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📶 LPs put succession plans in the spotlight

📶 LPs put succession plans in the spotlight

Plus what happens if Middle East money disappears, a former Battery VC raises a massive new fund, and Codeium gets more funding to automate coding

September 04, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes

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Good morning 👋

And happy hump day.

I just read somewhere that 42% of all newly minted unicorns were AI startups.

In case you needed another stat to suggest we’re in a bubble …

Let catch you up on what else happened yesterday.

HEADLINES
LPs advice to GPs: find a successor ⏭

Source

LPs are placing more importance on GP succession plans (Venture Capital Journal)
What happens if Middle Eastern VC money stops flowing? (Pitchbook)
Former Citi, Battery VC has new $378M fund that helps startups land Prudential, Mutual of Omaha, others as investors and customers (TechCrunch)
AI startup Codeium notches $1.25B valuation in race to automate coding (Pitchbook)
NEA quietly reenters the secondaries market (TechCrunch)
The IPO Market Will End 2024 On A Low Note (Crunchbase)

LINKS

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ A Simple Exercise to Take Back Time to Focus on What Matters: Peter Yang teaches how to eliminate, simplify, automate, delegate, and own—-in that order

⚖️ Automating Founder Reach Out: Study suggests investors looking for leverage AI in founder outreach should balance need between automation and human touch

🤐 The Controversial Startup Truth: The harsh realities no one talks about

🛟 Uncomfortably Safe: In a world that increasingly prioritizes comfort, it’s important to remember that choosing to be comfortable all the time also has consequences

🔥 Airbnb’s Vlad Loktev on Embracing Chaos, Inquiry Over Advocacy, Poking the Bear, and “Impact, “Impact, Impact”: Why chaos in good, learning to poke the bear and why it’s ok to let some fires burn

✊ How Steve Jobs Raised His First Funding: He kept on knocking…

👀 Spotlight Stealth, Early & Growth Startups: Data-Driven VC shares their top picks

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

"more money has been stolen with the tip of a pen than the point of a gun" -- Warren Buffett
— Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP)
5:07 PM • Sep 1, 2024

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FUNDS

Name	Fund Size	Fund Number
Earlybird VC	$242m	I
Radical Ventures	$800m	I
HighPost Capital	$100m	I
Antler	$72m	II
Balderton Capital	$615m	IX

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

STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
US-based AI seed companies that raised in the past week 🔎

Name	Description
Vybe	The AI camera
Inventive	AI-powered RFP & questionnaire response management
Moveo.AI	Transform your website into a generative AI agent

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

Book a demo with their team to see how you can do the same.

RECS

Strategy Breakdowns

A 3-minute email on the strategy playbooks and growth hacks that built the world's greatest companies.

POLL

Does your fund / company / place you work have a succession plan in place?

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:

Do you think OpenAI is overvalued or undervalued at $100b?

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🔝 Overvalued - that's WAY too expensive (10)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 ✨ Undervalued - we'll look back at this as a steal (15)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 🤷‍♂️ I have no idea - need more data (12)

37 Votes

Reply

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