yuno | The Go-To for High-performing payments teams• LinkedIn (7) Juan Pablo Ortega | LinkedInWhere to find Hadi Radwan:• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedInIf you like our podcast, please don't forget to subscribe and support us on your favorite podcast players. We also would appreciate your feedback and rating to reach more people.We recently launched our new newsletter, Principles Friday, where I share one principle that can help you in your life or business, one thought-provoking question, and one call to action toward that principle. Please subscribe Here.It is Free and Short (2min).
Send us a textPRE-IPO STOCK FUNDS CLOSING TO NEW INVESTORS ON SEP 13 (NEXT FRIDAY)AG Dillon has seven (7) pre-IPO stock funds closing on Friday, Sep 13. Next Friday. See fund list at www.agdillon.com/product (page 3). Available for purchase at Schwab, Fidelity, or directly at AG Dillon. Email aaron.dillon@agdillon.com to investSubscribe to AG Dillon Pre-IPO Stock Research at agdillon.com/subscribe;- Wednesday = secondary market valuations, revenue multiples, performance, index fact sheets- Saturdays = pre-IPO news and insights, webinar replays00:07 | Safe Superintelligence Raises $1B for new AI LLM- AI venture focused on creating safe AI models- Co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy- Raised $1B in May 2024 from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital- Offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv- For-profit entity addressing AI safety00:43 | OpenAI Hits 200M Weekly Active Users for ChatGPT- AI large language model business- ChatGPT now has 200M weekly active users, doubling since Nov 2023- 1M paid corporate users, up from 600K in April 2024- Expected to generate $2B annually from $20/month premium subscriptions- 50% of corporate users are in the U.S.; strong presence in Germany, Japan, U.K.- Secondary market valuation: $103.8B (+20.7% vs Apr 2024 round)01:33 | Salesforce Acquires Own Company for $1.9B- Data management firm specializing in data backup and recovery- Acquired by Salesforce for $1.9B in cash- Previously valued at $3.35B in Aug 2021- 7,000 customers; raised $507.3M from Tiger Global and Salesforce Ventures- Global data backup market valued at $12.9B in 2023, growing at a 10.9% CAGR02:14 | ByteDance Raises $600M for Dongchedi, Valued at $3B- Chinese parent company of TikTok- Raising $600M for car trading platform Dongchedi- Dongchedi boasts 35.7M monthly active users- Competing with platforms like Autohome and Bitauto- Secondary market valuation: $300B (+11.8% vs Dec 2023 round)03:00 | Anthropic's Claude AI Powers New Amazon Alexa- Amazon to release new Alexa powered by Anthropic's Claude AI in October- Paid version to cost $5-$10/month; current version remains free- Estimated $600M in annual sales if 10% of Alexa's 100M users opt for the paid version- Anthropic has a $23.6B secondary market valuation (+31.4% vs Jan 2024 round)03:49 | xAI's Colossus System Becomes Most Powerful AI Trainer- AI large language model business by Elon Musk- Colossus built with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in 122 days, doubling to 200,000 GPUs- Phase 1 cost estimated at $2B, located in Memphis- Colossus will consume 150 megawatts of power and 1M gallons of water daily for cooling- Secondary market valuation: $26.1B (+8.9% vs May 2024 round)04:45 | X Launches Beta Version of TV App for Fire TV and Google TV- Formerly Twitter, now focusing on becoming a "video-first" platform- Launched beta version of TV app for Amazon Fire TV and Google TV- Initial feedback suggests bugs, but fixes are anticipated soon- Aimed at reviving ad revenue and attracting video creators05:26 | Fidelity Cuts X Holdings Valuation by Another 4%- Fidelity reduced X Holdings (formerly Twitter) valuation by 4% in July- Total decrease of 72% since Elon Musk's acquisition in Oct 2022- New valuation implies X shares are worth $15, down from Musk's original $54.20/share- X's total value now approximately $21B06:03 | Pre-IPO Stock Market Weekly Performance06:48 | Pre-IPO Stock Vintage Index Weekly Performance
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
Produced by Foundersuite (www.foundersuite.com), "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders and investors who have raised capital. This episode is with Liza Rodewald of Instant Teams (www.instantteams.com) a talent marketplace that connects companies to military and veteran spouses. In this episode, we discuss the challenges and advantages of being a veteran / ex-military entrepreneur, how she got over 80 warm intros to investors, what it was like pitching Tiger Global, tips for sending monthly investor updates, her advice for military founders and much more. The Company most recently raised a $13 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. Other investors include Plug and Play Tech Center, The Veteran's Fund, Squadra Ventures, Brick Capital Ventures, Blue Tree Fund and Frontier Capital. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $17 Billion since 2016. If you are a startup, create a free account at www.foundersuite.com. If you are a VC or investment banker, check out our new platform, www.fundingstack.com
In this episode, we speak with Amir Nathoo, the Co-founder and Head of Outschool, a community marketplace of live online classes for kids. In 2015, Amir founded Outschool with Nick Grandy and Mikhail Seregine. The company's mission is to inspire kids to love learning by providing them with innovative learning opportunities outside of the regular classroom. The classes are offered by independent teachers and take place in small-groups over live video chat with assignments and feedback between the live sessions. Outschool has raised over $240 million from notable investors including Tiger Global, Coatue, Lightspeed and others. Prior to Outschool, Amir was a product lead for Square Payroll and a software developer for IBM. His passion for writing software started at a young age and he strives to find technological and social levers that can drive positive change in the world. I am your host RJ Lumba. We hope you enjoy the show. If you like the episode click to follow.
On today's Friday news roundup, we just had to talk about AI hardware taking on a new shape with Friend's $99 necklace. The pendant gives you an AI friend to talk to and…that's about it. Friend's pitch is that its wearable can help combat loneliness, but other AI hardware products that have come to market lately – like Humane's Ai Pin and Rabbit's r1 – have fallen short of expectations. Even OpenAI, the leader in the space, has come out later than expected with its hyper realistic AI assistant, and only today to a small “alpha group” of users, so it's hard to assess the product's capabilities. On the other side of the AI coin is, sadly, deepfakes and hallucinations. The team touched on this topic, noting how Meta's AI assistant hallucinated when it said that there was no assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump. Rebecca asked Devin Coldewey if he thought AI companies should take greater care to block users from asking questions about sensitive topics until they could solve for hallucinations, and if they should block users from making deepfakes about certain A-list people, particularly during an election year. His answer? Yes, but it's probably not as easy as it sounds.For our deals of the week, Kirsten kicked things off with Mary Ann's coverage of FranShares, a Chicago-based startup that lets people invest in franchise businesses starting with as little as $500 with a goal of providing passive income and portfolio diversification. Apparently, a lot of Gen Z and Millennials are investing in franchises through this platform, which just raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Chicago Ventures with participation from The Pitch Fund and Litquidity Ventures. Kirsten asked Rebecca if she, as a Millennial, would invest in a franchise, and her answer may surprise you.Kirsten and Rebecca also talked about Kennet of London, a 25-year-old growth equity investor that just raised $287 million for its largest fund to date, and it's a growth fund. Kennet's approach is interesting because they focus on B2B SaaS companies that are founder owned and bootstrapped, and thus potentially more capital efficient. Finally, the team discussed VC movings and shakings. Specifically, Alex Cook, a former partner at Tiger Global who oversaw some of its largest fintech investments and India deals, has left the firm after nearly seven years. Cook is the latest VC to leave a firm before the fund closed and he could see a return on investment. There must be something in the water. We had a lot of fun this episode, so give it a listen!Equity is TechCrunch's flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
Nishit had a front-row seat to the growth of the Indian Startup ecosystem. And often times he was in the driver's seat as well.Nishit Garg, a partner at RTP Global, shares his experiences from his early days at Flipkart, discussing the pivotal 0-1 journey and key projects that shaped his career. He provides a behind-the-scenes look at how Tiger Global revolutionized the Indian startup ecosystem and his reasons for joining RTP Global.We also cover the scaling challenges for Indian startups, staying relevant in a rapidly evolving market, the ability to sell and the surprising nature of Indian markets.Timestamps:00:00 - Introduction01:07 - Nishit's Entry in The Startup World07:55 - The 0-1 Journey at Flipkart09:34 - How Tiger Global Changed the Indian Startup World10:07 - Why Nishit Joined RTP Global17:46 - Why India Surprises Everyone?24:06 - The Right to Win For VCs26:41 - Venture Capital is About Power Law35:33 - Challenges & Opportunities For Indian Founders40:09 - Scaling Challenges for Indian Startups47:48 - Growth is The Only Way to Stay Relevant57:31 - Future of Indian Startup Ecosystem___________________________________Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journeys from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys. Hence was born The Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes. We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings. __________________________________Visit our Website: https://neon.fund/Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheNeonShowwFollow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/__________________________________*Sponsor Shout Out*Looking to build a differentiated tech startup with a 10X better solution? Prime is the high conviction, high support investor you need. With its fourth fund of $120M, Prime actively works with star teams to accelerate building great companies.To know more, visit https://primevp.in/
Join us as we talk to Uttam Digga, the Co-founder & CEO of Porter about their story. Uttam completed his integrated MSc in Economics at IIT Kharagpur in 2012. Following that, he held positions as an Analyst at both HSBC and J.P. Morgan before launching Porter in 2014.
When it comes to building a billion-dollar company, doing it once might be considered luck, but doing it twice is a testament to skill and perseverance. Sami Inkinen, the entrepreneur behind two successful ventures, shares his journey from humble beginnings on a Finnish farm to founding companies like Trulia and Virta Health. Sami has raised funding for Virta Health from top-tier investors like Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, and Caffeinated Capital.
We are honored to be starting this 2024 Masterclass edition with an amazing guest to talk about a topic every founder wants to hear about: How to Build your Fundraising Strategy. Francesco Simoneschi is the Founder and CEO of TrueLayer, Europe's leading open banking platform. TrueLayer developed an open banking payments network that allows banking institutions such as Revolut and companies such as Williams Hill (the betting site) to power faster and safer online payments. Founded in 2016, TrueLayer is backed by a stellar roster of investors including Stripe, Tiger Global, Connect Ventures and Anthemis. It has received $272m of funding in total, with its latest $130m round in 2021 valuing the business at $1bn. Francesco is also an investor himself. Before founding TrueLayer he helped create an angel fund called Mission and Market. This Masterclass was powered by BCG and Bizplace. Unlocking the potential of those who advance the world is crucial for BCG, and this purpose has been leading the firm for 60 years now. Over that time BCG has supported companies and organizations in their process of growth and strategic transformation. BCG supports start-ups and scale ups with the same care, to help them scale faster. If you're a founder and are interested in working with them you can email MILtheseeds@bcg.com. BizPlace is a boutique financial consultancy specializing in the VC world. Since 2017, it has been supporting innovative startups and SMEs, offering entrepreneurs strategic consulting services, fundraising, and facilitated finance to enhance and grow their business ideas. BizPlace positions itself as a catalyst in the growing Italian VC ecosystem. If you are a founder or an investor interested in collaborating with them, you can reach them at info@bizplace.it. Instagram @madeit.podcastLinkedIn @madeitpodcast
Alon is the Founder and General Partner of RE Angels, a real estate technology angel fund solely composed of real estate experts with deep and diverse industry expertise focused on early stage startups. Alon also owns and manages several multifamily portfolios throughout the southeast (FL, NC & VA). Alon was the co-founder and managing partner of DTI Holdings, a vertically-integrated private equity real estate fund, which was established in early 2017 and successfully divested in 2021 - achieving 20% IRR. Previously, as a senior investment manager at MIO Partners, McKinsey & Company's Investment Office. Prior to MIO Partners, Alon worked as a strategic consultant for McKinsey & Company, managing private equity client engagements.(0:32) - RE Angels & Alon's origin story(2:27) - Is Real Estate slow to adopt tech(4:49) - Early-stage Proptech VC criteria(10:02) - Proptech VC challenges(13:25) - RE Angels investment criteria(17:49) - Feature: Housing Trust Silicon Valley(19:00) - RE Angels Real Estate Tech framework(25:00) - Driving behavioral change through innovation(30:24) - Feature: Blueprint Vegas - The Future of Real Estate Is Here. Tangent listeners get a $300 discount at BlueprintVegas.com/Tangent(31:16) - RE Angels PortCo's: Paraspot.AI (AI-powered inspections for real estate) & Waltz (Enabling foreign investors to invest in US Real Estate) (39:08) - Collaboration Superpower: Warren Buffett
The Twenty Minute VC: Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
Basti Lehmann is the co-founder and former CEO of Postmates, the on-demand delivery service that raised over $900M from the likes of Tiger Global, Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Andreesen Horowitz. Following Uber's $2.65BN acquisition in 2020, Basti founded TipTop, a platform for fast tech sales which Marc Andreesen led the $20M seed round for. In Today's Episode with Basti Lehmann We Discuss: From US Immigrant to Billion Dollar Founder How did Basti start his career hacking AT&T? How did early hardships shape Basti's work ethic? What were Basti's biggest challenges building Postmates? Lessons from Raising $900M How did Basti raise $20M from Marc Andreesen? How does Basti select which VCs to work with? Why does Basti think 99% of VCs are sheep? Why does Basti think great VCs add no value? Why does Basti think having to educate investors is a massive red flag? Selling Postmates for $2.65BN Why did Basti sell Postmates to Uber? How did the acquisition happen? Was there anything Basti would have done differently? What does Basti think makes Dara Khosrowshahi a great CEO? What is Basti's biggest advice to founders on acquisitions? Future of AI: Startups or Incumbents? What does Basti think is the biggest challenge of LLMs today? Why does Basti think inference computing will be the future of AI? Why does Basti think incumbents can be replaced? Why does Basti think the biggest companies are being born today?
(0:00) Chamath's big poker trip (4:32) Addressing the "in the arena" comments (7:16) Biden administration targets Elon's businesses (21:58) Tiger Global claims disgruntled ex-employee circulated fake hit piece (27:51) BRICS adds six new members, Sacks breaks down some potential advantages of the new BRICS (40:46) BRICS ultimate goals, India's key position (51:54) How energy independence plays into the future geopolitical order (1:00:22) All-In Summit party talk! Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1693992134796603477 https://twitter.com/tomosman/status/1696929638935634240 https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1697072553775501661 https://www.newsweek.com/joe-bidens-robert-peters-pseudonym-under-scrutiny-gop-probes-emails-1820709 https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-spacex-discriminating-against-asylees-and-refugees-hiring https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1695073336483832007 https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/1579981/download https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/elon-musk-biden-foreign-business-relations/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/08/26/oliver-anthony-republican-debate-rich-men https://www.thefp.com/p/oliver-anthony-interview-rich-men-north-richmond https://www.foxnews.com/video/6335645970112 https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/08/25/tiger-global-blames-disgruntled-formeremployee-for-mystery-memo-sent-to-journalists https://www.reuters.com/world/brics-poised-invite-new-members-join-bloc-sources-2023-08-24 https://www.ft.com/content/4ff06aa6-b1bf-4e08-9b8d-aa42ee240c95 https://www.ft.com/content/669260a5-82a5-4e7a-9bbf-4f41c54a6143 https://www.voanews.com/a/india-remains-steadfast-in-partnership-with-russia/6883794.html https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-will-buy-oil-all-sources-who-offer-lowest-possible-prices-oil-minister-2023-08-30 https://www.budd.senate.gov/press-releases/budd-coons-lead-bipartisan-coalition-supporting-nuclear-energy https://twitter.com/chamath/status/1696295679344459807 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/06/02/united-states-ukraine-trust-developing-nations