Sep 7, 2021

Startup Digest Reading List - Saber, China Internet Report, Solana Ignition

Issue #170 — View online — Suggest a link

Startups & Tech

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

A few rapid-fire highlights for last week:

Our portfolio company Saber crossed $1.5B in TVL and is now the #1 biggest DeFi project on Solana.
Over the weekend some of my artworks and NFT collection were featured in an art gallery in Hong Kong.
Last week I also announced a new generative art project called Playground for the Solana NFT ecosystem.
Solana announced their next hackathon - Ignition. For any builders applying, I’d be happy to take a look at your application & also entrants should consider building on top of Saber too.

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

🗞️ Tech News Last Week

Amazon will be using Affirm for their buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) checkout option, in a move following Square’s acquisition of AfterPay for $29B.
Databricks raised a massive $1.6B on a $38B valuation with a (small) participation from us at Race Capital & my partner Alfred being their early seed investor from day one.
The SEC has hinted at banning the practice of “payment for order flow” (PFOF). This would have huge implications for companies like Robinhood which derive 80%+ of their revenue from PFOF.
The average time per user of TikTok is greater than YouTube for the first time in the US and the UK.
Apple and Google might not be able to maintain their tight grip over the underlying payment rails forever.

🤔 Deep Dive Posts

My partner at Race Capital, Edith Yeung, published this year’s China Internet Report (sponsored by Race Capital) which is the definitive annual report on the China tech ecosystem.
Privacy is coming whether tech companies like it or not, but do we really know what privacy means?
Here are some screenshots of internal emails from Google during their consideration process for acquiring YouTube.
DAOs are hot and on the cutting edge of blurring the lines between communities, investments, and corporate structures.

🔥 Race Capital - Portfolio Jobs

Polysign: Senior BSA Analyst (New York, NY)
FTX: Full Stack Developer (Miami, FL)
Opaque: Technical Recruiter (Berkeley, CA)
Opaque: Product Designer (Berkeley, CA)
Opaque: Developer Evangelist (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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