Jul 12, 2021

Startup Digest Reading List: Public Filings: Robinhood, Blend, Circle & Data Infrastructure Landscape

Issue #162 — View online — Suggest a link

Startup Digest Reading List

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

Two exciting things to share this week:

1) Very excited to announce our fund, Race Capital co-led the $9.5M seed investment in Opaque Systems, Ion Stoica’s (the founder of Databricks) latest company, that came out of the RISELab in UC Berkeley.

The team is building a full stack data infrastructure platform to do analysis on encrypted data. They are hiring engineers, PM, and a developer evangelist.

2) Race Capital is hiring a director of operations for our fund. If you or someone you know is interested I’d love to hear from you.

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

Tech News

Uber, Lyft, and a multitude of other gig worker platforms are having a harder time attracting workers on the platform.
Blend recently filed their S-1 to go public and Alex Johnson wrote a great teardown of the filing including the two big bets Blend is making to expand their TAM.
Github recently released Copilot which gives suggestions for code directly inside your editor, and the reception has been controversial to say the least.
Circle, best known for their USDC stablecoin product, filed to go public via a SPAC at a $4.5B valuation. For 2021, Circle is projecting $115M in revenue, $35B in circulation for USDC, with the vast majority of all revenue generated via interest on their accounts.
Robhinhood recently filed their S-1 to go public and I wrote a short teardown of the filing. A short summary in emoji form is below:

Robinhood S-1:

💰 18M total funded accounts

📈 $959M in revenue (2020)

🏦 $81B of assets under custody

♻️ 80% of their revenue through payment for order flow

⚠️ 34% of revenue comes from Citadel

💲ARPU is $137

₿ Crypto trading grew 23x

🐶 Dogecoin was 34% of Crypto Rev

Deep Dive Posts

Benedict Evans shares the observations that every application category is getting rebuilt as a SaaS web application, allowing continuous development, deployment, version tracking and collaboration.
It’s not everyday you see the acquisition of a venture capital firm. Stepstone recently acquired Greenspring Associates for $725M in cash and stock. Greenspring had ~$17B and was generating $70M in fee revenue, representing a 10x multiple on fee revenue or ~4% of AUM.
Here is a good market landscape of the data infrastructure space and the factors driving these underlying market trends. With our recent announcement of Opaque we are always open to talking to early stage founders building data related companies > chris@race.capital
On the controversy of Apple’s 30% of app store revenue > Apple makes 6% of their total revenue ($15B) from their app store fee. Of which 80% of this was from games where 0.5% of users drive ~54% of all of the billings in this category.

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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 Startup Digest Reading List is curated by:

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

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