PIN'd

A newsletter for communities, investors, angels, and founders

Author

Power in Numbers
November 10, 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

IBM announced earlier this week that it is launching a $500 million venture fund to invest in a range of AI companies - from early-stage to hyper-growth startups - focused on accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise.

01 Advisors, an outfit founded in 2018 by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and former Twitter COO and president Adam Bain, locked down $395 million in capital commitments for a third fund based on the traction the team has enjoyed by investing primarily in Series B-stage startups that sell business software and fintech services.

The app will formally shut down the fund — which pays creators with at least 10,000 followers and at least 100,000 views on their videos in the last 30 days — on Dec. 16. The news isn't entirely surprising: When TikTok first launched the Creator Fund in 2020, it said it would only be paying creators for three years.

Meet Grok, the first technology out of Elon Musk’s new AI company, xAI. Grok, the company said, is modeled on “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It is supposed to have “a bit of wit,” “a rebellious streak” and it should answer the “spicy questions” that other AI might dodge.

Dating app Bumble announced a doozy: It’s replacing founder CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd with Slack CEO Lidiane Jones. Jones only started as CEO at Slack last year, replacing another founder CEO, Stewart Butterfield. Jones, whose background includes various roles at Salesforce, Microsoft and Sonos, will be starting at the first of the year.

20VC is back with another offshoot fund called 20GROWTH that grabbed $5 million in capital commitments. Harry Stebbings, who founded 20VC, said that the 20GROWTH fund will be similar to 20SALES in that the fund will write checks of $100,000 and more for pre-seed, seed and Series A companies and won’t do follow-on investments.

Craft Ventures announced the successful closing of $1.32 billion in fresh capital across their two latest funds. Craft Ventures IV ($712 million) is the fourth early-stage fund and Craft Ventures Growth II ($608 million) is the second growth fund. The combination of venture and growth funds will be used to support the most exciting B2B software companies across stages.


💰 Funding announcement highlights

Coperniq, a four-year-old, a startup that makes workflow management software for solar and energy contractors, raised $4 million in seed funding led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator.

Kloudfuse, a data observability platform, emerged from stealth with $23 million in funding, inclusive of a $17 million Series A round led by Newlands with participation from Blumberg Capital, Aspenwood Ventures, High Sage and Exponent.

Risk Ledger, a startup helping customers monitor the security of their supply chains, raised a $7.8 million Series A round led by Mercia Ventures, with participation from Village Global, Seedcamp, Firstminute Capital, Episode 1, and Lifeline Ventures. The company has raised a total of $12 million.

Llama, a smart contract platform, has raised $6 million in seed funding from Founders Fund and Electric Capital, with other investors including Sandeep Nailwal, the co-founder of the Polygon blockchain, and Stani Kulechov, the founder of lending protocol Aave.

EarnBetter, a startup that uses generative AI to reformat resumes, draft cover letters, and provide personalized matches for job seekers, raised a $4.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Abstract Ventures.

📚 Interesting reads of the week

Shout out to Alex Pattis and team for putting together this interesting piece on venture capital scouts. It covers everything about the history of VC scouts, how to get started as a scout, how SPVs and VCs leverage scouts, and a few inspirational scout stories!

Many of you have probably seen the OpenAI frenzy that took over Twitter/X this week, with everyone declaring the death of all other AI startups. Why, you ask? Well, this article summarizes all the key points of OpenAI’s first-ever developer conference that just took place, and the announcements that Sam Altman made (and what they mean for the industry).

Goodbye pitch deck templates and hello “pitch cycle”. This short but useful article takes a look at how to create a four-part pitch cycle to take potential investors on a powerful journey and create a good reason for them to invest. Hint: Rather than asking yourself WHAT you need to present, ask yourself WHY the potential investor should listen.

The 2000 downturn lasted about 3 years. The 2008 downturn was about 14 months in the technology sector. The current downturn started approximately Q1 2022, so we’re almost 2 years in. Someday, there will be an upturn, and this is how you can prepare for it and beat your competitors.

A look at the most active US investors for the month of October. Spoiler alert: Gaingels takes the first spot, with 14 deals made! Find out who the rest are, how many deals they made, and in which industries.

💪 Tech Mafia of the week

Highlights:

💰 Most money raised: Acquco

⭐ Startup to keep an eye on: Artifact

🤑 Total money raised by the WeWork Mafia: $2.4 billion

Weekly tech mafia leaderboard

WeWork has been in the headlines the past couple of weeks as its filing for bankruptcy, and so we decided to take a look at the alumni group of this controversial company.

The alumni group is doing really well, and it ranks higher on our tech mafia leaderboard than groups from other major companies like YouTube and NVIDIA.

The WeWork Mafia takes the 22nd spot, with 119 companies founded in total and $2.4 billion raised.

PS: Are you a WeWork 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

Adobe's $20B acquisition of Figma is ~still~ on hold due to regulatory hurdles.

It was planned to be the 3rd biggest acquisition of a subscription software firm in history, but things might change by the time the deal goes through.

Whatever happens, these 3 early investors still stand to win big.

📌 1. Index Ventures

The SF–based firm is known for investing in other enterprise software businesses such as Slack and Confluent.

It led a seed round in Figma in 2013 and ended up with a stake of about 13%.

Danny Rimer, an Index partner since 2002, led the firm’s original investment.

📌 2. Jeff Weiner

The executive chair of Linkedin, Jeff Weiner, also participated in Figma’s seed investment in 2013.

He owns a 2.2% stake.

📌 3. Greylock Partners

The Menlo Park, Calif.–based firm, best known for early investments in Airbnb and Facebook, led the Series A funding round in Figma in 2015.

It ended up with a stake of about 13%

John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla and a partner at Greylock since 2011, led the firm’s original investment in Figma.


💼 Who’s hiring in VC?

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

HPE Pathfinder is looking for a VC Analyst.

Avesta Fund is looking for an Investment Associate.

NEA is looking for a VC Intern.

M13 is looking for a Program Manager.

Techstars is looking for an Investment Associate.

📠 Fun fact of the week

Number of unicorn startups worth over $1 billion:

🇺🇸 USA: 651
🇨🇳 China: 172
🇪🇺 EU: 100
🇮🇳 India: 70
🇬🇧 UK: 49
🇩🇪 Germany: 29
🇫🇷 France: 25
🇮🇱 Israel: 23
🇨🇦 Canada: 20
🇧🇷 Brazil: 16

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