Gideon Yu

Entering the Post-ZIRP, venture-capital-winter years. Thanks TechCrunch for this great summary of the macro economic context of #VC emerging managers.

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For the past year (and then some), I’ve been working closely with my Partner Will Rayner to build and launch something that we’re super excited to now make public - Lookout Ventures: a new seed stage fund, backing infrastructure and B2B software startups outside of Silicon Valley. We’re building on almost a decade spent sourcing and leading deals at TDF Ventures. While there, we saw the majority of the VC industry chasing and bidding up the same set of SaaS deals - based in a few select ecosystems like the Bay Area - and demonstrating the same set of well established go to market benchmarks. We’re not here for those deals. What we are looking for: *Regions*: The days of needing to be in Silicon Valley to succeed are over. Startup culture has spread to many metropolitan areas from Raleigh-Durham to Washington DC to Houston to Chicago. Those cities have a combination of great universities, major corporate headquarters, and local accelerators and incubators, which are the key ingredients for startup creation. We’re particularly focused on the Southeast, Midwest and Texas. *Stage*: Founders are probably sick of big brand investors telling them that their traction is too early but they’d love to stay in touch for the next round. While Lookout won’t often invest pre-revenue, we do invest before product market fit. Whether it’s called a seed, seed prime, or early A, we want to work with founders as soon as they know they have a solution ready to scale. *Sectors*: We’re comfortable investing early because we’re staying focused on topic areas in which we’ve built our expertise and networks during our past decade of investments around infrastructure software and vertical SaaS. Within those areas, we have more specialized interests ranging from MSP (managed service provider) tooling to cybersecurity serving the small business to SaaS focused on field workers in various verticals. We’re actively writing checks and are excited to already be working with great teams from Arpio, hotglue, inforcer, and CloudCapsule. If you’re building or investing in these areas, drop me a line and let’s catch up.

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🚀 Demystifying Venture: Pathways to More Money and Power 🚀 Last week, I had the honor to be invited to the Lesbians Who Tech & Allies Summit, gathering 4000+ tech, business and media leaders from all over the country. One of the highlights of the conference was a fireside chat about the VC industry featuring Candice Morgan, Partner at GV (Google Ventures) and Jana Rich Founder at Rich Talent Group. They shared some invaluable insights on how to break into venture capital and investing. Here are the highlights: 💡 Diversity in Venture: There are multiple ways to participate—angel investing, working at a VC firm, or making smarter decisions about your equity. The key? Access to information is power. 💸 True Wealth = Equity: The biggest driver of wealth in venture is through equity. Understand the risks, follow the founder’s journey, and get excited about areas you care about. 🔑 Investment Pathways: Platforms like Republic and Portfolia are making crowdfunding accessible to more diverse investors. These are great tools for those new to venture. 🎓 Educational Resources: organizations like All Raise and BLCK VC are excellent resources for anyone wanting to dive deeper into venture and investing. Thanks Gemma Allen and Anni Lundy for the invitation! #entrepreneurship #VC

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A big part of making AI usable is enabling testing to provide the necessary assurance that outputs make sense. Distributional is leading this capability.

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What's the fast river in alts? Listen to the latest Alt Goes Mainstream podcast with Mercer's Gregg Sommer & CAIS' Neil Blundell to hear how they are helping advisors approach private markets. Gregg, Neil, and I had a fascinating discussion about how the wealth channel can approach alternatives and how they can think about both diligence and customization. We covered: * The case for alternatives. * How advisors currently approach alternatives and how they can think about it differently going forward. * How to think about portfolio construction that includes alternatives. * How alts can help advisors differentiate their practice and attract clients. * Following the fast river in a career and why alternatives are “the fast river.” * The meaning of “structure over strategy.” * The rise in popularity of evergreen funds. Thanks Gregg and Neil for sharing your thoughts and expertise on private markets. Thanks to our sponsor, Ultimus Fund Solutions, for making this episode possible. https://lnkd.in/eBtyw6Fm

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How does an institutional LP decide which GPs to back? UTIMCO alum (and now partner at Foundry) Lindel Eakman opened up about how he picks on Samir Kaji's Venture Unlocked podcast 👇 (episode linked in comments) 🎣 "Would you trust them with your children?" Questions like this one tend to elicit genuine reactions and a real sense of a GP’s character and capabilities. Non-answers or silence in response to a pointed question like this one can be telling. 🤨 "Who fires who?" Questions like this help him evaluate governance and conflict resolution dynamics and the overall stability of the partnership. 1️⃣ Unlike some LPs, Lindel is very open to backing solo GPs. One of the reasons being that partnership risk -- which is one of the biggest when investing in VC funds -- is by definition, eliminated. 👍🏻 Lindel shies away from backing investors who may have potential to be top performers but are divisive or unpleasant to work with. Life is too short! Follow me - John Gannon - to learn more about the ins and outs of the VC market from all 3 sides of the table.

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One of the best podcasts that you will hear. Eric Weinstein, an accomplished business / hedge fund manager and just amazing thinker holds a master class in how to reason through a set of complex conversations. Some context here: Terrence Howard (yes the actor) came on Joe Rogan a little while ago, and did some very elaborate 'matching'. He very much comes across as a visionary, self-taught, self-reasoned through many complex ideas, bringing it all together with a vast web of historic scientific knowledge. Terrance launches into a set of core assumptions within the sciences, mathematics, physics and related topics. He tumbles through multitude of ideas from frequency, to energy, to wave theory, all very difficult to follow... but extremely compelling. Encyclopaedic knowledge, but a flow that is so rapid, and often superficial. For many casual 'scientists' and social media followers, it was like a red flag to a bull: and confirmed a narrative that 'they' (the scientific, trusted community) is lying to us, that they are not telling us something. That 'their' assumptions are wrong, but that there is a cartel of universities and institutions that is protecting it, and protecting their dominion over the sciences. This fed into Joe's common narrative that the modern scientific understanding of the world is incomplete and lacking: but more importantly that the institutions who guard this knowledge are themselves filled with political bias, making them fallible, and ultimate not trusted as much as they should be. (A lot of 'they' say this, or that.. not sure who 'they' are, except that they only have bad characteristics.) Enter Eric Weinstein, an accomplished thinker and just a superb communicator, takes Terrance through his own maze of ideas, and links between ideas, one at a time, carefully dissection the arguments. He leads this 'visionary' through his errors and discoveries,'What Terrance is doing here is... ' and sometimes he points out errors in reasoning, sometimes provides clarification, sometimes asks for clarification, but is always respectful, always careful, always thoughtful. He gives Terrance a lot of credit for his thinking, but also shapes and moulds it carefully. "You have a lot of desire to understand what it means. But before you think about it, you have to ask what it is" He delivers a masterclass in how to handle this kind of back-of-the-envelope science, that is so prominent in social media now. Terrance is in awe of him, as was I. This is where you see just an amazing capability of the human mind to reason through multiple avenues (often strange manifestation, with partial truths, and incomplete relationships), to question, to reason, to give room for each other in a very humane way. One of the best displays of human capability: both academic and the best humane characteristics, I have ever seen. #joerogan #podcasts #reasoning #human #conversation #rogan #weinstein #terrancehoward Eric Weinstein Joe Rogan

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🗞️ Breaking News: Red Ventures Selling CNET at a huge Loss❗️ Context: Red Ventures, the privately held digital media and marketing juggernaut based in Fort Mill, South Carolina, is selling CNET, one of the largest tech publishers on the web, to Ziff Davis for just $100 million. For context: Red Ventures bought CNET for approximately $500 million. Reason for the Sale: Total traffic to CNET has dropped by a staggering 50% over the last three years. The main driver behind this decline is a 68% drop in organic traffic (loss off Google rankings and traffic). Tables turned: This sale is a stunning turn of events for CNET, which once bought Ziff Davis (then a tech magazine firm) in a deal worth roughly $1.6 billion - more than two decades ago. Catch Up: - Ziff Davis trades publicly with a market value of $1.94 billion. The company lost about half of its marketcap over the course of the last 48 months. Strategic rationale: If Ziff Davis is able to ink a content licencing deal with Google, Bing/Microsoft or ChatGPT (or else e.g. X.AI) - like Reddit did - it might turn out to be a very smart deal …

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DeepCast shipped a number of really cool new features recently in advance of a broad outreach push to podcast listeners. One new feature is our new Daily DeepDigest tool that sends you a concise daily email including any new episodes from the trailing 24 hours from any podcasts you Subscribe to (on DeepCast). Think daily podcast cliff notes or podcast news ticker tape, with a hint of Morning Brew various brews or PitchBook News—it's increasing information throughput when you're pressed for time. And this feature is rapidly evolving to distill other key extractions from shows you're already interested in, but also exposing you to other shows you might be unfamiliar with that also have nuggets to share—and thus increasing your aperture yet still conscious of your time. Want to go deeper on any given episode? Click the episode detail and you're off to an episode on DeepCast, where you can subsequently read a longer form distillation of that episode or go straight to the source and listen to the episode. (And podcaster friends, these pages are definitely increasing indexing and thus Google entry points to your shows!) I'm loving this feature as a user, personally. Can't wait to see what others think! #BuildingInPublic #Podcasts #AllTheWorldsInformation #HowYouWantIt

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What a day at the inaugural Alpaca VC Capital Cup! 🏌️‍♂️☀️ Yesterday, we brought together 20 of South Florida's most incredible VCs, founders, and allocators at The Park in West Palm Beach for an afternoon that was about more than just golf. It was about starting the New Year by getting outside, connecting in-person and continuing to build the South Florida tech ecosystem. And for our team’s David Goldberg, it was about getting out of the sand in a pretty spectacular way – at least ESPN thought so (see ~45 seconds into the clip below, and you’ll get it!).   Since making South Florida my home, I've become increasingly convinced that the future of our tech ecosystem is made stronger when we step away from our screens and spend time together in person. The golf course isn't just about the green or the game – it's about the conversations, collaborations and unexpected outcomes that happen along the way. Huge thanks to our partners Escalon Services, LLC (thank you Zack Mellin) and First Circle Law (thank you Drew Morris) for supporting this vision of ecosystem building. And an even bigger thanks to everyone who showed up, swung a club and helped be a part of what’s happening here in the region: Jonathan Beda of Connexa Capital, Eric Helitzer, LEED AP of SubBase, Patrick Miller and Rob Cousin of J.P. Morgan, Steven Himmel of HighPost Capital, Harry Hurst of Protagonist, Jacob Slevin of FuseProp, Chris Wallace of Dunbar Capital, Paget S. of Gemini, Henri Pierre-Jacques of Harlem Capital, Blake Hatten of CEAS Investments, Howie Diamond of Pure Ventures, Luba Lesiva of Palumni VC, Nicki Berlyn Katz of Related Ross, Rob Hayden of Renew. These are the moments that make our South Florida tech landscape one I’m glad to be a part of. Who's ready for the next gathering? 🤝 #SouthFloridaTech #VentureCapital https://lnkd.in/eZWkqChP

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A new era of deep tech has emerged. First time funds will raise “unheard of” amounts of capital to fuel next gen deep tech startups - producing outsized, superior returns for LP’s compared to the rest. Prudent investors will act on this data and shift investment strategy as LP’s or risk being left behind savvy wealth managers and CIO’s / FO’s who saw this trend begin 4 years ago.

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Big things on the horizon, we are motivated and blessed to be at the dawn of a new age for the internet. Read more about our journey below or listen to the podcast: https://lnkd.in/eJeNhvVa

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Wonderful article about Emily Knight and the whole The Engine Accelerator team on the amazing work their doing changing the world with #ToughTech!

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I recently saw this metric from Carta’s 1Q24 VC Fund Report, which is very concerning. DPI... is nowhere to be found in earlier vintages that probably should start showing DPI. Funding early-stage projects is great, but ultimately, these venture dollars need to exit their investments and pay back their limited partners. That’s where the metric Distributed to Paid-In Capital (DPI) comes in. While managing a fund, we get interim measures during the life of the fund (e.g. IRR, MOIC), but ultimately, “you can’t eat IRR.” If you want to build a lasting venture capital organization, you need to start showing DPI for your fund. Keep in mind that this is traditional VC data from Carta, and is not strictly crypto venture. Crypto venture tends to get liquidity earlier (tokens) and things tend to go parabolic sooner (faster, more unicorns) - but I’d wager that the data here is somewhat similar for Crypto VCs… Not as much DPI as there should be from these earlier vintages. Read the full article, as well as a recap of all the crypto fundraising rounds for August, here: https://lnkd.in/g3eVJ-iF

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As folks like to say, VC is a repeat game. Yet, in my time as a VC I've witnessed behaviors that run counter to that premise, oftentimes from the people who have the most leverage. So, I was interested/delighted to see that the Founder's Institute has created and is promoting an analog to the Hippocratic Oath for VCs and finance professionals - called the Mensarius Oath (https://lnkd.in/exmEuzUN). Count me in as a supporter of the Mensarius Oath for ethical investing. #MensariusOath

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When change is the only the constant, the ability to be "in" the turbulence without letting it overtake you is vital for success. This guide from Wharton offers some excellent advice for navigating uncertainty by strategically managing workloads and priorities. It stresses the importance of maintaining a sustainable pace, making for breaks in the action and rest. Most notably, it suggests creating a list of "anti-goals" that encourages you identify what you can reasonably accomplish and avoid stretching yourself beyond your limits. #Leadership #ChangeManagement #Wellbeing

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