📶 AlphaSense joins the $4b club

Say “hey” 👋 | Apply 👥 | Upgrade 📶 | Affiliate 💸 | Sponsor 📣

Good morning 👋

There’s a tropical storm going through Miami and my elevator is broken, so I haven’t left my apartment all day. Tough day at the office.

Switching gears.

Let’s get into the biggest stories over the past 24 hours.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
AlphaSense joins the $4b club (and buys Tegus) 🦄

• AlphaSense raises $650M in funding at $4 billion valuation; agrees to buy rival Tegus for $930 million (TechStartups)

• The challenge of raising a sophomore fund (Venture Capital Journal)

• Exits multiply for continuation funds (Pitchbook)

• Google AI Overviews Are ‘Nail in the Coffin’ for Blogs: LTK Founder (The Information)

• Photo-sharing app BeReal acquired by Voodoo for €500m (FT)

• GM pumps $850 million in Cruise to keep struggling robotaxi company afloat (The Verge)

• Microsoft, Nvidia Lead In Investing In AI Startups, But Others Close Behind (Crunchbase)

• Consumer is actually thriving, says Glossier, Away, Farmer’s Dog-backer Forerunner Ventures (Fortune)

• Chip industry is still “at the end of a down cycle,” says German semiconductor CEO as he opens a $2.2 billion plant in Singapore (Fortune)

• Restate raises $7M for its lightweight workflows-as-code platform (TechCrunch)

• Friends & Family Capital, a fund founded by ex-Palantir CFO and son of IVP’s founder, unveils third $118M fund (TechCrunch)

Together with Confluence.VC Pro
All our products 🤝 one subscription

We’ll keep this short, so here’s what all you can get if you upgrade:

We usually charge more for this, but we’re offering three months free for our readers.

Here’s how to take advantage of that discount.

LINKS

🤓 The Dumber Side of Smart People: Morgan Housel explains why smart ideas that turn out wrong or outdated, can result in smart people clinging to very bad ideas.

🎭 Good and Bad Procrastination: Paul Graham’s advice is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list to push you.

🌉 Build Personal Moats: Erik Tornberg’s favorite career advice

💨 When Tailwinds Vanish: How to think about the internet in the 2020s

🖌 The Rise of the Software Creator: Why software creators, like content creators, will emerge as the industry’s non-professional creative class

🤖 Why It's Hard for Small Venture Funds to "Play the Game on the Field" in AI Investing: Advice for small funds investing in AI

🗣️ How to Talk About Valuation When a VC Asks: Start with the data and develop some talking points using these guidelines

👷‍♂️ Building an internet empire: How Greg Eisenberg thinks about building

🌲 Don Valentine lessons: A dozen things learned from studying one of the greats

📶 Outlier Frameworks: Our collection of how tier-one investors think

TWEET

REFER
Earn free stuff 🎁

You can get free gifts by telling your friends and family to sign up 👇

You currently have 0 referrals, only 1 away from receiving 77 Tools That Make Up the VC Tech Stack .

Copy & paste this link: https://confluencevcweekly.beehiiv.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

FUNDS

P.S. 👉 If you’re looking to get a new VC job … 

We’ve found the best way to do that is to find the jobs before they become available. In our opinion, the best way to do that is to a) find who is raising funds and b) find who is the right person to contact at each of those funds.

Lucky for you, we’ve already collected all of that information for you.

Here’s how to see all the information we have on funds (plus contact info)

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
Fastest-growing B2B analytics companies 🔢

We use Harmonic to get thousands of data points on companies like these. 

Here’s how you can do the same.

RECS

• Cyber Patterns: Social media strategies for nerds trying to blow up the internet

• The Early: A new place for junior VC resources and content

• Creator Spotlight: Your guide to the newsletter world — new stories every Friday

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay

RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in yesterday’s:

What is your initial reaction to the Apple // OpenAI partnership?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 😝 Excited about it - it will make my experience with my phone better (11)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 😑 Meh - I don't think it will change my experience much (11)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 😡 I hate it - RIP privacy (16)

38 Votes