📶 The Q2 state of startups

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Good morning 👋

We have a lot to cover today - plenty of headlines, links, recs, and three Founders Fund portfolio companies that have raised sub-$3m.

Let’s jump right into it.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 💰 Funds

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
The state of startups (Q2 2024) ℹ️

• The Q2 State Of Startups In 7 Charts (Crunchbase)

• Midyear Forecast: Top Trends To Watch In H2 2024 — From Chips To AI Funds (Crunchbase)

• AI-powered legal-tech startups cut the hype, gain more traction (Pitchbook)

• Private Secondary Market Rises 58% as Deal Buildup Finally Breaks (WSJ)

• Why OpenAI Could Lose $5 Billion This Year (The Information)

• Tesla Reports 45% Drop in Second-Quarter Profit (The Information)

• Alphabet to invest another $5B into Waymo (TechCrunch)

• CrowdStrike offers a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for outage (TechCrunch)

• Vanta raises $150M Series C, now valued at $2.45B (TechCrunch)

• Alphabet’s M&A flops underscore its strategic dilemma (FT)

• CalPERS’ climate-crisis pitch deck (Pitchbook)

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LINKS

❌ Why High Growth, High Churn Products Never Seem to Work: Andrew Chen gives some suggestions of how not to have just the “illusion of success”

📚 Some Books We’re Reading this Summer 2024: Recommendations from the a16z crypto team

🔌 Money, Power, Politics, and the Internet’s Next Battleground: Chris Dixon, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen discuss the internet’s corporate takeover and how that affects startups, creativity and innovation

🛁 Calling Bubbles with Benedict Evans (Part One): The intricacies of identifying bubbles before they burst, exploring the role and future implications of AI and touching upon how companies disclose crucial data are all delved into with this episode

🧼 Calling Bubbles with Benedict Evans (Part Two): This discussion revolves around AI advancements, the economic and strategic decisions behind Apple’s use of AI, and the broader market dynamics and antitrust considerations

✅ Moving From “Hunches” to Results: 5 tips from the Founders Factory

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)
Founders Fund portfolio companies that have raised under $3m 🔎

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

Here’s how you can do the same.

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 yesterday’s piece:

Are you currently training internal AI models?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yep - with internal data from our firm (56)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Yep - but with external data from somewhere else (56)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Nope - not yet (43)

155 Votes