Your Custom Text Here
Tapping into your network of fellow founders is a huge asset for founders trying to raise — even if they passed on working with you before.
Working with investors is all about long-term relationships, according to serial entrepreneur Bob Moore. In his experience, even when investors ultimately choose not to back the company, it is worth maintaining those relationships for future pitches and potential introductions to other founders. READ MORE
Venture capital can seem like the ultimate goal for startups, but it’s not the only path to success.
Angel investing, bootstrapping or modest raises can be a better fit for founders depending on the business model and product, entrepreneurial support experts discussed at Technical.ly’s annual Builders Conference. READ MORE
I don’t have anything against raising money, and in the right situation it can be a powerful tool. But after building businesses without relying on outside funding, I’ve seen a consistent pattern: When there’s too much capital too early, it tends to hide problems that should have been addressed sooner. Those problems don’t disappear, they just surface later, usually when they’re larger, more complex, and more expensive to fix. READ MORE
The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.” READ MORE
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev is touting the success of the fintech’s new Ventures Fund I, which allows retail investors to invest in private tech companies like Stripe, Oura, Databricks, OpenAI, and others, through a publicly traded fund listed on the NYSE. “We had something like over 150,000 retail investors participate in the IPO, so it’s quite democratized,” noted Tenev in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference this week. READ MORE
Private credit bonuses are going to take a hit this year.
That’s according to compensation consulting firm Johnson Associates, which projects that incentive compensation for private credit professionals will end the year anywhere from 2.5% to 7.5% down from last year.
That’s a steep decline from the firm’s projected incentive funding for private credit at the end of 2025: Johnson Associates expected incentives to increase from 5% to 10% for 2026. READ MORE
The private credit and private equity industries have not had a great few years, what with struggling exit opportunities and exploding funds. The biggest draw for professionals in the industry has always been the huge pay – but that seems to be fading away, too.
Our Compensation & Lifestyle Report 2026 surveyed almost 3,000 professionals worldwide in financial services, including those who worked in private equity and credit, a collective that we labelled as private capital. READ MORE
Google’s first-quarter earnings report reflected its position as an artificial-intelligence winner — and as a savvy investor.
The tech giant reported net income of $62.6 billion for the March quarter, up about 81% from a year ago. More than half of that — $36.9 billion — came from unrealized gains on equity positions. And of those, SpaceX and Anthropic were likely the overwhelming contributors. READ MORE
AI is rapidly transforming how we apply for jobs. Now that applicants can use the technology to tailor their résumés, mass-apply to hundreds of roles, and bluff their way through an interview, it can feel harder than ever to stand out.
Kristina Simmons, who was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, then a chief of staff at Vinod Khosla's VC firm Khosla Ventures, and who now runs her own firm, Overwater Ventures, cautioned against relying too much on AI when job hunting. READ MORE
In 2002, American Major League Baseball team the Oakland Athletics were competing against opponents who could outspend them three to one. They had no way of competing for talent with the top teams. So, their general manager, Billy Beane, stopped trying.
Instead, as chronicled in Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003), Beane asked a more fundamental question: what factors predict winning in baseball? The answer turned out to be different from what baseball scouts believed.
Baseball scouts were evaluating players using visible, intuitive signals like athletic build and physical appearance, pitching speed and the look of their swing. The problem is that these signals felt meaningful but were often poor predictors of actual performance. Scouts were essentially fooled by aesthetics. READ MORE
Emil Michael was exuberant.
In just six months as the Pentagon’s new technology chief, he had met with more than 100 start-ups, he told podcaster Molly O’Shea in December, scouring the tech world for companies that could build cheaper, smarter and smaller weaponry to power the future of war. “My job,” he added, is to incubate a fleet of new companies that could rival the likes of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and other “older primes,” remaking “the whole architecture” of the military. READ MORE
For decades, private equity (PE) has been lauded as a superior form of capitalism, a bastion of entrepreneurial vigor amid sclerotic public corporations. The value proposition − generate high returns by transforming companies through operational improvements, strategic growth and financial optimization, rather than relying on market trends − was, and remains, intuitively powerful. After all, the vast majority of economic activity occurs within privately held companies. READ MORE
Two major challenges in agrifoodtech dominate discussions right now: the flatlining of venture capital in the space and the recognition that many agrifood technologies need longer timelines than is common in the VC world. This is especially true for projects taking place in developing markets, where currency volatility, underdeveloped infrastructure, and limited farmer access to markets abound.
“Blended finance” — loosely defined as the combination of public and private funds — is frequently thrown into this discussion as a solution to both problems. READ MORE
“Cash is king”—even sometimes in compensation. In a survey last December conducted by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, CFOs at PE-backed companies in the US reported average total cash compensation of $604,000, up 5% from 2024. While the average cash bonus declined 2%, the average base salary rose 7%. READ MORE
Private equity has evolved from a niche postwar strategy into one of the largest and most sophisticated asset classes globally. Mega funds dominate global deal value and continue to scale. But the next decade of differentiated returns is unlikely to be generated at the top of the market. Instead, it will likely be built in the lower middle market. READ MORE
I’ve been covering the crypto VC space for many years now, and the last couple of years have felt different. Earlier, there was a steady flow of early-stage funding announcements. That slowed down a lot, and even though things have picked up a bit this year, it still doesn’t feel the same.
Most investors I spoke to said the era of easy fundraising in crypto is over and unlikely to come back. But several also said this is a healthy reset, and the space is just more strict now. READ MORE
For years, venture capital enjoyed an attractive public image. From the outside, it looked like a club of ex-Ivy Leaguers with a smattering of start-up experience making million-dollar bets from plush offices with long time horizons. Management fees were generous, failure was abstract, and the uniform was universal… chinos and a sleeveless puffer vest. Venture was not just an asset class, it was a lifestyle brand. READ MORE
These days, many founders feel pressure to raise tremendous amounts of venture capital. But it wasn’t always like this. Most people are surprised to learn that four of the most valuable companies in the world barely raised any VC funding at all by today’s standards.
Apple is believed to have raised less than $1 million before its IPO. Amazon raised about $8 million. Microsoft raised about $1 million. Google raised $25 million. Add it all up, and it’s less than $35 million in total VC funding. Granted, that’s about $74 million in today’s dollars, but it’s still a relatively small investment that led to four companies that are worth around $14 trillion today. READ MORE
The founder of one of the world's largest software investors has come out swinging amid a sell-off that has wiped trillions of dollars off the value of technology stocks. Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner at Thoma Bravo, said the $183 billion firm has not changed its investment thesis as a result of the so-called SaaS-pocalypse, but can now make similar investments at a much steeper discount.
"This is the time to do it," he told an audience Wednesday at Semafor's World Economy conference in Washington, DC, that included senior funds columnist Jessica Hamlin. "Would you rather buy a great software company when it's trading at 15 times revenue?" READ MORE
Private equity is giving 2008 vibes (1). Private credit is in crisis. Some are calling the end of the crypto honeymoon, with its trading volume drop (2) the lowest since 2023. All the while, Trump wants all of these assets to be added into 401(k).
In response to the self-proclaimed crypto president's August 2025 executive order, the Labor Department has proposed a rule that would make way for alternative assets into 401(k)s — a retirement plan that's nearly half a century old. READ MORE