We take the Internet for granted. We take the commercial Internet for granted. What we don’t appreciate is how far we have come from where it all started. Here is a long watch — a video that captures the Internet’s journey and how it got to today. This is the coffee break you need.
VC Elements is a brand new channel brought to you by Visual Capitalist which uses data-driven visuals to bridge the gap between the global trends shaping our future and the raw materials powering them.
In particular, we’ll be unearthing the following trends: Markets, Energy, Technology, Urbanization, Electrification.
Previous
Next
The channel will look at the untapped potential of the material world, specifically looking at:
Investment.
We’ll shine a light on the investment opportunities surrounding this space.
Dependency.
Everything we own is either grown or mined. Raw materials are at the core of our day to day lives, but how many of us actually know where these everyday objects come from?
Scarcity.
Natural resources are the backbone of the industrial economy, but the current rate of consumption is putting increased pressure on them.
Efficiency.
The world will need to invest $240 billion over the next five years to meet growing metals demand alone. We will create educational content, examining the latest sustainable technologies, and the raw materials powering them.
What content can I expect?
Below are some of the pieces recently published on the channel covering topics including markets, technology, energy and urbanization.
Previous
Next
This new series focuses on successful women in VC and rising stars who are making a big impact as investors and who are making a making positive impact on the venture ecosystem. For this edition, we spoke with Carmen Palafox, Managing Partner at MiLA Capital. Carmen shares details on her VC career, her work with All Raise and Latinx VC, and more!
Tell us about your career journey into venture capital.
At Berkeley-Haas I was immersed in the Bay Area tech ecosystem soon after starting the Executive MBA program in 2012. Early on we had off-the-record meetings with founders of startups such as Quantum Scape, CloudFlare, and The RealReal. We went inside Facebook, Google, and Airbnb, and learned about the job from pioneering venture capitalists. I was blown away by the potential for exponential impact and the fast pace of business.
Venture capital was fairly new to me in 2012. The ecosystem in Los Angeles at that time was nascent. Snap Chat and the Honest Company were less than one year old but public and private interest in supporting startups was building. In 2015, after graduating from Haas I wanted to break into Los Angeles venture and help develop the ecosystem. I joined the founding team of MiLA Capital to put LA on the map for hardware tech. Our team invested in 22 hardware companies across many industries including LA-based Dash Systems, Emerge, FitGuard, Rufus, Thesis, Acqubit, and more.
What are you most proud of so far in (Read more...)
Fast-growing fintech Pipe has raised another round of funding at a $2 billion valuation, just weeks after raising $50M in growth funding, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Although the round is still ongoing, Pipe has reportedly raised $150 million in a “massively oversubscribed” round led by Baltimore, Md.-based Greenspring Associates. While the company has signed a term sheet, more money could still come in, according to the source. Both new and existing investors have participated in the fundraise.
The increase in valuation is “a significant step up” from the company’s last raise. Pipe — which only launched its platform last June — has declined to comment on the deal.
A little over one year ago, Pipe raised a $6 million seed round led by Craft Ventures to help it pursue its mission of giving SaaS companies a funding alternative outside of equity or venture debt.
The buzzy startup’s goal with the money was to give SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. (Pipe describes its buy-side participants as “a vetted group of financial institutions and banks.”)
Just a few weeks ago, Miami-based Pipe announced a new raise — $50 million in “strategic equity funding” from a slew of high-profile investors. Siemens’ Next47 and Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Group co-led the round, which also included participation from Shopify, Slack, HubSpot, Okta, Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya, Marc Benioff, (Read more...)
The a16z Marketplace 100 series explores the startups and trends behind largest and fastest-growing marketplace companies. See the complete ranking at a16z.com/marketplace-100.
For marketplaces, “owning demand” is the surest path to sustainable growth. In practice, that means users come …
The post Marketplace Supply Strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
The next big social network will likely emerge from games.
People of all ages are increasingly spending more and more time with friends in virtual worlds. Games have huge advantages over static websites or apps in kindling social connections. Built …
The post Investing in Lowkey appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.
Meet Leeway, a French startup that is building an end-to-end software-as-a-service solution for your contracts. Leeway lets you centralize all your contracts in a single repository, go through multiple negotiation steps and trigger a DocuSign event for the signature.
The company raised a $4.2 million seed round from HenQ, Kima Ventures as well as several business angels, such as the founders of Algolia, Eventbrite, Spendesk, MeilleursAgents, Livestorm and Luko.
If you’re working for the legal department of your company, you’re probably working with multiple tools. Chances are you’re using Microsoft Word to write a contract, a cloud service to store and share the contract with your teammates and business partners, an e-signature and archival service.
Leeway is optimizing this worklfow at every step. First, you can store all your contracts on Leeway. In addition to making it easier to find a contract later down the road, you can get reminders when a contract is about to expire so that you can renew a contract.
Second, you can edit your contract from Leeway directly. For instance, a manager can review a contract and write changes in Leeway’s interface. The employee can then start a revision and save a new version of the contract.
After that, you can send the contract from the same interface. Administrators can set up approval workflows so that several people need to approve a contract before it is signed. As everything is centralized, you can get an overview of all your contracts that are currently in (Read more...)
We can keep on making progress
Brett: Eddington’s experiment is an excellent example of what’s called a crucial test, which is sort of the pinnacle of what science is all about.
If we do a test and it doesn’t agree with a particular theory that we have, that’s problematic. But that doesn’t mean that it refutes the theory. If you were to refute the only theory that you have, where do you jump to? You don’t have any alternative.
If we were to do a scientific test tomorrow and it was inconsistent with the theory of general relativity, then what? There is no alternative to general relativity. In fact, there have been experiments over the years that seem to have been inconsistent with general relativity. Guess what? They’ve all turned out to be faulty. If you had to choose between whether or not general relativity has been refuted by your test or your test is flawed, go with the fact that your test is flawed.
In the case of Eddington’s experiment, we had two viable theories for gravity. We had Newton’s theory of universal gravitation on the one hand and we had Einstein’s general theory of relativity on the other.
The experiment you described of how much the light bends during a solar eclipse is the correct way of describing what happened. It is not that we showed that general relativity was correct in some final sense; rather, we refuted Newton’s theory of gravitation. Newton’s theory was ruled out because (Read more...)