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Coatue's View of the Market, Or Why Catching a Falling Knife Is Dangerous
Coatue — the prolific technology hedge fund that managed $73 billion as of last year — privately circulated this deck, which a source passed on to me.
The slides give a picture of Coatue’s view of the stock market as of late May. Newcomer subscribers can read the 20+ exclusive slides below.
Today’s post focuses on Coatue’s view of the macro environment and shows why Coatue has been moving cautiously. The firm has proven savvier than its hedge fund brethren in navigating the tech downturn and is one of the most prolific investors in the technology industry.
Tiger Global & SoftBank Bet the Farm
I got my hands on a Tiger Global pitch deck from Q1 of 2022. (Paid subscribers can see many of the Tiger slides for themselves below.) The slides help to paint a picture of the firm’s most important investments and offer some clues as to the predicament that Tiger faces right now.
I’ve also been talking to investors. Questions are swirling. Will any of the biggest investors shut down as stocks continue to tumble?
Today, SoftBank released its earnings report, offering information about its poor performance.
The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz
Benedict Evans, Andreessen Horowitz’s former in-house analyst, has mused over the years that “A16Z is a media company that monetizes through VC.”
That observation becomes truer by the day.
While there’s a lot of loose talk on Twitter about cutting out the media and “going direct” – publishing your own story to the world without the press as an intermediary – Andreessen Horowitz is really doing it, consciously and methodically. The firm’s strategy has dramatic implications for the future of media and the venture capital industry.
This is the story of how Andreessen Horowitz disrupted the world of venture capital by cozying up to the media and then, how they purposefully threw that relationship away.
Let me tell you the story from the beginning.
Above the Crowd, An Interview With Benchmarks’s Bill Gurley
Over the years, Bill Gurley has nudged me to pay attention to his various pet crusades in DMs and WhatsApp messages. These days he’s obsessed with the flaws in the IPO process.
But he’s always just read something new or is mulling some theory about the world. I remember tearing through Billion Dollar Whale on his recommendation. It was as if he had assigned me a book report. Once I’d finished reading, I sprang back to our message thread to give him my thoughts.
We really got to know each other as I covered the Uber beat for Bloomberg. I’ve sat down with him over the years in Benchmark’s offices in San Francisco and in Woodside. When I was thinking about quitting Bloomberg to start this newsletter, he was the first VC I asked for advice.
14 Charts That Tell the Story of AI Right Now
So much is happening in artificial intelligence right now.
There’s the race between OpenAI and Anthropic.
Open source projects are hard at work to show they’re still relevant.
A gusher of money is flowing into the space.
And we’re already seeing projects ascend into hyped up glory, only to plummet back to Earth a month later.
We wanted to put some data behind everything that’s going on to make sense of what’s happening. We looked to answer questions like, How are models performing in independent tests? What projects are accumulating the largest repositories on GitHub. And what types of AI startups are raising the most funding?
Venture Capital Returns, Zipline's Mega Round & Updates from Silicon Valley
The other day I made a public records request with UTIMCO, the Texas public investment fund with over $65 billion in assets under management.
I'm not the first reporter to go ferreting through UTIMCO's disclosures for insights about performance of venture capital funds. But this data — from a report dated February 28, 2023 — gives an updated snapshot on the state of venture capital returns. And we tried to organize them nicely for you.
Other Great Posts:
Exclusive Leaked Slides From VC Firms
Profiles of Major Investors
“Story of a Cap Table”
Charts and Data-Focused Breakdowns
Analysis of the Startup Industry
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Scooter Executives Head for the Exits as Once Ambitious Technology Companies Falter