📶 more VC musical chairs

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Good morning 👋

It’s becoming a lot harder to retain talent, and that applies to venture roles too.

Over the past year, we’ve seen dozens of departures from places like a16z, Cowboy, Bedrock, Tiger, and others, and it doesn’t sound like the trend is slowing down.

Today we’ve got more on that, the best startup cities, three new companies founded by teams with prior exits, plus why one investor thinks we're in a golden era for pro rata deals.

Let’s get into it.

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TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• ™️ Startups

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

HEADLINES
VC musical chairs continue 🪑

• Venture capitalists continue to play musical chairs (TechCrunch)

• Corporate Venture Deal Numbers Are Down Despite Big AI Headlines (Crunchbase)

• The world’s top startup cities (Pitchbook)

• Anthropic reportedly in early talks to raise new funding on up to $40B valuation (Silicon Angle)

• Alpha Partners’ Brotman: “one of the best times in history for pro rata deals” (Venture Capital Journal)

• Polymarket Discusses Fresh Funding Amidst Election Betting Craze (The Information)

COMMUNITY
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Four years ago, we started our investing careers with zero guidance.

After being the dumbest person in the room for a year, we wouldn’t wish that on anybody else.

So we built our own playbook with everything we wish we knew about venture investing earlier.

Then we turned that playbook into a private community for investors.

Fast forward to today, and we have helped thousands of investors from all over the world.

If you work full-time in VC, growth equity, or private equity, we’d love to have you.

Apply to join 2,127 other members.

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LINKS

👨‍💻 State of the Product Job Market, Part 2: Lenny brings the data on what’s happening in the job market

🏭 Bureaucrat Mode: Andrew Chen posts a tweet that helps explain how when companies get big, scaled, and successful the “best practices” can become industrialized and becomes hard to get anything done

🏈 The Paradox of Competition: It either raises your game or causes you to quit

🔀 Bootstrapping vs VC Funding—What’s the Better Path?: Data-Driven VC gives some synthesizing insights from the data

🔥 Working Hard in a Burnout Society: 3 solutions that are simple but not necessarily easy

TWEET

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STARTUPS (Together with Harmonic)
Pre-seed and seed companies started this year by founders with a prior exit 🔎

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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:

What is the right amount of YC cohorts / year?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 1 (6)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 2 (10)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ 3 (7)

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 4 (9)

32 Votes