#108 Recent VC Headlines, Insights That Matter

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Recent VC Headlines, Insights That Matter

There’s a lot of great content from notable VCs, LPs, and CFOs/finance pros on the internet. Here, we’re focused on pulling out the insights out that really matter, as well as finding the most current content that overlays historical lessons with current market dynamics, which are changing faster than ever.

Today we’re looking back at at some of the most recent VC headlines and given our quick takes, as well as insights from friends of @TheFundCFO Newsletter.

Loom: A $975m “disappointment”? (Confluence.VC Weekly)

Last week, Loom was bought by Atlassian for $975m. It’s life-changing money for everybody involved, and somehow the media is spinning it to look like a negative outcome (look at the headlines here, here, and here).

The tech media continues to be delusional, but that’s not newsworthy. Here are the larger takeaways from this successful exit event. Why it matters:

  • Valuation resets are real

  • Video is the new king of communication

  • Freemium continues to attract legacy SaaS players

Check out the full post at Confluence.VC Weekly (linked here).

Top 10 Trends in Data & AI at the Impact Summit (Tom Tunguz)

Tom Tunguz previewed his top data and AI trends that he’ll share in early November. Last year, he covered the following, and will be sharing a scoreboard on how many of these turned out to be true:

  1. Cloud data warehouses will process 75% of workloads by 2024.

  2. Data workloads segment into in-memory, cloud data warehouse, & cloud data lakes.

  3. Metrics layers unify the data stack.

  4. LLMs change the roles of data engineers.

  5. WASM becomes an essential component of web applications.

  6. Notebooks win 20% of Excel users.

  7. SaaS applications use the cloud data warehouse as a reading & writing database.

  8. Data observability becomes a must-have.

  9. The decade of data continues.

I frequently reference Tom’s work when digging in to company analysis, valuations, and financial forecasts. Check out the full post linked here.

How to build a successful venture fund (Signature Block)

Insights from fund managers that have done it before, read by thousands of investors managing over $30B in AUM. The Weekend Fund continues to deliver via Signature Block. Recently, they shared a deep dive on venture studies and incubations, linked here.

$100B+ of enterprise value created, 800+ venture studios worldwide. Hear from the operators of the top venture studios.

Venture capital, as a model, is being pulled in many directions. One of the directions taking hold: venture studios and incubations. Rising competition and escalating early-stage valuations are contributing to its popularity. As of July 2023, there were 800+ venture studios worldwide. Full post linked here.

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