📶 optimism for emerging managers

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Good morning 👋

And Happy Friday.

We thought yesterday was a slow news day, but then we kept finding headlines we thought you’d be interested in.

Let’s get right into it.

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TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
Emerging manager optimism 🔆

• Encouraging signs for emerging managers (Pitchbook)

• RIP Legacy Cloud. Long Live Vertical AI (Crunchbase)

• Hamilton Lane $5.6B close showcases secondaries demand (Pitchbook)

• X Aims to Boost Bottom Line With Payments as Revenues Plunge (PYMNTS)

• Internal SpaceX documents show the sweet stock deals offered to investors like a16z, Gigafund (TechCrunch)

• Most stocks hyped as winners from AI boom have fallen this year (FT)

• Apple Suspends Work on Next Vision Pro, Focused on Releasing Cheaper Model in 2025 (The Information)

• Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet, a new AI model that is 3 times faster than previous models released 3 months ago (TechStartups)

• OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever launches new AI startup, Safe Superintelligence (SSI) (TechStartups)

• Design software companies are giving AI a redesign (Fortune)

• Amazon extends generative AI-powered product listings to Europe (TechCrunch)

• Ex-HubSpot exec builds an AI-powered CRM that learns for you, with a $4M seed led by Sequoia (TechCrunch)

• Vecna Robotics’ self-driving forklifts take on 100-year-old workflow (Pitchbook)

LINKS

🌎 World-Building: The more complex or valuable whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world for your audience

♟️ A Tactical Guide for Managing Up: 30 tips from the smartest people we know

🧐 How to Assess Product-Market Fit: A key goal of early-stage companies is to find out if you built something customers liked

👓 A Guide to VC “Congrats” Tweets, from 🤑 to 😐: Here’s what they tweet but here’s what they mean

🔍 10 Places To Find Product-Market Fit: There’s no point in pushing a product that brings no real sustainable value to customers.

🛜 Your Life Is Driven By Network Effects: How to make the seven most important decisions of your life

🤫 Someday: Operating in a slow, boring fashion, “safety” murders your ambition, murders your sense of adventure.

🙌 How to Build an SDR/BDR function: Bessemer Venture Partners gives 33 tactics on how to recruit and retains high-performing sales reps

👌 How This Ex-Freelancer Grew a 7-Figure SaaS with Zero Funding: They serve thousands of happy customers, turn a healthy profit every year and have never taken a cent in funding

📶 15 Lessons From Doug Leone: Managing Partner at Sequoia and legendary venture investor

📶 Non-Traditional Paths: Why the best investors usually have non-linear trajectories

🧭 Confluence.VC Navigator: Our internal navigator tool to help readers find what they’re looking for

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.

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Here’s how to see all the information we have on funds (plus contact info)

RECS

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Creator Spotlight: How the best online creators make it all happen.

Newsletter Operator: The best newsletter we read about building a newsletter business.

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:

What is the realistic timeline for AI replacing white-collar jobs?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ It's already happening (9)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 In the next six months (15)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ It's at least a year away (5)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Two years or more (9)

38 Votes