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📶 Who's making real money podcasting?

📶 Who's making real money podcasting?

Plus Jay-Z's fund is thinking about a merger, the enterprise AI roadmap, and 93 non-obvious VC takeaways

July 30, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

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Good morning 👋

Yesterday we asked whether you all use ChatGPT or Google more. The results surprised us a little, and we’ve included the responses at the bottom of this email.

We have a lot of headlines and other resources to catch you up on, so let’s jump right into it.

HEADLINES
Will the real podcasters please stand up? 🎙

Source

A Few Blockbuster Podcasts Are Making All the Money (WSJ)
State of Venture Q2’24 Report (CB Insights)
The Enterprise AI Roadmap (CB Insights)
Twitch Generated $2 Billion in Revenue in 2023 (The Information)
Vertical Farming Venture Capital Has Dried Up, But Startups Are Still Planting Seeds (Crunchbase)
Jay-Z's Venture Capital Firm Is Reportedly Planning A Merger That Could Be Valued At $1B (Essence)
Family offices are giving top staff equity and profit shares in battle for talent (NBC)
The Supreme Court Blows Up a Popular Small-Business Succession Plan (WSJ)
Open-source AI narrows gap with proprietary leaders, new benchmark reveals (VentureBeat)
Prada is building a huge Hong Kong store 4 years after shuttering its flagship there as luxury brands creep back (Fortune)
Venture Firm Narya Sees Boost in Interest After Co-Founder JD Vance’s Nomination (WSJ)
Twitch Generated $2 Billion in Revenue in 2023 (The Information)
Pinterest, LinkedIn Team Up With Publishers to Sell Ads (The Information)

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LINKS

🧑‍💻 How to Write Cold Emails and DMs that Actually Get Replies: Use this 5-step framework to 10x your replies

📈 The Ultimate Guide to Performance Marketing: Lenny’s podcast brings this discussion with Timothy Davis, who led performance marketing for all of Shopify and has consulted with companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin and Eventbrite

🔟 10 Lessons from my Journey as a Product Leader and Creator: Peter Yang has led product teams at Amazon, Meta and Robiox and shares his hard-earned lessons here

👷‍♂️ Billionaires Build: Paul Graham says the most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what users want

🍪 The Not So Cookie-Cutter Approach to Company Building—8 Lessons from Zapier: Wade Foster, founder and CEO of Zapier, shares his contrarian takes on building a billion-dollar company, from fundraising advice, go-to-market advice, go-to-market strategy, and hiring mistakes

🏋️ Why You Should Push Yourself to do Hard Things: Peter Yang interviews Nat Eliason about why he pushes himself to do hard things and his advice for aspiring creators who want to get started to avoid the dark side of the creator economy

💰 Are you underpaid? We built a tool to assess whether you’re overpaid or underpaid using our VC comp data

I’ve worked every role imaginable in venture capital over the past seven years.
I’ve worked as an LP, I’ve run a syndicate, I built a private community for VCs, and I cut my teeth as a junior VC working for two different funds.
Here are 93 things that nobody told me about VC:… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Clay Norris (@ClayNorris10)
2:51 PM • Feb 7, 2024

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FUNDS

Name	Fund Size	Fund Number
Kingswood	$1.5b	III
Menlo Ventures	$100m	I
Graham Partners	$1.8b	VI
DFJ Growth	$1m	V
Trill Impact	$98.217m	I
Alliance Consumer Growth	$160m	V

P.S. 👉 If you’re looking to get a new VC job …

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

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
Sequoia-backed companies started in the past two years and have raised <$3m 🔎

Name	Description
🎥 EdgeTrace	Real-world video understanding
🪐 Lumen Orbit	Data centers in space
🧠 Quilt	Enterprise AI for subject-matter experts

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

Here’s how you can do the same.

RECS

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POLL

Do you regularly listen to podcasts? 🎧

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- Clay

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