📶 a new largest venture deal of all time

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Good morning 👋

In the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, “Scared money don’t make money.”

And that’s the approach that OpenAI is taking.

They’re expected to raise $6.5 billion at a $150 billion pre-money valuation, while also turning down billions of oversubscribed dollars.

This would pass the $6b xAI round earlier this year as the largest venture deal of all time.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
The king of fundraising 👑

• OpenAI closes in on largest VC round of all time (Axios)

• Fed rate cut to hit private markets ‘months down the road’ (Pitchbook)

• Hydrogen Startup Funding Continues To Boom (Crunchbase)

• Grok’s image generator, Black Forest Labs, is raising $100M at a $1B valuation, say sources (TechCrunch)

• Zoom the latest tech firm to reduce equity pay (Newsnation)

LINKS

䷰ The Evolution of Samsung—From Groceries to Global Tech Giant: How Samsung’s strategic pivots shaped a global empire

💼 Mastering Portfolio Construction: The Generalist details how to build a strategy that maximizes returns

🛜 Beyond the PayPal Mafia: How alumni networks drive new ventures

🤨 Unfortunate Startup Pivots (a Short List): Andrew Chen explains why adding chat/social, B2B to consumer, going free, and other pivots that don’t work

😠 Why Is Everyone Hating on Product Managers?: Big tech PMs have become a bad meme, here are 10 reflections to earn back respect for this profession

👨‍💻 Rethinking SEO in the Age of AI: Lenny’s podcast reveals SEO insights from Eli Schwartz, author of The Product-Led SEO, about mid-funnel tactics and the future of search

TWEET

REFER
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FUNDS

Explore all new funds (along with contact info) 👉 here.

COMMUNITY
What do investors from a16z, Bessemer, Founders Fund, and Insight have in common?

They’ve all joined this private investor community.

Here are a few reasons you should think about doing the same …

👥 Member directory: Venture is a networking game after all, right? Join 2,100+ other investors already inside and get access to the entire member directory once accepted

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🗣 Investor-only Slack: Where venture, growth, and private equity can answer hard-to-find questions and gather signal through the noise

RECS

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 Friday’s piece:

What do you think of these Friday recaps?

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ ✅ Keep sending these out (14)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 👍 Keep doing this - but maybe do it once / two weeks (12)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ❌ Don't like these - stick to the news (16)

42 Votes