📶 Altman's angel portfolio

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Good morning 👋

Something I’ve learned over the years is that 99.99% of people should not angel invest unless they want to burn money on fire.

But for every rule there is an exception, and in this case, Sam Altman is that exception.

Headlines today cover his angel portfolio, autonomous taxis, Trump on TikTok, and why climate tech companies are having a make-or-break moment.

Let’s get into it.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
Altman’s angel portfolio 💰

• It’s Crunchtime for a New Generation of Climate Startups (WSJ)

• The Opaque Investment Empire Making OpenAI’s Sam Altman Rich (WSJ)

• Trump joins TikTok, outpaces Biden campaign for followers in hours (Axios)

• Microsoft lays off over 1,000 employees in cloud, mixed reality group (The Information)

• Air taxi startups are prepping for pilot-free flights (Axios)

• "Not your mom's Facebook:" Inside Meta's plan to win back the youth (Axios)

• WndrCo officially gets into venture capital with fresh $450M across two funds (TechCrunch)

• Storyblok raises $80M to bring more AI into its ‘headless’ CMS aimed at non-technical people (TechCrunch)

• Ian Osborne’s Hedosophia leads $100M raise for pre-revenue fusion startup (Pitchbook)

• Creandum collects €500 for European founders (Venture Capital Journal)

• Valar Labs Secures $22M Series A (VC News Daily)

• CoreWeave Raises $1.1B Series C Funding (VC News Daily)

• Plenful Lands $17M Series A Round (VC News Daily)

Together with the Community Builder Playbook

Communities are the new network effects.

Companies building community-first products have built-in distribution, higher LTV, lower CAC, and sustainable competitive advantages over other businesses.

We know this because we’ve seen it first-hand through building Confluence.VC.

We’ve captured everything we know about starting, scaling, and monetizing an online community into this playbook.

You can get it here if you want to learn what has worked for us.

LINKS

🙈 When Smart People Are Bad Employees: Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.

🚀 Getting Your Startup Off the Ground: How do you find ideas and validate them before launch?

🔦 How to find product-market fit: 5 strategies for web3

❓ Best questions to ask on reference calls: 25 questions to find truth

🤮 The war on hustle culture is bullshit: Translation: competitive advantage

📊 Pillar financial model template: The template that Pillar VC recommends to portfolio companies

📈 Why data-driven product decisions are hard (sometimes impossible): All the excuses we make when we see data, but why that's sometimes OK.

👶 Having Kids: Paul Graham’s evolution of thinking on kids

⚠️ Risk-seeking vs. Mitigating: Two skills for different periods of life

💰 Are you underpaid? We built a tool to assess whether you’re overpaid or underpaid using our VC comp

TWEET

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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)

RECS

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 piece:

Are you still actively deploying into generative AI companies?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yes - absolutely ✅ (14)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ No - not a chance ❌ (12)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Taking a wait-and-see approach 🟡 (6)

32 Votes