Forgepoint Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our mission is to ensure a safer and more prosperous world by investing in the innovators shaping and securing our digital future. Founded in 2015, Forgepoint manages $770M across 2 funds and draws upon one of the largest networks of trusted industry experts and customers to support entrepreneurs with strategic guidance and connections.
Opportunity: We are actively seeking an Associate to join our team in the San Francisco Bay Area. The role will primarily focus on executing new investments, supporting portfolio companies post-investment, and developing investment theses / themes / market maps. We expect the Associate to be an active voice in all investment and fund-level discussions. Importantly, the role is designed for upward mobility.
Responsibilities:
Effectively evaluate and analyze new investment opportunities
Conduct comprehensive due diligence on new investments
Build and maintain financial models and conduct valuation analyses
Ongoing monitoring and support of portfolio companies
Develop investment theses, themes, and market maps based on in-depth research
Perform various outbound marketing and deal sourcing activities, which may include email outreach, attending conferences, and interfacing with prospective entrepreneurs or co-investors
Perform other responsibilities related to executing the investment mandate of the fund
Requirements:
Undergraduate degree
Minimum 2-years of investment, investment banking, or consulting experience
Excellent writing, communication, presentation, and analytical skills
Demonstrable ability to review and articulate investments
Institutional Venture Partners (“IVP”) is among the most storied venture firms in the world. An enduring 40-year partnership with a laser-focus on growth, IVP has raised sixteen venture funds and invested in over 400 companies, 130 of which have gone on to complete successful IPOs. IVP closed its $1.8 billion IVP Fund XVII in 2021 and exhibited outstanding investment performance with an IRR of 43.1%. IVP pursues investments in growing technology companies and typically invests $10- $100 million in each portfolio company. IVP is committed to being a long-term, experienced and dedicated partner to management teams, helping portfolio companies develop strategy, recruit talented executives, improve financial operations and establish strategic partnerships. IVP’s limited partners include pension funds, university endowments, foundations, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds. IVP’s investments include Attentive, Casper, Coinbase, Compass, Crowdstrike (CRWD), Discord, Dropbox (DBX), Figma, Github (MSFT), Glossier, Hopin, LegalZoom, Mindbody (MB), Pure Storage (PSTG), Rubrik, Slack (WORK), Snap (SNAP), and Superhuman, among many others.
Role Description
IVP is recruiting a skilled and motivated communications professional who wants to contribute meaningfully to the team and grow in their career. As Head of Communications, you will be a member of the IVP Marketing and Communications team and focus on public relations and social media. Our team’s collective goal is to demonstrate what makes IVP special and increase our standing in the minds of CEOs/Founders, limited partners, and other key constituents. You will report directly to Blair Shane, CMO of IVP, and work closely with the Heads of (Read more...)
Institutional Venture Partners (“IVP”) is among the most storied venture firms in the world. An enduring 40‐year partnership with a laser focus on growth, IVP has raised sixteen venture funds and invested in over 400 companies, 130 of which have gone on to complete successful IPOs. IVP closed its $1.8 billion IVP Fund XVII in 2021 and exhibited outstanding investment performance with an IRR of 43.1%. IVP pursues investments in growing technology companies and typically invests $10‐ $100 million in each portfolio company. IVP is committed to being a long‐term, experienced and dedicated partnerto management teams, helping portfolio companies develop strategy, recruit talented executives, improve financial operations and establish strategic partnerships. IVP’s limited partners include pension funds, university endowments, foundations, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds. IVP’s investments include Attentive, Casper, Coinbase, Compass, Crowdstrike (CRWD), Discord, Dropbox (DBX), Figma, Github (MSFT), Glossier, Hopin, LegalZoom, Mindbody (MB), Pure Storage (PSTG), Rubrik, Slack (WORK), Snap (SNAP), and Superhuman, among many others.
Role Description
IVP is recruiting an exceptional Director of Content to build our content strategy, with the goal of supercharging our efforts to reach founders and CEOs of breakout companies on the path to becoming market leaders. In this role, you will oversee the firm’s content strategy, develop the content, and direct others (contractors, agencies). You will work with IVP investors firsthand to convey their segment and functional expertise as well as their authentic personality while reinforcing IVP tone. In doing so, you will help IVP reinvigorate its brand and make (Read more...)
Institutional investors are relying more on ETFs during periods of severe volatility—but how exactly is this vehicle being used within their broader portfolios?
In this infographic from iShares, we highlight their three primary use cases for ETFs. It’s the third of a five-part series covering key insights from the ETF Snapshot, a comprehensive report on how institutional investors manage volatility.
The Methodology
To assess how institutional investors navigated this volatility, Institutional Investor published a report in 2021 based on a survey of 766 decision makers. Respondents were from various types of organizations, firm sizes, and regions.
For instance, here is how responses broke down by location:
70% of respondents (n=534) use ETFs when moving from one manager to another. The following table provides a breakdown of regional results.
Region
% of respondents listing “transition management” as an ETF use case
Latin America
81%
EMEA*
73%
North America
69%
Asia-Pacific
55%
Average
70%
*EMEA includes Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Institutional investors cited the extra utility that ETFs provide, namely in terms of maintaining beta exposure (the portion of return that can be attributed to the overall market) and minimizing performance drag (the negative effect of fees on performance).
In other words, using relatively low cost ETFs during transitions can enable an institutional investor to maintain market exposure with minimal fees.
ETF Use Case #2: Tactical Adjustments
61% of respondents (n=468) use ETFs to make tactical adjustments within their portfolios. The following table provides a breakdown of regional results.
Region
% of respondents listing “tactical adjustments” as an ETF use case
Latin America
69%
EMEA
69%
North America
59%
Asia-Pacific
49%
Average
61%
Tactical asset allocation refers to shifts in the portfolio’s asset mix that are intended to take advantage of market pricing anomalies or strong sectors. Tactical adjustments are temporary, and a manager will eventually bring the portfolio back to its strategic asset mix after the achieving their desired results.
When asked which types of ETFs are suitable for implementing tactical adjustments, 66% responded with fixed income, 57% responded with equities, and 34% responded with factor/smart beta ETFs.
ETF Use Case #3: Liquidity Management
The third most common ETF use case (n=394) was liquidity management. See below for a breakdown of regional results.
Region
% of respondents listing “liquidity management” as an ETF use case
North America
84%
Latin America
55%
EMEA
38%
Asia-Pacific
15%
Average
52%
When asked which types of ETFs are suitable for managing portfolio liquidity, 83% responded with fixed income, 27% responded with equities, and 22% responded with factor/smart beta ETFs. This is likely due to the events of 2020, where panic over the initial outbreak of COVID-19 caused bond market liquidity to dry up.
ETFs Continue to Gain Ground
Thanks to their suitability in various use cases, ETFs have quickly become a core component of the institutional investor’s toolkit. In fact, 65% say they will increase their use of ETFs going forward.
Those that didn’t may soon change their minds—experts have predicted more market volatility in 2022 as supply chain issues, inflation, and geopolitical conflicts escalate.
Charted: $5 Trillion in Fossil Fuel Subsidies (2010-2021)
This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email every week.
With energy consumption vital for life and business, governments often look to fossil fuel subsidies to make energy as affordable as possible.
These subsidies artificially reduce the price of fossil fuels and generally take two forms:
Production subsidies occur when governments provide tax cuts or direct payments that reduce the cost of producing coal, oil, or gas.
Consumption subsidies cut fuel prices for the end-user through price controls and other such measures.
Each year, governments around the world pour nearly half a trillion dollars into fossil fuel subsidies. This chart breaks down a decade of fossil fuel consumption subsidies by energy source using data from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Breaking Down Fossil Fuel Consumption Subsidies
Since 2010, governments have spent over $5 trillion in fossil fuel consumption subsidies. The majority of this sum went towards making oil more affordable, as seen below:
I wrote a post recently as to why web3/crypto matter. A logical follow on question is: why aren’t we further along, given that Bitcoin is over ten years old? Part of the answer is that blockchain technology is complex and there is still a lot to figure out. But another part of the answer is that there is a chicken and egg problem to be solved that has echoes of the historic adoption of the web itself.
I remember well discovering the web in a lab at MIT due to the Mosaic web browser showing up on a workstation that I was using for one of my stats classes. But at home people faced a conundrum. They had heard of the web but how could they get on it? For that they needed a web browser and where was that going to come from? Today there isn’t a phone or laptop or desktop that doesn’t ship with one or more browsers pre-installed, so it is easy to forget this initial problem. Most people had never used something like FTP and so asking them to figure out how to do so in order to download a browser was a non-starter.
As it turned out there were two solutions to this problem. The first was AOL mailing CDs to pretty much everyone. That of course was aimed at keeping people inside AOL’s walled garden, but AOL software did include a web browser. The more important solution, however, was Microsoft bundling Internet (Read more...)
As a reminder, Marketsmith (by Investor’s Business Daily) is now a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from Marketsmith. They are offering my readers a three week trial for $19.95. Click this link if you would like to try it out.
The Nasdaq 100 had a 7% range last week but it finished flat. Correlations have been extremely high as they usually are during corrections or bear markets. Lately, stocks have been moving in tandem regardless of fundamentals or sector belonging. Just look at the intraday charts on Friday – everything is looking very similar.
Unless your view is longer-term and you are slowly accumulating an index or a strong business at progressively lower prices, the most common-sense way to make money in this environment is intraday trading. This type of market behavior usually doesn’t last too long, except if it’s a new long bear market which is clear only in hindsight. Eventually, things calm down and multi-day (Read more...)
