AngelList launched Angel Funds as well as providing $35 million in funding for the initiative via a second Maiden Lane fund. ~> AngelList just launched full-fledged venture funds, meanwhile Naval Ravikant hints at future plans for Product Hunt and adding secondary trading to AngelList

A well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm is taking an unusual approach to technology investing by giving millions of dollars to other investors, rather than to startups themselves. Bain Capital Ventures, which has backed companies including LinkedIn and DocuSign, said on Tuesday it will start investing in “angel” investors (via AngelList) ~> Bain Capital Ventures to fund ‘angel’ investors

Social Capital, the Silicon Valley investment firm founded by Chamath Palihapitiya, has hired Marc Mezvinsky as its vice chairman. The hiring of the investment banker and hedge fund founder is part of a wider effort by Social Capital to morph itself well beyond its venture roots ~> Social Capital has hired Marc Mezvinsky as the investment firm morphs its business

When venture capitalists (VCs) evaluate investment proposals, the language they use to describe the entrepreneurs who write them plays an important but often hidden role in shaping who is awarded funding and why. But it’s difficult to obtain VCs’ unvarnished comments, given that they are uttered behind closed doors. HBR were given access to government venture capital decision-making meetings in Sweden and were able to observe the types of language that VCs used over a two-year period. One major thing stuck out: The language used to describe male and female entrepreneurs was radically different. And these differences have very real consequences for those seeking funding — and for society in general ~> We Recorded VCs’ Conversations and Analyzed How Differently They Talk About Female Entrepreneurs

The shift to cleaner power is disrupting entire industries. Will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels? The Big Green Bang: how renewable energy became unstoppable

Indoor farming is a trendy startup space, but many of those ventures have recently failed. Plenty thinks its technology, model, and timing mean it’s the place that will finally turn greens into green ~> Has this Silicon Valley startup finally nailed the indoor farming model?

VCs aren’t giving up on the dream of getting food delivered cheaply through an app. They’re just trying to find ways to do so with fewer subsidies, or even profitably. One promising niche is targeting the hungry office worker ~> VCs Hunt for a Food Delivery Business That’s Sustainable

Anyone thinking of betting big on shared-mobility as the future of public transport should be alerted to one thing: the car-rental business is currently languishing. On Monday, Hertz reported a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss cementing a generally poor quarter for the sector. Shares tanked accordingly ~> What Hertz tells us about the future of shared mobility

Artificial intelligence — specifically, machine learning (ML) — is a powerful ‘enabling technology’ that represents a paradigm shift in software capability. But how do investors evaluate early stage software companies that put ML at the heart of their value proposition? MMC Ventures introduce their ML Investment Framework ~> The MMC Ventures AI Investment Framework: 17 success factors for the age of AI

SoftBank’s huge $100 billion investment fund — the largest tech fund in history — announced its first close and it’s huge. The Japanese telecom giant revealed that its VisionFund has closed an initial commitment of $93 billion from a bevy of high profile backers. They include Apple, Qualcomm, UAE-based Mubadala Investment Company, Saudi Arabia’s PID public fund, Foxconn, and Foxconn-owned Sharp. The plan is for the fund to reach its $100 billion target within the next six months through commitments from other investors ~> SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund raises $93 billion in its first close

Early-stage blockchain entrepreneurs have already raised more money via ICOs than venture capital this year, and VCs, seeing the writing on the wall, are beginning to disrupt themselves by tokenizing their own fundraising rounds, now AngelList and Protocol Labs (USV wrote a good explainer on why they are backing them) are launching CoinList, a new platform for token-based networks to reach investors and raise money for the development of the project ~> Want To Hold An ICO? CoinList Makes It Easy – And Legal, while Albert Wenger offers his Thoughts on Regulating ICOs 

Neufund’s goal is to establish a secondary market for startup equity by providing a simple yet robust way of representing startup shares as Blockchain tokens ~> Neufund micro-ICO

Silk Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by the Chinese government and based in London, has raised its first fund worth $500m (£388m): The firm is eyeing up investments in “deep tech” startups in Europe and the US with potential to expand in China, including areas such as artificial intelligence and robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), FinTech and MedTech.

Notion Capital, the London-based VC focused on enterprise SaaS and cloud startups announced a new later-stage follow-on fund for existing portfolio companies, and the final closing of its third early-stage fund, which now counts Cisco amongst a number of new U.S.-based LPs ~> Notion Capital outs new $80M ‘growth equity’ fund to invest in enterprise Saas and cloud portfolio

Startups in Latin America are using creative solutions to address not just local but also global problems. For investors outside the region, the prospect of working with these startups can appear attractive, yet complicated. Investing in early-stage startups in Latin America can present challenges; however, despite the challenges, it can be well worth the effort ~> A new era for startup investing in Latin America

A Mexico City venture capitalist discusses what it takes to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem ~> How Startup Culture Can Thrive in Developing Worlds

The reasons for a stagnating US public equity listings market: Availability of private funding for young companies and M&A activity plays key role

What jobs will be left for us humans? What Yan-David Erlich learned by challenging some industry experts.

Technology giants, not the government, are building the artificially intelligent future. And unless the government vastly increases how much it spends on research into such technologies, it is the corporations that will decide how to deploy them ~> Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future

The European Investment Fund, which provides billions in funding to British venture capitalists, has frozen funding to UK VC firms after the Brexit vote ~> The EIF has frozen funding to UK VCs and cancelled an angel investment scheme

It’s fairly normal for successful venture capital pros to spend their careers building up a track record at a larger firm, and then “spin off” with their own firms. Lately, as limited partner interest in venture continues to grow, it feels like just about every partner who isn’t listed on their firm’s Form ADV is launching their own fund ~> Venture Capital Partners Strike Out on Their Own

No1 Seedr? Andy Murray backs more UK startups: Tennis star backs two fledgling firms on crowdfunding platform Seedrs, including company behind world’s first flat folding helmet

Albert Wenger’s World After Capital (work in progress)

In 2012 the U.S. had 6x more VC rounds than Europe. In 2016 this number reduced to 2012 to just over 2x difference in 2016: European VC is gaining ground

Amazon’s stock has surged in its 20 years of trading, but few investors rode the roller-coaster to those gains ~> Amazon’s IPO at 20: That Amazing Return You Didn’t Earn

The era of unicorn startups has created a distorted view of entrepreneurial success. All the talk about billion-dollar exits has inflated the numbers that define a win. Starting and selling a company for $100 million dollars is an outlier event in terms of pure entrepreneurial probability, but such outcomes are viewed as well short of success in many corners of today’s startup world ~> There’s no shame in a $100M startup

Wade Foster of Zapier explains why a conservative approach to fundraising may actually be the best way to keep your options open ~> How Zapier Pulled Off Its One-and-Done Approach to Fundraising

A list of resources of Fundraising Hacks for Venture Capital and Private Equity Funds

Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital on The growing dissonance between two business models (SaaS and VC)

Blake Robins shares “What I learned during my first year as a VC”

‘Traditional’ and corporate investment-based accelerators might struggle to succeed going forward ~> Could tech accelerators soon become a thing of the past?

💪🏻 💪🏻 💪🏻 ~> VC investing still strong even as median time to exit reaches 8.2 years

This is already the tenth edition of Series F and I love putting this together more and more each week, thanks to all of you for making it so enjoyable! 

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Feedback? 🤔 neil@thenordicweb.com or @neilswmurray