Thursdays at Abnormal Returns are all about startup and venture capital links. You can check out last week’s links including a look at the most active VCs of 2019.
Quote of the Day
"We don't need a 17th bottled water brand at CVS or a 28th CliffBar competitor at Walgreens. We need our best and brightest people working on important problems that wouldn't be solved otherwise."
(Dave Perell)
Big picture
- Alexis Madrigal, "Over time, the leaders of Facebook and Google, specifically, began to argue a new line: The most innovative, competitive companies are not small and nimble, but big and rich with user data." (theatlantic.com)
- The US is starved for startup talent. (marginalrevolution.com)
Companies
- The US challenger bank Chime quadrupled its valuation over the past nine months. (ft.com)
- Legalpad wants to streamline the visa process for startup employees. (news.crunchbase.com)
- Curb space is increasingly in demand. Coord wants to help cities manage it all. (axios.com)
- Michael Moritz is investing in Turkey's Getir which promises ultra-fast deliveries. (ft.com)
Plaid
- Why Plaid will not be the last high-profile API acquisition. (abrahamthomas.info)
- Plaid executed perfectly on way to an exit. (howardlindzon.com)
Narya Capital
- J.D. Vance has launched his new VC firm, Narya Capital. (axios.com)
- Where exactly is Vance's fund planning to look for investments? (ftalphaville.ft.com)
Venture
- If the Vision Fund era is over, what comes next? (techcrunch.com)
- Why seed funds have scaled. (haystack.vc)
- Checking in on the health of the venture capital market in 2019 via some charts. (tomtunguz.com)
- Hedge funds, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds stepped up their VC activity in 2019. (institutionalinvestor.com)
- Brexit aside, venture funding of British tech companies jumped in 2019. (cnbc.com)
