my biggest value as a VC is this clause in my standard TS. iykyk.

Exciting news to kick off London Tech week: Londoners can now sign up to experience @wayve_ai autonomous rides on @Uber which are launching soon (pending final regulatory approval). 🇬🇧 Join our interest list today: uber.com/gb/en/autonomous/wa…

AI Dark Output: The Visible Cost of Invisible Output Why AI's increasing output is going to be one of the hardest economic measurement problems in history. AI "Dark Output" could end up being the majority of economic activity, but a challenge to measure. newsletter.semianalysis.com/…

Asking for a friend: How to reset my environment in the real world? (pic for inspiration)

The window is amazing! What a mom! 🥰💪🏼

I want to share some difficult news. I was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and I want you to hear it directly from me. Treatment is starting immediately and will include multiple strategies over the course of about a year. While I will be stepping back from some of my usual activities, I will continue to support SV Angel founders, who I love with a passion. SV Angel remains unchanged. Topher has made all of our investment decisions for the better part of the last decade, and Ronny joined as Managing Partner in 2024. They bring experience from nearly every major technology cycle in Silicon Valley and are now focused on partnering with founders building the future of AI. SV Angel has a deep, experienced team that remains fully focused on supporting exceptional founders. With a more focused and balanced schedule, I can prioritize treatments while helping SV Angel founders at inflection points like we always do! I’ve chosen not to share the specific type of cancer since I don't want speculation about my prognosis. I appreciate your understanding and respect for this. I am optimistic about my prognosis. I am fortunate to have the best/amazing team of UCSF doctors in San Francisco, and as you know, I never back down from a fight. Thank you for your support, it means a great deal to me.

Sam Altman makes ‘mic drop’ offer to every Y Combinator startup techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/sa…

"Because funds have become larger in real dollar terms, many venture capital organizations have invested larger amounts of money in each portfolio company. Firms have attempted to do this in two ways. First, there has been a movement to finance later-stage companies that can accept larger blocks of financing. Second, venture firms are syndicating less. This leads to greater competition for making later-stage investments.” The Venture Capital Revolution, by Paul Gompers and Josh Lerner The pathology of venture capital is not hard to unravel. The market expanded, with more capital chasing deals, creating larger and later investments. Companies now stay private longer, and more future growth is priced into each financing event. The metrics to attract investment in private markets are revenue, growth rate and gross margins. As companies raise more private capital, they spend longer focusing on these metrics. This mirrors what what Startup Genome described as "premature scaling", where a company overdevelops along one dimension, at a cost to others. Indeed, revenue, growth and gross margins do not provide a full picture of company health. As implied by 'Goodhart's Law', as these metrics became a target they can mask a deeper financial malaise. Imagine, for example, if the NBA understood a good basketball player purely by how tall they were and how fast they ran. The league would be packed with frenetic 7-foot-tall monsters and a terrible quality of play. As a result, companies with an extended life in private markets become structurally and almost inevitably overvalued. While investors can protect against this with additional terms, to an extent, those terms do not extend to common stock holders. “Reported unicorn post-money valuations average 48% above fair value, with 14 being more than 100% above. [...] Common shares lack all such protections and are 56% overvalued.” Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality, by Will Gornall and Ilya Strebulaev As a result, venture backed companies (particularly those that have raised the most) now struggle to find a profitable exit. Exits are where rubber hits the road. It's where venture marks, which are notoriously unreliable, suddenly have to match up with real-world expectations. This is especially difficult in hot markets or hot categories. "We show that an increase in the supply of venture capital (VC) leads to a decline in the quality of firms going public. ... both post-IPO operating profits and post-IPO sales growth are lower when the supply of VC capital is high." The Rise of Venture Capital and IPO Quality, by Amrita Nain, Jie Ying and Joseph Arthur This structural overvaluation makes venture-backed companies less appealing targets for acquisition, but it's harder to see the consequence of that beyond sluggish M&A. Where it's more obvious is in IPOs, where not only are there fewer public offerings but those companies also more obviously struggle once public thanks to the visibility on their share price. A substantial post-lockup dip is now a feature of most venture-backed IPOs, and where companies have raised multiple billions that dip lasts longer and is increasingly negative. “Our results do indicate that the deregulation of private markets has played a significant role in bringing about a new equilibrium where fewer high-growth startups go public. Importantly, our results strongly point to the fact that this new equilibrium has not come about by some unfortunate freeze of the IPO market.” The Deregulation of the Private Equity Markets and the Decline in IPOs, by Michael Ewens and Joan Farre-Mensa For context, of the 10 US-listed companies that raised more than $3B in venture capital, 8 were negative at lockup expiry and the group has a market adjusted performance of -63%. And it's completely unnecessary, even for capital-intensive companies. Tesla raised $105 million prior to its IPO, compared to $10.6 billion for Rivian and $3.4 billion for Lucid. Only one of those companies is clearly a winner today, generating a vastly greater sum of economic value. The other two, however, enabled much greater fee income for their investors. This explains why some venture firms have responded to this new reality by specifically backing the 'tallest and fastest basketball players', and benefitting from the ease of herding capital into that category. The volume of capital raised is their main metric of success, with scale and predictability are their product on which they charge fees. Others investors, particularly those with LPs that care about distributions, need to think more carefully about how they steward investments to an exit. That means being conservative with capital and ensuring companies properly develop along all dimensions. That also neatly aligns with the original description of venture capital, provided by Gompers and Lerner in their 2001 paper, "providing capital to firms that might otherwise have difficulty attracting financing." If a company can easily raise capital on generous terms, then it's definitionally not a venture investment and is unlikely to produce the required returns. The only question is, do you care about the returns?

🇩🇪 Germany: $3.6B VC in 2026 → $46B in exits. That's $12.8 per dollar. 🇫🇷 France: $4.2B VC → just $1.8B in exits. 43¢ per dollar. The UK raised 4× more VC than Germany — and still generated less exit value. 📊 app.dealroom.co/curated-heat… @dealroomco

mature things tend to get pressured into being less weird over time, so if you're starting from scratch your advantage is that you can be very weird if you don't start weird you're probably trying to compete inside the local maximum of something more boring than you could be

i think not having cars parked literally everywhere is like 75% of the reason why Tokyo (and probably japan in general) looks so nice