📶 Meta keeps slashing

This Week in Venture

Meta keeps slashing 💀

Meta announced last week that the company is doing more rounds of layoffs, this time targeting technical roles.

Why it matters: Consumers are hurting ➡️ less disposable income ➡️ worse ad performance ➡️ more ad spend pullback ➡️ less revenue for platforms like Meta. This is the simplified view of what has been happening over the past year or so at the company, and it’s hard to see a world where this trend doesn’t continue.

The more interesting trend that is developing through Meta and other big tech layoffs is the fact that these businesses can continue to operate with significantly less humans around.

The promise of software eating the world was exactly this: humans and businesses should be able to get more output with less input. That has already been happening, and it will continue.

Many people tell themselves that working at a large company is the “safe” route. Turns out, that is probably wrong.

Expect more single-employee businesses and less multi-thousand company businesses.

What happens next: Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Google and loads of other tech companies have made cuts over the last two years. How many of those businesses have gone under? Did the businesses even skip a beat?

We’re generalizing of course, but in most cases, the answer is “no”.

We expect three major things to happen coming out of this:

1. Revenue / employee will become a measure of success in private markets. Top-line revenue is irrelevant if the “L” part of the P/L statement puts you in the red. Markets reward efficiency.

2. A larger emphasis will get placed on owned distribution channels. Buying traffic through advertising is renting a house on sand; you don’t own the eyeballs, and it will only get more expensive over time.

3. College students and young people will re-evaluate career choices. What happens when the “safe option” isn’t actually that safe?

Sydecar makes it easier to gather LP dollars 📈

Sydecar launched Fund+ as a way for venture capital funds to raise LP dollars under a single entity.

Why it matters: Ask any emerging manager what the worst part of the job is. 90% of the time, they’ll admit it’s fundraising.

Raising a first fund is hard for a number of reasons, and your ability to raise your first fund hinges on the strength and liquidity of your network. (As an FYI, most LPs have restrictions where they aren’t allowed to invest into first-time funds.)

But what if your network isn’t in a position to write sizable checks?

This new product by Sydecar changes that, and now fund managers can pool together smaller checks under one entity, and Sydecar can take care of the automated banking, compliance, tax, and other stuff that goes into closing docs.

Say you’re raising a new fund, most of your capital connections aren’t in a position to write a $250k+ check, but they still want to participate and become an LP. Instead of drafting up separate docs for each of them, you can now create a single SPV, send it out to each person, and have organize all of their LP information under a single line item.

What happens next: Especially right now, it’s hard out there if you’re a first-time fund manager.

The low-interest environment is over, limited partners are more conservative with their positions, and fundraises are taking quarters longer than expected.

Raising a portion of the fund through an SPV increases the potential number of LPs, and we expect this to become more common in the coming months.

If you’re an emerging manager looking to get to your final close faster, you should check out this product.

Together with Secureframe

Get SOC 2 in weeks (not months)

SOC 2 reports provide the necessary validation that businesses require to stay compliant.

The problem with SOC 2?

It used to take FOREVER to complete. Until Secureframe.

Secureframe’s platform uses intuitive workflows and automated evidence collection to help you obtain a SOC 2 report in weeks, not months.

Schedule a personalized demo with their team to see how.

Links We Like

🔮 Choose Your Number: How to escape the mental prison of constantly pursuing more money

🐭 6 Ways to Improve CTR in Google Search: Nobody cares how good your content is if they never click into your article

📌 Why VC Hiring Sucks: Five reasons the current process is broken plus a better solution

⏭ Funnel Optimization: How we run our funnel to convert 4x higher than industry averages

➡️ Investor Recruiters: The 39 best recruiting firms focused on placing talent in venture, growth, and private equity roles

💳 Brex Review: Pros, cons, comparisons, plus 50k free points if you sign up

📝 Typeform Review: Data is the new oil, and Typeform is the best data collection tool in the market

🧠 100 Mental Models: How to think better

Have an article you like that we should include in this section? Let us know by responding to this email.

What We’re Learning

Retesting landing page design (and we improved our page for founders)

We’re continually testing new landing page ideas to see what works best. At the end of the day, you can always be improving copy, design, and layout, and your landing page can always be performing better than it is today.

Over the past week, we redesigned our founders page. Check it out and let us know if you love it or hate it.

Wordpress and other website hosting services have plenty of templates to choose from. You don’t need to recreate the wheel, and you’re better off using these pre-made templates than creating something from scratch.

We used this service to roast our landing page and give us good feedback on what to improve. Highly recommend using it for anybody that wants quick improvements.

If anybody has experience optimizing landing page conversation, let us know. We’d love to talk.

Tools: Wordpress, Roast My Landing Page

Tweet of the Week

The most important skillset

Together with Brex

Wait … you guys manage your spend?

Obvious statement alert: managing invoices and team spend is a nightmare.

Chasing down receipts, uploading to a spreadsheet, sending to another team to approve, and reimbursing your employees sounds … super fun.

Brex takes this archaic process from the Stone Ages to the modern era by giving finance teams the tools they need to operate. Dashboards, automations, integrations, and financial modeling instead of manual work that makes you want to reconsider jobs.

Give your finance team the tools they need to operate in today’s world.

Question of the Week

Bev-tech investors

Anybody else investing in beverage tech? Give Susannah a shout if you want to trade notes.

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

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- Clay and Tyler