There’s plenty of frustration in the world of startups over when a digital asset does and does not constitute a security in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission. Where many see regulatory murkiness, the five-year-old, New York-based investing platform Republic sees opportunity. Indeed, while many outfits grapple with whether to distance themselves from […]
Check out these startups from Pear’s Demo Day (there’s usually a breakout or two in the bunch)
We can’t check out every investing outfit’s demo day. But one event that we try to catch every year is that of Pear, which is held annually each fall and features (blessedly) just a dozen or so very nascent startups. Pear, a seed-stage venture firm founded in 2013, has an impressive track record when it […]
We’re already very much at war with China, argues a provocative new book
If China once seemed to be committed to the free market economy, over the course of 2021, it has shattered that illusion entirely by abruptly disempowering its own tech companies and turning up the dials on media censorship at the direction of a president who, three years ago, oversaw the erasure of presidential limits from […]
Renowned investor Kevin Ryan thinks the big money is in healthcare
Kevin Ryan has become very wealthy by being at the right place at the right time — including at online ad network DoubleClick, which he joined as its twelfth employee and eventually ran as CEO (it was later acquired, twice) — as well as co-founding numerous companies, including the software company MongoDB, which is currently […]
Bradley Tusk is seizing the moment: ‘We’re investing, we’re incubating, we’ve got SPACs’
Whether or not we’re at some kind of tipping point right now, venture investors, old and new, have done very well in recent years, with their limited partners notching the biggest gains in decades. Among the newer VCs to be having a time of it is Bradley Tusk, the political strategist, lobbyist and founder of […]
This new platform is teaching emerging fund managers how to survive and thrive
More people have begun turning to venture investing as a full-time pursuit, only to discover that it’s not as easy as it looks. That realization explains the rise of Oper8r, a for-profit, venture-backed accelerator that launched last year as a kind of Y Combinator for emerging fund managers. It explains the broad appeal of AngelList, […]
Tekion, the automotive retail platform headed by a former Tesla CIO, just tripled in value
A year ago, we told you about the opportunity that former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan was chasing. His plan? To pull car dealers into the 21st century with a snazzy end-to-end automative SaaS platform like the one he helped develop inside Tesla. Customers could use it to order a car to their precise specifications; dealers […]
8-Bit Capital, co-led by Jonathan Abrams, has closed its first fund with $40 million
Jonathan Abrams and Kent Lindstrom have partnered on a lot of things over the years. Lindstrom was an advisor and investor at the early social networking service Friendster, founded by Abrams. He was also the COO of social news aggregator Nuzzel, which was founded by Abrams and that sold to a subscription startup called Scroll […]
Chamath Palihapitiya speaks to SPAC concerns, from fees to disclosures to quality
It was almost exactly two years ago that a special purpose acquisition vehicle (SPAC) spearheaded by investor Chamath Palihapitiya took public the space tourism company Virgin Galactic. It was the first human spaceflight company to trade on the NYSE — or any exchange, for that matter — and it was so successful, with the company’s […]
And that’s that, as the Zoom deal to buy Five9 is called off
Talk about a roller coaster ride. Zoom, the video conferencing company that became everyone’s primary means of communication around work during the pandemic, will no longer be acquiring Five9, a maker of cloud-based customer-service software. Though the all-stock deal, announced in July, was expected to enable Zoom to tap into the lucrative contact center market, […]