Nov 23, 2020

Startup Digest Reading List: New Format - Tech News & Deep Dive Posts

Issue #132 — View online — Suggest a link

Startup Digest Reading List

A curated list of the top stories in technology, startups, and venture capital.

Welcome to this week’s edition of Startup Digest’s Reading List, where I curate stories I found interesting on technology, startups, and venture capital.

I’m changing up the format a bit this week to split out the newsletter into two sections:

1) Curated news from large & high growth tech companies

2) Curated deep dive posts written by operators or pieces with significant insight.

Let me know what you think of the new format, and would love to hear your thoughts!

————————-

Written by Chris McCann, General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners. More about me.

Feel free to share with others, sign up here: https://startups.startupdigest.com/

Biggest tech news last week

Apple changed its pricing model for developers who distribute through the AppStore ecosystem. Apple is taking 15% for developers who make <$1M and 30% for developers who make >$1M.
Amazon is now selling prescription drugs, and prime members get discounts.
A few high growth tech companies filed their S-1’s to go public including: Airbnb, Affirm, Roblox, Wish, and C3.ai.

Deep dive posts

A deep dive into the story of the cap table (ownership) behind Doordash. TLDR: It’s not enough just to be early, you need to be early and have conviction to follow through to maintain or increase ownership in the winners.

The performance of VC funds is notoriously hard to find as the VC industry is very private about performance. Here are a few public sources which pull the curtain back on a subset of funds: Calpers, Calsters, University of Texas, Oregon Retirement Fund, and University of California Regents. These sources include returns data from: Khosla Ventures, Insight Ventures, Bain Capital, NEA, Shasta Ventures, Cedana Capital, Forerunner Ventures, Foundry Group, Foundation Capital, IA Ventures, Spark Capital, TechStars, True Ventures, USV, Warburg Pincus, and many other VC funds.

Puppet and CircleCI put out their yearly State of DevOps report with data from 2400 people. The biggest change over has been devops being a set of bespoke services evolving to a complete platform offering for the internal teams.

Lenny Rachitsky published a great growth fundamentals presentation covering how startups grow from their early days to scale.

——————————

This Startup Digest Reading List goes out to a wide membership base of founders, technologists, investors, and operators. Feel free to share with others, sign up here: https://startups.startupdigest.com/

Techstars Startup Digest Startup Digest Reading List is curated by:

Chris McCann - General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners
chris@startupdigest.com

Did you enjoy this issue?

Did you see something you think we should include in our newsletter? Suggest a link.

Manage all your newsletter subscriptions here.

If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.

If you don’t want to receive this newsletter anymore, unsubscribe here.