Sailing Through Rainbows of Sound
w.220 | Unicorn Retrospective, Real Estate and Housing, Occupational Licensing, Final Foundry
Dear Friends,
Thanks for allowing the late newsletter edition. Even though it's short and sweet, I wanted to get this one out to return to the groove of writing and shipping.
Today's Contents:
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
Unicorn Rant
Song of the Week: Sailing Through Rainbows of Sound
Good Reads: Sensible Investing
Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work - Analytical report from the IMF. It doesn’t look great for the professional class in high-income countries.
The Future of Healthcare is Private Practice - From Slow Ventures, but a structured read for the uninformed. We will see how medical school graduates approach the idea of ‘hanging up a shingle’ versus the trend towards secure employment and structured flexibility that has been on offer for the last several years.
The Final Foundry Fund. The Foundry Group was one of the OG venture funds for a generation and announced they won’t raise another fund. I thought the announcement was well-presented and mature.
Trend: Institutions begin to loosen restrictions to get talent in jobs. Viral articles of the week:
Emergency-Hired Teachers Do Just as Well as Those Who Go Through Normal Training
Mike Bloomberg pours $250M to open health care high school in Dallas. It's great to see education and career pathway options that go around traditional higher education gearing up. Now, young people can avoid being indebted and have greater certainty that they will land a position in a higher-paying career.
America may begin to catch up with the vocational pragmatism of Europe.
Real estate and housing are holding us back—a round-up of articles.
John Gray and Peter Thiel: Life in a Postmodern World
Unicorn Rant
Welcome Back to the Unicorn Club, 10 Years Later - Article by Aileen Lee and Cowboy Ventures.
Venture Capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term ‘unicorn’ for a startup with a $1Bn valuation in 2013. Her latest piece is a retrospective on the 532 unicorns in her data set.
The report's takeaways show how meaningless the term ‘unicorn’ is and that the misleading moniker indicates the rot at the core of the venture and startup ecosystem that is still winding its way down from the ZIRP era.
For example, as they note, 93% are “papercorns,” privately valued companies, and 60% are “ZIRPicorns.” Their last valuations were from 2020–2022, when interest rates were near zero, and many are running out of runway.
The consequences are now cascading. Terms and conditions matter, particularly of later financings, and often early investors get crushed off the capable, and their returns diminish through down rounds and preferences.
The truth is that ‘unicorns’ are not a productive way to think about the world of startups and venture capital. Yet most venture marketing includes a metric of “this VC has invested in X unicorns” as if that is the qualification for success.
The industry is still learning that liquidity events and healthy financial performance matter. And the end is in sight.
One last fun point:
Learning Tech has the least unicorns (although education companies are in the vertical and enterprise SaaS categories)…
…but it’s the most capital-efficient sector.
Song of the Week: Sailing Through Rainbows of Sound
Video on YouTube.
I’ve greatly enjoyed listening to Richard Houghten’s multi-instrumental music while working. I found him on Spotify.
“Sailing Through Rainbows of Sound” by Richard Houghten.
Instrumental
Selfie of the Week
I guess I haven’t been taking that many (any?) selfies lately. But here is some visual art I made during a ‘makers evening’ to go with the song (album) of the week.
Thanks for reading, friends. Please always be in touch.
As always,
Katelyn