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Good morning 👋

I had a bachelor party in Charleston over the weekend. That’s my excuse for sharing this a day late.

In other news, Telegram shared their numbers earlier this week. They’re good enough for us to cover the news, so we give our two cents on that story in this week’s piece.

P.S. Our next deal flow report goes out on Sunday.

Here’s how to get it in your inbox.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 📌 Jobs

• 📶 Visual

• 🗳 Poll

• ☕️ Memes

NEWS
Telegram isn’t just for the ultra-paranoid 💬

Telegram has reached 900m AUMs and plans to IPO before 2026. The company currently has “hundreds of millions” in revenue and has been offered money from investors at a $30b valuation.

Why it matters: 

A few things stand out about this news:

1. Telegram is WAY larger than we originally thought (and growing). We believed the company was only going after those who valued communication privacy. Turns out, that number is higher than we imagined. The company was at 500m AUMs in 2021. They have almost doubled that in three years.

2. The medium is the message. In other words, the platform that people choose to communicate on holds more weight than the actual message they communicate. If #1 is true and Telegram’s growth is any indicator, that means a growing percentage of the population is fed up with being part of the surveillance state. They are voting against it by where and how they communicate with each other.

3. Revenue / employee is world-class. We think this is one of the strongest metrics to evaluate businesses today (no more gauging success on headcount). Telegram currently has ~50 employees. This sets a good precedent for other companies looking to replicate some of their success.

What happens next: 

The projected IPO date is not until 2026, so there’s still a lot of time between now and then. If Telegram continues on its current path, we expect this to be one of the largest exits of the year whenever the IPO window opens again.

In the meantime, we recommend every investor study how Telegram operates. Revenue per employee is the future of business underwriting, and Telegram is one of the best in the world at maximizing leverage of each new hire.

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LINKS

🍕 VC and free lunch: Why VC is the best asset class

🖊 The trough of feedback: Why VCs aren’t incentivized to give real feedback

⚕️ The Huberman-ization of America: Why people are getting more serious about their health

🧠 Bill Gurley’s best advice: A brain dump of his best ideas over the years

📤 23 bits of subscription advice: From somebody with 23 years of building subscription products

⛔️ The dangers of being a LTV/CAC disciple: One of Bill Gurley’s best

📶 February 2024 recap: Live look into our business update from last month

TWEET

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JOBS
Finding your next role in venture 📌

P.S. 👉 If you’re hiring (or plan to hire) investors … 

We’re building a better way for venture capital and growth equity funds to build world-class investment teams. Here’s how.

Let us know what roles you’re hiring for, and we’ll follow up if we can help you.

RECS

MEMES

Let us know if you have a better meme.

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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

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