Startups & Tech

By Chris McCann

Startup Digest Reading List: FTX, Cloud Provider Market Share, and Hype in Consumer Social

#165・ Aug 2, 2021

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Issue #165 — View online — Suggest a link

Startups & Tech

A curated list of the top stories in technology, startups, and venture capital.

Last week, one of our portfolio companies, Saber, announced their $7.7M seed round where we at Race Capital led. Here are the highlights:

⚔️Founded in May 2021
💰$7.7M seed round led by RaceCapital w/ participation from Jump, Multicoin, Social Capital
📈In 14 days they went from $0 to $140M total value locked (TLV)
3️⃣Saber is the #3 most valuable project on Solana already.

It’s been an honor to partner with the Macalinao brothers (Dylan and Ian) from day one. Congrats on the most recent milestone!

I’m also including a new section in the newsletter recapping the job opportunities across our portfolio companies, powered by Pallet 🔥

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Written by Chris McCann, General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners. More about me.

🗞️ Tech News Last Week

Incredible stat: 1 out of every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee.
Duolingo went public with a valuation of $6.5B
Robinhood went public at the low end of its range, and fell a further 10%, with a market cap of ~$30B
The semiconductor chip shortage could last a few years.

🤔 Deep Dive Posts

The Generalist, by Mario Gabriele, is writing an epic 3 part series about one of our portfolio companies FTX. The first part is about Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX and his motivations for starting the company.
The cloud providers all reported earnings. TLDR: AWS has a $59B revenue run rate, Azure is $35B, and GCP is third with $19B.
Jason Mikula commissioned a survey panel to understand who is using crypto, how users are using it, and why.
Sarah Tavel of Benchmark recounts why hype in consumer social can be dangerous TLDR: Hype creates the aura that something is bigger, more important, and more inevitable than it actually is. In this way, it acts like a subsidy on engagement in a consumer social network.

🔥 Race Capital - Portfolio Jobs

FTX: Full Stack Developer (Miami, FL)
Opaque: Product Manager (Berkeley, CA)
SocialChat: Operations manager (San Francisco, CA)
GoodNotes: Back-End Team Lead (London, UK)

Browse more open roles across our portfolio at Race Capital’s Portfolio Job Board

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This Startup Digest Reading List goes out to a wide membership base of founders, technologists, investors, and operators. Feel free to share with others, sign up here: https://startups.startupdigest.com/

Techstars Startup Digest Startups & Tech is curated by:

Chris McCann - General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners
chris@startupdigest.com

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