💰 Weekly Update: Top 4 Curated VC Picks + Must-Read Top 3 Books for 30Aug2023
🗒️ All Raise’s new CEO confronts a changing landscape for diversity in VC
Yahoo: New job. In April, Paige Hendrix Buckner became the permanent CEO of All Raise, the organization that supports women and nonbinary people in tech and venture capital. She first stepped into the role on an interim basis in January when her predecessor, Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon, left the position.
As All Raise's new CEO, Hendrix Buckner was focused on building community, supporting founders, scaling and professionalizing the originally all-volunteer organization, and engaging potential LPs when another priority was dropped on her doorstep this month: the racial discrimination lawsuit against Fearless Fund, a small venture capital firm that backs women of color founders.
Four months in, Hendrix Buckner—like many people in venture capital—is navigating the impact of a lawsuit that threatens the work All Raise and its members have been doing to put more capital in the hands of diverse founders and funders. All-women founding teams receive about 2% of VC dollars and Black women get less than 1% of VC funding.
🗒️ #1 Wealth Secret Of Unicorn-Entrepreneurs And School Teachers
Forbes: The common assumption is that high-income individuals, such as physicians, are richer than school teachers, and that VC-using entrepreneurs do better than bootstrapping billion-dollar entrepreneurs. However, the reality seems to be that finance-smart entrepreneurs and schoolteachers can accumulate substantial wealth through finance-smart strategies and skills. The truth seems to be that greater financial wealth creation with less income (for schoolteachers), or investment (for entrepreneurs) is possible, which challenges common assumptions. Finance-smart decisions, skills, and strategies can do wonders for your net worth – whether you are an entrepreneur or a schoolteacher.
🗒️ How to size your VC fund
Sifted: Current first-time fund managers don’t have access to the seemingly endless supply of cash and optimism that their predecessors did in the heyday of 2021. Yet, despite the economic downturn, LPs pulling out of commitments, reduced risk appetite and the hundreds of rejections first-time fund managers have reported, new VC funds are still popping up across Europe.
To raise a fund, an emerging fund manager — a first time fund manager trying to start up a new venture capital fund — has to consider several factors when totting up the total they plan to raise. Current market conditions, the stage and sector you plan to invest in, team experience and networking ability all play a significant role.
Sifted spoke to emerging fund managers in London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Tallinn to help you figure out how much you should be raising for your first ever fund.
🗒️ Startup extinction season is going to kick into high gear — and there's likely going to be a bloodbath soon for some of the 50,000 VC-backed startups
Business Insider:
- There are more than 50,000 US VC-backed startups, and many will be looking for capital soon.
- Many startups raised money in early 2022, and the average time between fundraising is 1.5 years.
- Some startups will be looking for funding in Q4 or be forced to look for a sale or shut down.
They're shutting down, looking for buyers, or begging for an investor to write them a check to get to the end of the year, if that.
My colleagues Melia Russell and Rob Price recently wrote about one of the latest victims — lending company Captain. The startup has followed the typical survival strategy of a desperate startup this year by first cutting costs with layoffs. Then searching for more capital with fundraising or some kind of financing or debt. And when that failed, looking for a buyer. Captain, however, has not decided to shut down – yet.
Recur, an NFT startup once valued at more than $300 million, decided to shut down recently. And a a tiny edtech Web3 startup called 101 also called it quits.
Top 3 book summaries this week 📚
Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson
As the authors of Crucial Conversations tell us, most human problems lie in how people behave when others disagree with them about important and emotional issues. How these moments turn out often decide the trajectory of your life. Which is why having a strategy you can rely on to produce results in those moments is so crucial. In this summary you'll learn the 7 principles for having crucial conversations in a productive way.
The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes
According to Holmes there are two things that are required if you want to have success in business and in sales. The first key is what he calls "pigheaded discipline." The second key is to focus on mastery. Doing 12 things 4,000 times will generate far better results than doing 4,000 different things. And what are those 12 things? You'll find out in this summary.
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
Atul Gawande has a startling idea: that many of the problems that we face today can be solved by the simple, humble checklist. His book outlines the solutions he helped implement across surgery sites worldwide (saving millions of lives), but also how checklists are solving problems in other industries too - like construction and aviation.