#146 Best CFO Reads for VC GPs & LPs

Q2 marches on! Appreciate the new format feedback as we power through busy season! We’ve aggregated some of the best VC GP / CFO reads we’ve seen recently - enjoy!

👋 Hi, I’m Doug! Welcome to @TheFundCFO crew! Every Tuesday/Thursday, we publish VC/CFO insights that matter - highlights from notable VC GPs, LPs, and CFOs/finance pros. Check out our VC Fund Playbooks, Models, Budgets, & Compliance Checklists @ Streamlined.Fund! Love what we’re doing? Consider upgrading to paid for deeper dives on Thursdays (most paid subscribers expense these insights!).

“Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.” -Harry S. Truman

Picture of the Day: Amen Corner at Augusta National

Top Reads of Recent History, VC CFO Style

• #142 VC Market Maps & Useful Data

• #141 VC is the Best (Asset Class) if You Choose Wisely

• #140 RTF (Return The Fund) Math for VCs

• #137 The Ides of March -> VC CFO Deadlines

• #135 Regulatory for VC Funds, CFO Edition

• #130 Top Takes of 2024 (So Far) & Takeaways

• #123 Q4 Valuations + Real Policy Examples (Download)

• #119 The Ultimate PE/VC Fund Checklist for Year-End Finance & Compliance

• A Crowdsourced List of Books and Resources for New Venture Capitalists

Best Recent Reads We’ve Seen on the Web

• "Chips and Chicks" - All-Level Poker Series in London (Jamesin Seidel)

• Sourcery → Global Risks, TSMC, Rocketships (Molly O’Shea)

• Confluence VC: YC Demo Day (Clay Norris)

• The race to lead AI has become a hunt for new and growing amounts of training data. OpenAI, Google and Meta ignored corporate policies, altered their own rules and discussed skirting copyright law as they sought online information to train their newest AI models. In a violation of YouTube’s policies, an OpenAI team transcribed more than a million hours of videos to train its latest model GPT-4. Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, discussed using copyrighted data from the internet on the grounds that negotiating licenses with publishers would take too long. And last year, Google broadened its terms of service to allow the company to tap publicly available Google Docs, restaurant reviews on Google Maps and other internal information for training data. (via Chamath Palihapitiya)

• The VC Corner (Ruben Dominguez Ibar): Web3 Fundamentals 📚 [Bertelsmann Investments, Martin El-Khouri, Celine Schröder]

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words - Insightful Images

Priced seed rounds got bigger over the past two years, but every other round shrunk. Where will all the dry powder go if round sizes remain smaller? -Peter Walker

Source: PitchBook; Chart: Axios Visuals (via Molly O’Shea)

Venture capitalists disbursed $36.6B into 2,882 U.S. startups during the first quarter of 2024, per an early look at the upcoming PitchBook/NVCA Venture Monitor.

• That's a a 9% dip from the prior quarter and a whopping 29% decline from one year earlier.

• It was the slowest first quarter for U.S. venture deals since 2018.

36 Hours in the Gundo, Tech's Latest Startup Haven. The Information (Paid).

That’s all for today folks! Thanks for your support and spreading the word! Share this on Twitter or LinkedIn to help grow “the crew!”