Venture capital’s most underrated skill: knowing when NOT to invest

There is a moment before every flight that matters more than takeoff itself.

It is not dramatic or cinematic. From the outside, it often looks like nothing at all. A pilot reviews the conditions, studies the route, checks the aircraft, evaluates the weather, considers alternatives, and then makes a decision: go or no-go.

That decision is deceptively simple to underestimate because nothing visibly happens. If the answer is “go”, the flight proceeds. If the answer is “no-go”, the aircraft stays on the ground, the plan changes, and life moves on. READ MORE

VC firm sues California regulator over portfolio diversity disclosures

Early-stage venture firm 1517 Fund has sued the California regulator that’s overseeing the delayed rollout of a controversial new portfolio diversity disclosure requirement, claiming the law is unconstitutional.

It’s the sharpest pushback yet from VCs, who have called the rules an overreach that burdens investors and the startups they fund. The complaint appears to be the first lawsuit over the California Fair Investment Practices by Venture Capital Companies Act. READ MORE

Why An IPO Boom Alone Won’t Solve Private Equity’s Exit Problem

Wall Street may be on the cusp of one of the most consequential initial public offering (IPO) waves in years. SpaceX is preparing what could be the largest IPO in history, potentially valuing the rocket maker and xAI owner at close to $1.75 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are also weighing listings that could command valuations measured in the hundreds of billions.​

The key question is not about size or spectacle. It is structural: Can a concentrated, space- and AI-led IPO wave extend beyond a handful of marquee names and meaningfully unlock the broader M&A market?​ READ MORE

A private-equity giant sees 'unlimited' upside in a booming sector that's not AI

Geopolitical tensions are creating massive opportunities in defense and industrial investing, according to Carlyle Group CEO Harvey Schwartz.

"Everywhere you go in the world, the conversation is the same. It's a conversation first and foremost about national security," Schwartz said at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday. READ MORE

How Venture Capital Benefits From Zombie Bankruptcies

Julia’s first TikTok to hit a million views came at a price—her job. 

The video, from April 23, 2024, shows Julia working as a barista at Foxtrot—the “elevated” convenience store chain with dozens of locations in Chicago, Texas, and Washington, DC, and known for coffee, upscale groceries, wine, and its own delivery app. The caption says, “found out 2 hours before that our company was closing nationwide!!!” Julia shows herself clumsily making her last latte and pans the camera around the store, where customers are still sitting with their laptops. “There are all these people here. What do we tell them?”  READ MORE

Venture Capital Shifts Focus to Hardware, Physical Systems Amid AI-Driven Disruption

Venture capital’s latest pivot is away from purely software bets and back toward the physical layers of computing, manufacturing and energy. In Maker Faire Rome’s 2026 hardware outlook, the argument is that artificial intelligence has made hardware a strategic asset again, not just a support system. That view is increasingly reflected in company data and investor behavior. READ MORE

After the Shein shock, Everlane’s founder launches his next act

When Puck announced on May 17 that sustainable fashion startup Everlane had been acquired by Chinese ultra-fast-fashion retailer Shein, it sent shockwaves throughout the apparel industry. Michael Preysman, who founded Everlane in 2011, was just as shocked.

“I found out the same time as everyone else,” he said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m not involved with the company anymore, and like many, am still digesting the news.” READ MORE

Inside The Earliest Bets Of The AI Era

Before OpenAI became a trillion-dollar IPO candidate, before AI coding assistants generated billions in revenue, and before defense tech became one of Silicon Valley’s hottest categories, a small group of seed investors had already made their bets.

They backed frontier AI, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and AI infrastructure years before the market went all-in on these sectors. In many cases, they invested before startups had meaningful revenue, before products existed and before entire categories had fully formed. READ MORE

AI Funding in 2026: Where Venture Capital Is Going

There’s a number that keeps coming up in conversations about AI investment right now, and it’s so large it barely sounds real.

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, investors poured $300 billion into roughly 6,000 startups globally (Crunchbase, April 2026). That’s not a typo. A single quarter. One 90-day window. And it eclipses the total venture capital deployed in any full year before 2018. READ MORE

6 Charts on SpaceX’s Pre-IPO Financials

SpaceX published its landmark S-1 filing on Wednesday, offering the most comprehensive picture of its financials to date. In its top-line figures, the Starlink creator disclosed that it brought in USD 18 billion in revenue in 2025 on a consolidated basis, with a net loss of USD 4.9 billion. EBITDA came in at USD 6.58 billion for the year.

That exponential growth trajectory has been nearly two decades in the making. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, and it has raised more than USD 10 billion in venture capital funding over its lifetime as a private company. Now, a slew of investors—including Founder’s Fund, DFJ, D1 Capital, Fidelity, and Thrive Capital—and thousands of early employees are gearing up for a generational liquidity event. READ MORE

The role of university venture funds in spinout success

Funds that invest in university spinouts are a growing asset class, having seen strong expansion over the past three years. However, there are few benchmarks focused on specifically these funds.

It is our aim at Global Corporate Venturing to collect enough data on these university venture funds to create a benchmarking tool that fund managers can use to compare their performance with other funds.

For the past two years we have run surveys of university funds and independent fund managers to build a picture of spinout investment vehicles globally. READ MORE

The Savvy Logic Behind VC Bets In ‘Uninvestable’ Sectors

Defense, energy, robotics and government have historically been classic no-go areas for VC investment. These “hard” industries have slow procurement cycles, tight regulatory oversight and high-friction customer migration in common. Legacy software vendors serving them have benefited from a barrier of complexity to innovate slowly without facing the risk of customer churn.

This made the victims of this year’s AI anxiety-driven sell-off all the more dramatic. Software juggernauts serving heavy industries — IBM, SAP, ServiceNow, Schneider Electric — have gone from safe bets to being the subject of investor scrutiny. READ MORE

The Midas All-Stars

When the Midas List began in 2001, Silicon Valley was still coming to terms with the “tech wreck.” The excitement in early internet companies led to public flameouts and a long and painful reset that saw the Nasdaq drop 39.3%, its worst one year drop to date. But as any Midas investor knows, market downturns are when generational companies are built: Google, Amazon and Netflix, founded and built in this era, have become some of the world’s most valuable companies, and made their founders and investors vast fortunes. READ MORE

The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds

Physical tech is back, at least judging by this week’s largest U.S. funding deals. The biggest of all was a $1.5 billion corporate round for a medical device company that develops implants and treatment systems for musculoskeletal disorders. It was followed by an enormous Series A round, backed by a bevy of big-name investors, for Hark, a 1-year-old artificial intelligence startup that says it’s developing personalized AI devices. Along with the usual heavy dose of AI, this week’s list also includes large deals for aerospace and defense, fintech, and retail technology. READ MORE

How Instagram Became A Venture Capital Deal Engine

For decades, venture capital depended on closed networks. Founders needed introductions. Investors relied on private circles. Geography mattered. The strongest deal flow often stayed concentrated around Silicon Valley, New York and a handful of elite startup communities.

Marshall Sandman believes that model is starting to break down. The founder of Animal Capital has spent the last 139 days posting daily videos on Instagram @marshallsandman explaining venture capital in unusually direct terms: fundraising mechanics, dilution, startup mistakes and how investors evaluate businesses. READ MORE

How AI Is Changing Finance, And Why Private Equity Is Behind

Venture capital moves fast and breaks things. Private equity moves deliberately and fixes them. That difference explains a lot about where PE sits on AI right now: not absent, but methodical in a moment moving faster than methodical allows.

According to my company's research, VC-backed companies have adopted AI at a 77% rate. PE-backed companies are at 59%. That gap is less about technology than organizational readiness. READ MORE

a16z Is the Only VC AI Engines Reliably Cite

When founders and investors ask an AI engine about venture capital, the answer leans on Wikipedia, TechCrunch, and Crunchbase — and on exactly one venture firm's own website. 

The Venture Capital AI Visibility Index 2026, released by 5W, the AI Communications Firm, is the first public two-wave benchmark of how often U.S. venture firms and named partners are surfaced, cited, and recommended inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It analyzed 28,400 prompts, 60 firms, and 100 named partners across two testing waves between January and May 2026.  READ MORE