$UBER went public on Friday. Notwithstanding the initial stumble, Uber will go down in history as one of the most lucrative venture capital investments of all time. The stock is down from its IPO price of $45 per share, but at that price, the initial… Read More
Wired’s oral history of how the London startup scene came to be is a good reminder that, typically, a city needs some great big exits (acquisition or IPO) to really kickstart an ecosystem. In the case of Silicon Valley, you could perhaps trace things back… Read More
The word on the street is that Sonder — the marketplace for vacation rentals and competitor to Airbnb — is close to finalizing a $200 million investment round that would value the company at $1 billion. I first wrote about Sonder back in 2016 after… Read More
Machine learning is one of the most important trends in tech right now. But like anything new, it naturally raises a number of important questions and concerns. Benedict Evan’s most recent blog post provides a good explanation of what he refers to as the artificial… Read More
Fred Wilson made an interesting remark in his recent post about the current “IPO bonanza” that is taking place in the tech space. He is, of course, talking about the recent IPO of Lyft, the recent S-1 filings from Pinterest and others, and the expected… Read More
Earlier this month it was announced that the on-demand electric scooter and bike startup, Lime, had closed a $310 million series D round. This values the 18-month old company at around $2.4 billion and brings its total raise to $867.1 million. For comparison, Bird —… Read More
I have been writing about the real estate startup Opendoor for many years here on the blog. Another promising startup in this space is Knock, and today it was announced that they just raised a $400 million Series B round (led by Foundry Group). They share… Read More
Welcome to 2019. I am currently in transit and catching up on some internet reading and email on my way back to Toronto. At this time of year it is, of course, common to reminisce (or lament) about what happened over the last year, as… Read More
I have written a lot about Opendoor over the past few years because it is one of the most promising “proptech” startups in operation today and I am obviously very interested in the impact of tech on the real estate industry. I also have a fascination… Read More
Above is a screenshot from a presentation about the future of tech that Benedict Evans gave last week at venture capital firm a16z’s annual conference. And below is a video of the talk. If you can’t see it, click here. The talk is positioned as “the… Read More
