VC Funding Falls Dramatically, Practical AI, Awkward Silence, and Pre-Wealth Planning

Venture and growth investors in private companies continued to scale back their investment pace in the first quarter of 2023.

People often ask me how to use AI. Here's an overview with lots of links.

The rule of awkward silence is an emotional intelligence tool. It's used by people like Jeff Bezos, creator of Amazon,...

Listen to this episode from Panic with Friends - Howard Lindzon on Spotify. I’m really, really excited to have Frederik Mijnhardt, the CEO and Co-founder of Secfi on Panic today. Frederik and Secfi (Social Leverage Fund III) are an incredible educational resource and service for founders and startup employees. I’ve talked about, tweeted about, and written about how important it is for those early startup employees to deal with liquidity and things like exercising their options in a tax-efficient way. Startup equity is complex. COVID had many startup employees learning the hard way – and more recently with the Series I at Stripe, noted for both its size, and its tender offer coming in at 50 percent lower than the previous round. As we continue to see more of these “down rounds” and lackluster IPO windows, Frederik and his team are helping employees make the most of their equity and make more informed decisions. I’ll say it again – this is an important topic so please forward this to anyone you know that founded or works at a startup – whether it’s a company that has just raised a seed round or a company on its way to an IPO. Guest - Frederik Mijnhardt, CEO and Co-Founder at SecFi howardlindzon.com, secfi.com Twitter: @howardlindzon, @AFMijnhardt, @AskSecfi, @PanicwFriends, @knutjensen linkedin.com/in/mijnhardt #fintech #invest #investment #venturecapital #stockmarket #finance Show Notes: Introduction. (00:37) Welcome Frederik (08:07) About Secfi (08:36) The Stripe case (09:18) How startup employees should think (13:39) Thoughts for founders (17:00) Investing in an up market (19:18) Exercising your options (19:50) Tax traps (21:38) Educating employees (22:42) Transparency (First time founders v. serial entrepreneurs) (24:08) Problems in the industry (24:46) Software company multiples (26:43) Watching your money (28:43) The next bull market (33:34) Wealthy on paper (35:16) Employee equity by country (37:28) Great companies are built in a downturn (43:40) Wrapping up (45:14) Closing thoughts. (46:30)

Listen to this episode from Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Spotify. My guest today is Dan Rose. Dan is the chairman of Coatue Ventures and has one of the most interesting collections of experiences of anyone I’ve talked to. He spent 20 years at Amazon and Facebook in their early days, working closely with Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sheryl Sandberg. He’s had a front-row seat to the defining products and founders of our era and his lessons from those experiences do not disappoint. Please enjoy this great discussion with Dan Rose. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:27] - [First question] - The story behind Amazon’s Kindle and the lessons it taught him [00:09:19] - Amazon’s philosophy of working backwards and the most creative solutions he and his team had to come up inside of that framework [00:13:04] - What he did to convince publishers to get on board with his vision [00:16:02] - His overall experience of the relationship between innovation and constraints [00:18:43] - Thoughts about the fine line between genius and nutcase [00:22:02] - What the key points of his theory on partnerships would be [00:24:28] - When advising portfolio companies becomes relevant [00:26:09] - The dark arts of building companies that could be adopted by partnerships [00:28:40] - Why he thinks the best technology companies drive strategy through product [00:29:24] - What unites the communication layer between great leaders communicating a vision well [00:32:23] - Resolving micro management while also giving skilled talent their own space [00:36:07] - Where Javier Olivan fits into his ideal executive team [00:36:57] - What about growth requires its own expertise [00:37:35] - What makes Dave Schneider an ideal sales leader [00:39:08] - The most stressful period of time while working at Facebook [00:42:51] - General thoughts on great versus good business models in tech [00:45:36] - Topics where Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg would disagree the most [00:47:13] - Defining the platonic ideal of a great investor approaching corporate enterprises [00:50:25] - Overview of the investing environment we’re in today from coast to coast [00:53:45] - Other questions he loves and thoughts on Bezos asking people if they felt they were lucky or not [00:55:07] - What made Sheryl Sandberg so successful; Lean In [01:00:35] - Why he started his career at Life Mastery selling personal growth seminars [01:05:47] - What will define the next generation of leaders [01:07:59] - A product he would build if he could that doesn’t exist yet [01:08:59] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Search job openings across the Social Leverage network.

ProducePay is transforming the fresh produce industry by giving more power to farmers through a transparent marketplace, flexible financing, and better market insights. At the intersection of Technology, Finance, and Agriculture, Produce Pay's prod...