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Good morning 👋

And Happy Tuesday.

Just a monthly reminder that we want to either help you, pay you, or work with you. Click one of the links above this to explore which one is right for you.

Back to the regularly scheduled programming - here’s what all you missed yesterday.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
Gaming funding dips in Q2 📉

• Gaming Startup Funding Fell in Q2 (Crunchbase)

• Commitments to VC likely to drop but remain a ‘healthy part’ of PE allocation (Venture Capital Journal)

• Market Map: Meet the startups tackling insurance paperwork (Pitchbook)

• OpenAI unveils GPT-4o mini, a lightweight version of its most powerful model to date (Techstartups)

• Inside Iconiq Growth, one of Silicon Valley’s most mysterious venture capital funds that just closed a $5.8B startup war chest (Fortune)

• Fintech Fragment eases ledger problems, nabs $9M from Stripe, Jack Altman, BoxGroup, and others (TechCrunch)

• Cohere raises $500M to beat back generative AI rivals (TechCrunch)

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LINKS

🪟 FinTech Marketing in a Post-Doge Era: Leslie Campisi pulls back the curtain on the complicated marketing moment FinTech has found itself in.

😫 Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build: John Huang argues there’s simply too many entities offering the same table stake features.

🎧 Why Founders Should Hire a Chief of Staff: The real benefit is the focus it brings to the founders.

😋 What is Work?: Naval’s view on work challenges the conventional wisdom.

📚 What I’m Reading (July 2024): Andrew Chen dishes on the books he reading and listening to.

🧐 How Much Talent Churn Is Too Much?: Data-driven VC delivers a guide for mastering the employee retention in startup land.

👨‍💻 VC Online Communities: Choose quality over quantity

🔎 Deal Flow Report: Our latest deep dive on three Sequoia-backed pre-seed and seed companies

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

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

• Big Desk Energy: Startup insights, stories, and vibes sent to your inbox every Tuesday.

• Strategy Breakdowns: By far the best newsletter we’ve found to learn big tech strategy.

POLL

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:

Were you impacted by the Crowdstrike outage on Friday?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Yep - couldn't do any work (12)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Nope - I got lucky (19)

31 Votes