venture capital
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COVID-19 Edition: What is venture sentiment today? – First Republic Bank published interesting results from a survey they conducted of 427 venture capital firms. Over the past month or so, there have been a lot of VCs posting on Twitter that they’re open for business. The data here tell a different story. Internet Speech Will…
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For Black America, COVID-19 Is The Bullet. America Is The Gun – “This is how the coronavirus kills Black people. This is how half of the related deaths in Mississippi are Black. This is how 70 percent of the deaths in Louisiana are Black. Sixty-two percent in D.C. And so on. And so on. Not by Black…
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Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Report Banks Have Too Much Money Now – “But ideally what you want is for banks to have lots of capital in bad times, and then relax those requirements—let them lever up and buy stuff and take deposits and lend and trade Treasuries and generally support the financial system and the…
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TikTok Is the New Music Kingmaker, and Labels Want to Get Paid (Bloomberg) I wonder what it is about the music industry that has it looking at itself on the wrong side of a deal once again. Decades ago, Napster and file sharing put a massive dent in the industry, then Apple came along and…
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From Managing Decline to Building the Future What would it look like for there to be a visa program that matched skilled immigrants with communities that are especially hard-hit by population decline in the U.S.? The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank founded by Sean Parker of Facebook fame, just published a report outlining this…
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Several weeks ago, Chamath Palihapitiya did an interview with Kara Swisher on Recode/Decode that really got my attention. He was talking about how the venture capital industry was overdue for a shakeup to meet the needs of technology startups. He talked about using data science to identify investment opportunities and scale companies, similar to what…
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Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend who is raising a fund for her Lagos-based startup. At one point in our conversation, she shared the effort she has had to go through to get people she has met with in Silicon Valley up to speed on what is happening in Nigeria’s tech space. This has…
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I thoroughly enjoyed interviewing Eric Osiakwan about his experience building internet infrastructure in its early days in African countries, and the transition to investing in African startups. On top of that, he is pushing to get more Africans in the investing game to support the growth of the technology industry across the continent. Here’s the…
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I was glad to see the news about the launch of Valor Ventures, a VC firm led by women and focused on finding women founders. Another firm that excites me is the Impact America Fund. Here’s a good interview it’s founder, Kesha Cash, did with the Andreesen Horowitz team. Some time ago, I posted First…
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Marc Andreessen’s frenetic pace on Twitter has fascinated me for the past year. He seems to devour a ton of information and makes nice connections between the current technology landscape and the history and theory that got us to this point. The New Yorker did a helpful profile on him – the kind that makes…
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Entrepreneurs across the African continent are developing highly innovative technologies that are meeting real needs and improving the ease of life for people from all walks of life. At this year’s MIT Venture Capital (VC) Conference, I sat in on a panel that covered Brazil’s VC space. Two things struck me as very different from…
Kwame Som-Pimpong 