PIN'd

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
October 13, 2023

Welcome to PIN’d - our weekly newsletter where we pin (lol, bear with us) the most important tech/startup news of the week for aspiring angels, vc’s, startup investors, founders, etc. Expect a new weekly roundup from us every Friday morning!

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📰 This week’s best news

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 54, which will require venture capital firms in the state to annually report the diversity of the founders they are backing. This is the United States’ first piece of legislation that aims to increase diversity within the venture capital landscape. The law will go into effect on March 1, 2025.

Atlassian announced it has agreed to acquire privately held video messaging platform Loom for about $975 million, beefing up its team collaboration tools to tap into resilient demand fueled by the adoption of hybrid work. The acquisition of Loom, which has more than 25 million users globally, will enable customers communicate and collaborate more effectively.

Sony Group announced today that it has established Sony Innovation Fund: Africa as an initiative to support the growth of the entertainment businesses in Africa. It will invest in seed to early-stage start-ups in the entertainment industry in Africa, including start-ups in the gaming, music, movie and content distribution sectors. Sony is initially allocating $10 million towards such investments.

CEO Garry Tan is bringing aboard some new lieutenants to help him run the sprawling organization. Earlier this week, Luther Lowe, a Washington, D.C.-based, 15-year veteran of Yelp who spent his last five years with the company focused on public policy, announced on Twitter/X that he just joined the accelerator. Y Combinator is gearing up to announce three other recruits, all of them YC alums: Tyler Bosmeny, Nate Smith and Pete Koomen.

Kaszek Ventures, the largest venture capital firm based in Latin America, is sitting on $1 billion it raised early this year as it waits for new deals to materialize and for more mature companies to run low on cash and potentially accept new valuations.

Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director of venture capital firm General Catalyst, and Dr. Marc Harrison, former CEO of Intermountain Health, announced the formation of a new business venture owned by General Catalyst dubbed the Health Assurance Transformation Corporation (HATCo) that will see Harrison as its CEO. They plan to buy a health system that will put technology at the forefront of healthcare prevention and delivery and will run through a value-based care model.


💰 Funding announcement highlights

General Catalyst led a $3.5 million seed round in Ostium Labs, creators of a decentralised non-custodial perpetuals exchange for real-world assets. The fresh funding will fuel the launch of Ostium Protocol, enabling traders to seamlessly gain price exposure to a variety of asset classes previously unavailable on-chain.

Accel led a $21 million investment in Lottie, an end-to-end marketplace for the care home industry. With another $21 million in the bank, taking its total funding to $31 million to date, the team plans to double its headcount to more than 100 by the end of next year as it builds out its tech.

OpenAI’s Startup Fund led an $8 million seed round in Anysphere, a startup building what it describes as an “AI-native” software development environment called Cursor. The new cash will be put toward hiring and supporting Anysphere’s AI and machine learning research.

Menlo Ventures co-led a $25 million Series A round in Cleanlab, a two-year-old startup co-founded by three MIT PhDs, aiming to fix data problems in AI models. Other investors included TQ Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Databricks Ventures.

Mana.bio, a biotechnology company working on programmable drug delivery, has raised $19.5 million in a seed financing round to advance the development of its AI-based lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery platform. The seed financing round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health, Base4 Capital, NFX, Technion, and LionBird.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Brought to you by none other than the PIN team. ❤️ We know many people are wondering about the difference between syndicates, solo angel investing, VC funds, and investing through PIN. In this article we break down the challenges of starting a fund, why investing in alumni networks is an asset everyone should be tapping into, and how PIN makes it super easy to invest in the best startups.

How do you know if a task is real work or “fake” work — the stuff that feels like work, but isn’t actually moving your startup forward? YC's Group Partners talk about productivity in the latest episode of Office Hours. They share what works for the founders they help, and, perhaps more importantly, what doesn’t.

Go back in time and check out what a study from 1984 says about the habits of Silicon Valley’s capital class. Michael Gorman of McKinsey and William Sahlman of Harvard Business School mailed a three-page survey to 100 venture capital investors. The findings portray a very different industry than the one we’re familiar with today. A smaller one, but also a more focused and cutthroat one.

Valuing a startup is very different than valuing an established company. Quantitative analysis and financial projections don’t always predict the future success of the early stage startup which is why some angel investors put greater value in the entrepreneur and management team. Learn about three pre-money valuation methodologies that are often used by angel investors.

A snippet of Peter Thiel on Auren Hoffman’s podcast and their discussion on the state of the European and US startup economy. A total of seventeen companies worth $100 billion have been founded since 1990, eleven of those in the U.S., six in China, and none in Europe. However, Europe currently has the highest density of AI talent, the highest share of cited research publications, and a large student demographic studying computer science and engineering. So is Europe just getting started?

💪 Tech Mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Hyperscience

⭐ Favorite rising star: Orgspace

🤑 Total money raised by the SoundCloud Mafia: $108 million

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

The latest addition is the SoundCloud Mafia. Former employees of SoundCloud have raised a total of $108 million and founded 25 companies. AI, SaaS and Web3 are the industries that the most startups have been founded in by former employees. The SoundCloud Mafia ranks on the #41st spot on our leaderboard.

PS: Are you a SoundCloud employee/alum interested in getting your community together to invest in the community (and earn carry/other benefits along the way)? Or are you a member of another community that you think would make for an amazing startup investment community? 😉

Learn more about us and sign up for the waitlist here.

📌 PIN tweet of the week

🤝 Inside the Deal

Unlike many startups that seek multiple investors to raise capital, WhatsApp took a different path. They decided to work with a single VC firm from the very start.‍ In 2011, Sequoia Capital made a game-changing move by investing $8 million in a relatively obscure messaging app called WhatsApp.

Even as WhatsApp scaled to hundreds of millions of users with minimal revenue, Sequoia remained the sole investor, contributing an additional $52 million in July 2013 when WhatsApp was valued at $1.5 billion.

 


💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

Looking to get into VC? Below are this week’s curated VC job openings.

Flashpoint is looking for an Investment Analyst.

Griffin Gaming Partners is looking for a Senior Fund Accountant.

Techstars is looking for a Fund Controller.

Moxxie is looking for an Investor.

Futuraiser is looking for a VC Intern.

📠 Fun fact of the week

Deel is the fastest-growing SaaS startup in history, reaching $100M in annual revenue in just 18 months, beating the likes of Slack and many other great companies. It hired over 1,200 people from around the world in less than a year. The company is dominating a $30 billion market, solving the complex problem of onboarding and paying international contractors.

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