I got 99 problems, but this ain't one...
Hi there,
Today's newsletter is a veritable cornucopia of data covering the
top investors in backdoor unicorns (what the heck?), the crazy # of
Asian $100M ecommerce rounds in 2015 and the
billions going to cybersecurity startups.
In other news, Postmates is delivering paper copies of Vogue to your door according to
AdAge. Have we finally found a way for the internet to save print media?
Flexus who? Can't we just talk about Gilt Groupe's $50 million down round?
Yesterday, Flexus Biosciences was acquired by Bristol-Myers in a deal worth upto $1.25 billion. The company raised just $38 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins and Celgene.
We tracked 15 articles talking about this mega-exit. Yup, just 15 articles about a unicorn exit of a company focused on anti-cancer therapeutics.
Anti-cancer therapeutics are just so boring, right?
I wonder if Flexus employees at least get to use Slack?
VC bloggers - where are the women & the Europeans?
We issued our
Periodic Table of VC Bloggers a few weeks ago and outside of a
threat of violence from Hunter Walk of Homebrew and a few Mendeleev fanboys who said things like "This periodic table doesn't have any periodicity" (I have zero idea what that even means), the reaction was very positive.
People also riffed and commented on the Periodic Table which was even more awesome.
Michael Young (
@myoung), the CTO of Digg, created
an OPML file of the 89 blogs on the Periodic Table to make it easy for you to import into Digg, Feedly, etc. Thanks Michael.
Katie Bolin (
@katie_bolin) of Spark Capital
challenged women VCs and angels to blog more and committed to writing weekly. Here's a recent post Katie wrote on approaches within the
freemium space. Keep an eye on her blog.
Marcin Szelag (
@marcinslezag) of Innovation Nest
asked European VCs to step up their blogging game. He also analyzed the geography of the VC bloggers on the Periodic Table because he knew we're suckers for graphs. Here's a post by Marcin on the challenges of
investing in marketing tech companies. He has committed to blogging daily so watch his blog as well.
If you've written about the Periodic Table of VC blogs or any of our other data, reports or research briefs, definitely let me know by responding to this email as we love featuring these in our newsletter.
Best,
Anand
@asanwal