📶 "let me know how I can be helpful" goes to Washington

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Good morning 👋

Slow news day for venture capital, so the biggest story of the day is Trump’s new VP pick, J.D. Vance.

He’s a protégé of Peter Thiel, a former marine, a former VC, and he is a rare politician with real views on the current state of technology.

We have a few pieces below on his stance on open AI along with his rationale for crypto support and adoption.

P.S. We have a deal flow report going out to premium subs this Sunday.

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TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
Trump’s VP pick is pro-tech 📈

• Trump V.P. pick J.D. Vance praised for comments seemingly in support of open source AI (Venturebeat)

• Trump’s VP pick is the first ever ‘bitcoiner’ on a presidential ticket (The Independent)

• Musk plans to give $45m a month to new pro-Trump PAC (Reuters)

• Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz Say They Plan to Donate to Trump PAC (The Information)

• Pro rata rights: The overlooked superpower of VCs and their LPs (Venture Capital Journal)

• Exa raises $17M from Lightspeed, Nvidia, Y Combinator to build a Google for AIs (TechCrunch)\

• Microsoft’s new AI system ‘SpreadsheetLLM’ unlocks insights from spreadsheets, boosting enterprise productivity (VentureBeat)

• Docyt AI Unveils GARY, the World’s First AI Bookkeeper (VentureBeat)

LINKS

🤖 No SaaS! How AI Agents Will Change Software Pricing: Tomas Tunguz gives his two cents

⑃ Crucible Moments: The Pivotal Decisions That Define Us: Roelof Brotha gives his perspective on how small things make massive impacts

🎾 It’s Only a Point: Alfred Lin + Roger Federer gives perspective

🔎 Traits I look for in founders: Good list

📶 Do Startup Valuations Matter for Investment Returns? Backed by some AngelList data

✍️ Writing Well: Julian Shapiro breaks down his writing process

⛔️ The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula: LTV isn’t always what you think it is

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)

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
a16z companies that have raised <$2m and were started after 2022 🔎

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

Here’s how you can do the same.

RECS

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

• High Yield Harry: Where we get our favorite finance memes

• Mainstreet Memos: Democratizing venture, one newsletter at a time

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:

Which statement is the MOST believable?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ "AGI is going to change everything, and none of us are going to have jobs." (7)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ "AI is WAY too overhyped, and most of the dollars spent today will be wasted." (5)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 "Nobody knows what will happen, but the only predictable way to make money is to invest in infrastructure (chips, GPUs, etc.)." (15)

27 Votes