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The Daily Bolster

by Fred Wilson
This post is by Fred Wilson from AVC

USV is an investor in Bolster, a marketplace for fractional and full-time executive talent for startups and growth companies.

This week Bolster launched a daily short (5min) podcast and email with actionable insights and advice from founders, operators, and investors. It is called The Daily Bolster.

I did a Daily Bolster episode and it is featured today. I’ve embedded it below and you can watch it here if you are reading AVC via email.

The daily email contains a short pull quote from the daily podcast which in and of itself is quite useful but is also a prompt to spend five minutes and watch or listen to the daily podcast.

I strongly recommend founders and operators in the startup and growth sectors subscribe to the daily email and podcast. You can do that here:

Subscribe to The Daily Bolster Email

Podcast:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on YouTube


USV TEAM POSTS:

Albert Wenger — Mar 26, 2023
Thinking About AI: Part 2 – Structural Risks

Startup Awards Don’t Equal Success

by David Cummings

Last week I was joking to a group that our approach to startup awards at Pardot was straightforward: no award was beneath us. Want to recognize us as a fast growing company? We’ll take it. Want to recognize us as a great place to work? We’ll take it. Want to recognize us as the coolest company between 50 and 200 employees in the Southeast in the marketing technology category with a six letter dot com domain name? We’ll take it.

Startup awards are plentiful and a popular element of the community. Publications use awards as a way to generate content and put on events. Non-profits and community groups use awards as a way to annually celebrate local startups and entrepreneurs. Recognizing success and accomplishments also acts as inspiration for the next generation that want to see their name in lights.

Only, as an entrepreneur, it’s critical to remember that startup awards don’t equal success. With all the challenges that come with entrepreneurship, there’s a strong desire to seek external validation. By winning this award, I must be doing something right. Only, it’s too easy to internalize awards as a credible sign of progress. We won this award therefore our startup is going to succeed is not true.

Awards are fun and exciting.

Awards are not success.

Startup success is only bestowed by customers — not by mentors, investors or media. Customers decide where to spend their budget and whether or not a product is useful. The market decides, not the (Read more...)

The game theory of a bank run, navigating advisor relationships, and bond laddering explained

by MPD
This post is by MPD from @MPD - Medium

Here’s what’s covered on this week’s episode:

  • The fallout from SVB’s closure.
  • Different strategies founders can keep in mind when deciding on where to keep and invest their cash reserves, including bond laddering.
  • Due to the recent events in banking there has been a lot of crypto activity. Brett breaks it down.
  • Startup Tip of the Week: how to navigate advisor relationships

Links:

Listen via your preferred platform here.

*DISCLAIMER*

Interplay Family Office LLC (“Interplay”) is registered as an investment adviser with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or training. Information about the qualifications and business practices of Interplay is available on the SEC’s website at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov._ Interplay only transacts business in states where it is properly registered or is excluded or exempted from registration requirements. Offering of asset management services through Interplay is pursuant to an investment advisory agreement. The views expressed in this podcast/vodcast are subject to change based on market and other conditions. The podcast/vodcast may contain certain statements that may be deemed forward looking statements. Please note that any such statements are not guarantees of any future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected. Any projections, market outlooks, or estimates are based upon certain assumptions and should (Read more...)

Impending Cancellation of Thousands of Startup Credit Lines

by David Cummings

While some of the dust has settled around Silicon Valley Bank’s demise, a number of second and third order effects are still looming. For startup-land, one of the biggest challenges on the horizon is the impending cancellation of startup credit lines. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was the largest provider of debt to startups, and still is as the new bank Silicon Valley Bridge Bank (SVBB). So, if the bank still has $6.7 billion dollars of loans out to startups what’s the problem?

The problem is that the majority of deposits have left the bank and aren’t coming back. Without deposits, the bank can’t lend as much. The bank has to maintain certain capital ratios, and with intense scrutiny, will be more conservative with how it uses deposits to make money. Many startups will still be able to keep a credit line, but it’ll likely be much smaller than in the past.

In addition, startups are difficult to underwrite. While the SVBB staff is being paid 50% more than their normal salary to stay on for 45 days, many will inevitably be let go because the bank has many fewer deposits, so it needs many fewer employees. Once a fair number of employees are let go, the volume of underwriting capacity will decrease, and the bank will opt to focus on the higher quality startups. 

Finally, startups have shown they’ll happily move their deposits anywhere, as opposed to a small business owner that wants to work with the bank that’s in (Read more...)

Banking Madness: A before and after analysis of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, plus what really…

by MPD
This post is by MPD from @MPD - Medium

Banking Madness: A before and after analysis of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, plus what really happened with Silvergate

In the past week three prominent banks closed their doors. On this week’s episode we break down what’s happening.

Links:

Listen via your preferred platform here.

*DISCLAIMER*

Interplay Family Office LLC (“Interplay”) is registered as an investment adviser with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or training. Information about the qualifications and business practices of Interplay is available on the SEC’s website at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov._ Interplay only transacts business in states where it is properly registered or is excluded or exempted from registration requirements. Offering of asset management services through Interplay is pursuant to an investment advisory agreement. The views expressed in this podcast/vodcast are subject to change based on market and other conditions. The podcast/vodcast may contain certain statements that may be deemed forward looking statements. Please note that any such statements are not guarantees of any future performance and actual results or developments may differ materially from those projected. Any projections, market outlooks, or estimates are based upon certain assumptions and should not be construed as indicative of actual events that will occur. Information communicated during the podcast/vodcast does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice but is limited to the dissemination of general market information. A professional adviser (Read more...)

Leading Through Crisis: 96 hours after the fall of SVB

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

On Tuesday, David Cohen (Techstars co-founder/chair) and I did an AMA for Techstars founders about the SVB crisis. The team at Techstars turned it into a podcast for our Give First series.

The teaser from the podcast follows:

The fall of SVB will go down in history as one of those ‘where were you when …’ moments. For David Cohen, he was sitting at a sporting event when his phone began buzzing incessantly. For Brad Feld, he was couch shopping with his wife.

Feld is no stranger to crises and his instincts kicked in quickly.

“I shifted into problem-solving mode,” says Feld.

But then, almost as quickly, the government stepped in and money began flowing. Crisis averted. It was time to reflect.

Listen as Feld and Cohen share insight into what they saw in the VC and startup community, how communication made all the difference and how many came together to support each other.

They also tackle the looming question weighing heavy on founders’ minds: how will this affect the future of startups.

As for the couch? Tune in to find out.

The post Leading Through Crisis: 96 hours after the fall of SVB appeared first on Brad Feld.

Bank Hygiene for Startups

by David Cummings

The last 72 hours has been a whirlwind in startupland. With the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the largest financial institution for startups is no more. SVB worked with half the VC-backed companies in the United States, and according to PitchBook, there are 130,000 such businesses. That’s right, an astounding 65,000 startups are SVB customers. As of Friday morning, the first $250,000 of demand deposits are guaranteed and monies in excess of that are dependent on winding down the bank and not guaranteed. Current rumors range from 50% of deposits will be made available on Monday to takeover by a bigger bank with minimal disruption to deposits. Yet, nothing above the first $250,000 is guaranteed.

Startups that bank with SVB will have a long weekend waiting to see what ultimately is shared on Monday. My guess is that startups will get all their deposits back, but it might take some time to do so depending on whether or not the government steps in.

Now, regardless of being venture backed or an SVB customer, there are a few bank hygiene takeaways for startups:

  • Two Bank Relationships – Treasury management is clearly mission critical to the business. By having standard bank accounts with two different banks, a backup is ready to go in case the primary bank struggles. In addition, it’s valuable to negotiate better rates and terms whereby the banks compete against each other. Just like having geographically independent data centers to host your app for redundancy, do the same (Read more...)

Tax tips for startups, content checkin including our go to sources for news, and indexing against…

by MPD
This post is by MPD from @MPD - Medium

Tax tips for startups, content checkin including our go to sources for news, and indexing against sandbagging

Tax season is upon us so we decided to bring on a guest from the Interplay ecosystem to help break down some must-knows for startups when navigating the process. The guest is Kate Kelly, CEO and Co-Founder of Chelsea Capital. Chelsea Capital is a financial services company, offering alternative financing, accounting, tax, and fractional CFO services. Kate shares some great tax season tips for startups.

Here’s what’s covered during the other partner meeting segments:

  • Mike and I discuss our current content intake and strategies for consuming news.
  • Chris and I chat about the last round of Q4 earnings and how those earnings stacked up against estimates. We also chat about Foxconn’s announcement to open up new plants in India and what that means for China.

Enjoy.

Links:

Listen via your preferred platform here.

*DISCLAIMER*

Interplay Family Office LLC (“Interplay”) is registered as an investment adviser with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). Registration of an investment adviser does not imply any level of skill or training. Information about the qualifications and business practices of Interplay is available on the SEC’s website at www.adviserinfo.sec.gov._ Interplay only transacts business in states where it is properly registered or is excluded or exempted from registration requirements. Offering of asset management services through Interplay is pursuant to an (Read more...)

Gluecon 13: 2023

by Brad Feld
This post is by Brad Feld from Brad Feld

GlueCon will occur for the thirteenth time, on May 24th-25th, in Broomfield, Colorado.

My Foundry partners and I helped Kim and Eric Norlin create Gluecon in 2009 because we saw the need for a developer-focused event to explore emerging technologies around the cloud and APIs. 

The first year that GlueCon occurred, it seemed like nearly every session began with someone defining “what cloud computing is.” In the interim years, dozens of products and startups have launched or used GlueCon as one of the venues for their early premieres. Twilio, Docker, and Kubernetes all appeared on the GlueCon stage long before they were known by the wider tech community. 

GlueCon has always prided itself on being a welcoming community that seeks quality interaction over being lost in a sea of people on an expo floor. We’ve long held GlueCon at the Omni Interlocken — a space that allows the attendees to come together in an informal fashion, making it easy to meet just about anyone you’d like to while at the event. 

It’s always been fun to host a national tech conference in Boulder. In addition to bringing in plenty of people from around the country, we always get focused attendance from a bunch of tech leaders in Boulder and Denver.

Some of this year’s presenters include:

  • KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Kate Holterhoff from Redmonk
  • Adrian Cockcroft, ex-Cloud Architect (Netflix) and VP (AWS)
  • Dormain Drewitz, VP, PagerDuty
  • Alex Williams (interviewing an industry leader) from The NewStack

Topics cover everything from Observability to WebAssembly (Read more...)