Jbimbapa
2.8K posts
Sometimes I forget that what I've experienced growing @OrdoSchools is just not normal. Last week, I told an experienced edtech salesperson that we win 1 in 3 school RFPs — mostly cold. He was shocked. Apparently, most people in edtech don’t even bother with cold bids. “You don’t win off a proposal where you haven’t met the school”, he said. But we've built half our business this past year on cold bids. Pretty cool, right?
whoop solved a massive product issue by having its battery last >1 week now. It's genuinely a huge upgrade. That said, I think the moat for wearables that take basic hr+sleep tracking is ˜0 and all their value will come from their software
The concentration is already underway. The five largest US VC funds captured 44% of new funding in Q1. It’s difficult to frame that as returning to a healthy status quo. It’s worth considering the influence of a multi-stage brand name firm like Lux writing an open letter about the extinction of small managers. On one hand, it will make LPs reluctant to back that class of VC, which takes some competition out of the market for Lux. On the other, it may be dangerously shortsighted. As @Trace_Cohen has been saying, small firms and EMs help VC cast a much wider net early on — which is crucial for catching and identifying outlier startups. Small firms have less consensus bias, get less caught up in momentum, and can explore emerging sectors in greater detail. Large firms are skating on thin ice here, as well: It’s not ‘performance’ that allows them to survive down markets, as it’s fairly widely known that small funds outperform as an aggregate. It’s not ‘stewardship’ either. Pretty much every large fund has made embarrassing blunders in the last few years. A number, including Lux, had positions in FTX, for example. So what ensures their survival, regardless of performance or reputation? Simply, it’s their relationships with institutional LP fund managers, the multi-fund commitments that span cycles, and the sheer weight of their AuM. There’s very little about it which is meritocratic. The right thing to do, as a big name fund that can weather this market without suffering, should to support the wider ecosystem of smaller managers. Even when you’re competing with them at the small check stage. And I don’t mean becoming an LP in order to exert control over even more of the market, which is a whole other problem.
Brazil's Supreme Court will issue fines up to $8,874/day to anyone using a VPN to access Twitter/X
With the introduction of Llama 3.1 405B, we now have an open-source model that beats the best closed-source one available today on selected benchmarks. What a time.
