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TLDR from Z

I’m writing this to all of you late at night, wearing a viral Korean sheet mask, drinking a kettl matcha latte, and working on diligence for a deal I’m pursuing.

Would love to grab coffee and chat if you’re in one of the following cities between now and late August:

• Park City / Salt Lake City (next week)

• Chicago (next week)

• NYC (week of July 22nd)

• Hong Kong (early August)

• Singapore (early August)

• Tokyo (maybe!!!! early August)

Quick newsletter structure update on my end: I've decided to add more personal insights to the newsletter, making it a more engaging read. This has been a no-fluff newsletter packed with the most concise recap I could give you on all that has happened in the VC/tech ecosystem in the past week. You’ll now see more quips from me scattered throughout the news section, investor features, job opportunities section, and more. Also experimenting with a smaller font - lmk if you think it’s too small.

VC Industry News

• Investors bet $24 billion on AI companies during the second quarter, new Crunchbase data shows, doubling the amount invested in the burgeoning space in the first quarter. AI investments represented 30% of the total dollars invested in the quarter.

• Microsoft drops OpenAI board seat amid antitrust concerns

• Pitchbook says defense tech is a stalwart in an otherwise chilly VC environment: Pitchbook numbers show that while overall venture capital deals have slowed over the past year, the defense tech sector has weathered the storm better than most others.

• Floodgate’s Mike Maples explains how startups that most people ‘don’t like’ are the best ones to back

  • ZN’s POV: me constantly defending consumer social and CPG

• Investor appetite for early-stage and growth rounds in climate-tech startups continued to wane through the first half of 2024, per data from research firm Sightline Climate.

• Notion’s CTO explains what’s next for the productivity behemoth: Fuzzy Khosrowshahi talks with Fast Company about competing against Slack and Google.

• A second-quarter rebound for fintech: fintech companies raised about $14.9 billion in the second quarter of the year, up 47% compared with one year earlier and up 60% compared with 2024's first quarter.

• More ex-military officials are becoming VCs as defense tech investment reached $35B

• Andreessen Horowitz Is Building a Stash of More Than 20,000 GPUs to Win AI Deals

  • “Sequoia and A16Z, have differing views on the demand for GPUs in AI. Andreessen Horowitz is stockpiling and renting GPUs to startups, indicating they foresee ongoing shortages. In contrast, Sequoia believes GPU constraints have peaked and further production will waste investor money. Andreessen Horowitz has secured its own GPU clusters and aggressively invested in AI startups, including OpenAI competitor Mistral and Elon Musk's xAI. A16Z led 19 generative AI deals worth $1.3 billion in the past two years and has raised two dedicated AI funds.”

• Why Bill Gates believes AI superintelligence will require some self-awareness

• From Facebook to the face of crypto: Inside Anthony Pompliano’s wild career

• Investors chase wealth tech startups in India as affluent class grows

• Crypto VCs are in rebound mode: In Q2, companies in web3, NFT, DAO, metaverse, and gaming sectors raised a total of $758 million, with Farcaster and Zentry leading at $150 million and $140 million respectively. Investments in infrastructure, trading, and layer 1 firms each received 12% to 15% of the capital.

• Vitamins, minerals and supplements set to drive next wave of investment per XRC Ventures report

• Wall Street veteran Sallie Krawcheck built Ellevest into a $2 billion juggernaut that creates wealth for women. Her advice? ‘Know where the power is’

• AI has destroyed Google’s promise of carbon neutrality, with emissions rising 50% over the last five years

• Why Top Nuclear Experts And Ex-CIA Brass Joined A High School Grad's Tiny Fusion Startup

• How Former Operators Are Redefining Consumer Growth-Stage Investing

• The Fuzzy Math Behind Scale AI’s $13.8 Billion Valuation: Scale AI’s 27-year-old CEO, Alexandr Wang, used to compete in national high school math competitions. His latest math-related victory may have been convincing investors in Silicon Valley to stretch his own company’s numbers.

• Creator Startups Have Already Raised as Much Money This Year as in All of 2023

  • The Creator Economy’s AI Tailwind: “Investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is driving increased funding for creator economy startups, reversing a two-year decline. The second quarter continued the rebound from the first quarter, indicating investors' confidence in generative AI's potential to create valuable tools for content creators.”

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Fundraising News

• Beeble AI raises $4.75M to launch a virtual production platform for indie filmmakers

• Iceland is dodging the VC doldrums as Frumtak Ventures lands $87M for its fourth fund

• Female entrepreneurs can fundraise 20% faster than men on crowdfunding platforms, research finds

  • ZN’s POV: it should be noted that this study was conducted in The Netherlands and reviewed 934 crowdfunding campaigns across 3 Dutch crowdfunding platforms.

• Humane execs leave company to found AI fact-checking startup

  • ZN’s POV: in case you forgot, Humane is the company that made the "worst product” Marques Brownlee’s ever reviewed

• Canoe Intelligence raises $36 million for Series C led by Goldman Sachs

• Startup Volley Raises $55 Million to Create Voice-Powered AI Games

• PointOne raised a $3.5M seed round from Bessemer Venture Partners, 8VC, General Catalyst, and more.

• With $6M in seed funding, Enso plans to bring AI agents to SMBs

• This $1.5 Billion AI Company Is Building A ‘General Purpose Brain’ For Robots: Skild AI has raised $300 million to continue building its plug-and-play robotic intelligence with the hope of enabling companies to integrate it into robots of all kinds.

• Marc Andreessen, Sequoia again back Kearny Jackson, this time in $65M Fund III

• Accend raises a $3.2M seed round

• AI startup Hebbia raised $130M at a $700M valuation on $13 million of profitable revenue

  • Hebbia drives over 2% of OpenAI’s daily volume

• Nala to use $40M Series A to build B2B payments platform, scale remittance services

• Index Ventures raises $2.3B for new venture and growth funds

  • Business Insider also reports “An exodus of investors is underway at Index Ventures on the back of a $2.3 billion fundraise”

• Quantum Rise grabs $15M seed for its AI-driven ‘Consulting 2.0’ startup

• This Biotech Startup Raised $12.5 Million To Find Bacteria That Help Fight Cancer

• J2 Ventures, focused on military healthcare, grabs $150M for its second fund

• Forestay, Europe’s newest $220M growth-stage VC fund, will focus on AI

• Spain’s exposure to climate change helps Madrid-based VC Seaya close €300M climate tech fund

Consumer-Specific News - subscribe to my other newsletter Fan Behavior.

• noplace, a mashup of Twitter and Myspace for Gen Z, hits No. 1 on the App Store

• Etsy will now tell you what role a seller had in a product’s creation: the online marketplace is requiring all items to be listed as either “made by a seller,” “designed by a seller,” “sourced by a seller,” or “handpicked by a seller.”

  • ZN’s POV: this is great and symbolizes the extremities of Gen Z’s consumption behavior. On one hand, Gen Z’s love vintage shopping and sustainable fashion aggressively but on the other hand are shopping from Shein/Temu 24/7 and spending copious amounts of money on fast fashion (to the climate’s detriment). Etsy used to fit more into the ~vintage consumption behavior because buying from an Etsy seller was considered ~small business and ~unique. This new requirement will force consumers to confront how much they care about originality in a product vs. purchasing another drop-shipping-esque product.

• As more and more weight-loss startups prescribe Ozempic and Wegovy, doctors say they’re making unproven claims.

• Could Ariana Grande joining Weverse start the K-popification of American music? As labels look for new ways to court high-spending superfans, they’re starting to embrace K-pop’s favorite fan-engagement app.

  • ZN’s POV: Won’t write too much here but I firmly believe all fan-engagement platforms are going to look more like the Asian founded community platforms like Weverse vs. the same old link-in-bio, subscribe for premium content type of engagement we see in the US. Wanna read more about my thoughts here? Fan Behavior.

    • I hate to break it to everyone, but Scooter Braun is involved in Weverse via his involvement in Hybe. If you don’t know why this is a bad thing

• Kitsch’s CEO started out selling handmade hair ties. Now she runs a viral haircare brand known for plastic-free shampoo bars

• [cafeteria] came out of stealth; a new consumer-tech platform that “pays teens to shape brands they know best”

• Away CEO Jen Rubio expands luggage brand into soft-shell bags and puts IPO on the back burner

• A host of influencers offer etiquette lessons online, preaching on posture and teaching table manners. #Etiquette posts on TikTok have been viewed more than 5bn times. William Hanson, a British etiquette coach with some 5m fans on Instagram and TikTok, leads The English Manner, an “etiquette and protocol institute”. Sara Jane Ho, a Chinese instructor, has taken niceties to Netflix. “Mind Your Manners”, a reality show, was nominated for an Emmy award in 2023.

• Athletic Brewing raised $50M in a General Atlantic-led funding round that values the company at ~$800M after more than $90M in sales in 2023.

• MrBeast’s $100 Million Amazon Deal Is an Outlier

• Spotify is going to let you leave comments on podcast episodes

• When 2.0 Ventures, a private equity firm in Salt Lake City, took a majority stake in an apparel brand called Feat Clothing this May, it talked up the “exponential success” Feat Clothing had demonstrated. Specifically, its press release pointed to the $75 million valuation Feat had achieved in its last funding round in March 2022. What 2.0 Ventures didn’t disclose were any recent growth metrics or the size of the acquisition. But there are signs that Feat’s acquisition likely did not exceed the sky-high valuation touted in the press release.

• Capri Sun is looking to raise $500M via a minority stake sale. The company is controlled by Swiss billionaire Hans-Peter Wild and generates around $1.5B in annual revenue.

• A creator hit $16M ARR today on Whop

Niche internet lore

Gen Z’s favorite pop-stars are Hannah Montana coded and the content we’re getting from them breaks out of the mundane rising star media circus routine.

1. Sabrina Carpenter is on Hot Ones

   1. reminder — BuzzFeed Struggles to Sell Owner of Hit YouTube Show ‘Hot Ones’: several parties are interested but balk at $70 million price

2. Chappel Roan is doing a sit-down interview with Drew Afualo

Tweets to think about

Investor Features (so far)

This is my favorite section of No GPs Allowed and I’m so excited to have featured so many incredible investors on this newsletter thus far. I’d love to widen the scope of features beyond my immediate network: nominate yourself or someone else to be featured on No GPs Allowed below.

• Layla at Female Founders Fund

• Johnnie at Listen Ventures

• Marcello, CoS at Novo (previously at Notation Capital fka GGV)

• Lauren at FJ Labs

• Vaneezeh at Thomson Reuters Ventures

• Connor at Visible Ventures

• Georgie at Headline Ventures

• Nikunj at Khosla

• Sakib at Crossbeam

• Alex at Chai Capital

• Bryce at Primary

VC Theses & Startup Tips

Also theses = plural of thesis (in case this was confusing to anyone)

1. XRC Ventures Q1 Brand Capital Fund research report on Consumer VC Benchmarks Seed to Series A is exceptionally well executed and packed with incredible information (see above for a chart of major M&A in beauty). Highly recommend.

2. “How whaling ventures in the 1800s shaped venture capital as we know it” from Fortune Termsheet’s author Allie Garfinkle.

3. CB Insights published a report to cut through the hype and see which celebrities-turned-investors are the strongest. To create their Celebrity VC Index, they dug into recent financing and exit activity, unicorn metrics, and portfolio company Mosaic scores — CB Insights’ proprietary algorithm measuring startup health and potential.

4. Jared Hecht, new VC at USV and Founder of GroupMe shared a new thesis/thought-piece: “I’ve gotten a pitch every month or so from an entrepreneur saying they are going to build the groupme killer. Nobody has done it yet. It’s not because groupme is a stellar application, it’s because you need a forcing function to move all your groups to another application. The only way to do this is to pray the app either gets shut down or to build something that is 10x better.”

5. The Center for Venture Research published these statistics: In 2023 women angels represented 46.7% of the angel market, an increase from 2022 (39.5%) and 2021 (33.6%). Women-owned ventures accounted for 46.3% of the entrepreneurs that were seeking angel capital, a marked increase from 2022 (37.1%) and 2021 (28.6%). The yield rate for women entrepreneurs seeking angel capital was 28.8%, higher than the 2023 market yield rate and also an increase from the 25.6% women yield rate in 2022.

6. The LinkedIn pitch deck Reid Hoffman used to raise a $10m Series B in 2004 from Greylock.

7. Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz published a brief thesis titled “THE LITTLE TECH AGENDA: Little Tech is our term for tech startups, as contrasted to Big Tech incumbents.”

1 GP Allowed

Interviewing Terri IRL while we’re in Park City, Utah, at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference! Can’t wait to share this with all of you :)

Break into VC: Jobs

Full-time Investor

Stripes is hiring a Consumer Investor. Apply here!

Alumni Ventures is hiring for multiple investing roles. Apply here!

Cowboy Ventures is hiring an Investment Associate. Apply here!

Commerce Ventures is hiring a Senior Associate. Apply here!

Flourish Ventures is hiring an investment associate. Apply here!

Pear VC is hiring an Investment Associate - AI and Enterprise. Apply here!

Entrepreneur First is hiring multiple Analysts/Associates. Apply here!

Full-time Platform

A16Z is hiring a Deal Operations Partner. Apply here!

Eniac Ventures is hiring a Chief of Staff. Apply here!
ZN’s POV (I love Nihal & the Eniac team shout out Monica + Sofia)

Struck Studio is hiring a Venture Lead. Apply here!

Techstars is hiring a Program Associate. Apply here!

Cowboy Ventures is hiring a Chief of Staff. Apply here!

Internship/Part-time

How Women Invest is hiring a Senior VC Investment Fellow. Apply here!

Cerberus Capital Management is hiring for a 6-month fellowship. Apply here!  

Necessary Ventures is hiring an intern. Apply here!  

Expanding Capital is hiring an intern. Apply here!  

VC $$$

You can drop your salary details here (anonymously) to be shared in future editions. VC compensation is an exceptionally opaque part of the “breaking into VC” process. This section aims to act as: a reference for you as you negotiate your salary and to showcase just how different compensation is across fund size, titles, and more.

• Title: Investment Associate

• Fund Size: $1-5B

• Base Salary: $140,000

• Cash Bonus: $10,000

• Carry: N/A

Events (for VCs)

post summer

• The Future of Consumer Social: Panel

  • for who: consumer social nerds

  • hosted by: Zehra 

monday - wednesday 7/15 to 7/17

• Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2024 Conference

  • for who: founders, investors, operators

  • hosted by: Fortune 

  • I’ll be speaking on a panel at this conference! It’s in Park City in July :)

wednesday 7/17

• Inside Summit

  • hosted by: Madison & Claudia (The Room Podcast)

Wanted to dedicate this edition of The Z List’s friend’s section to the Inside Summit, happening on July 17th in NYC. As a part of The Room Podcast community, I’m super excited to extend 20% off tickets for a limited time (use code: ZEHRA20) Inside Summit is going to be the tech event of the summer - and very different from any other conference you've been to. Here's some of what you will experience at Inside Summit: 

• Founder & funder matching for those fundraising or looking to build their network

• Founder-to-founder buddy matching for founders to make new friends and mentors (make founder friends that are a stage ahead of you)

• Vendor & customer warm introductions

• Small-group conversations & workshops oriented around tactical topics that aren’t happening anywhere else

• Free headshots

• Goodie-bag full of products from some of the hottest DTC brands

• Consumer brand “market” access

• After-party with open bar & bites

friday 7/19

• Gen Z VC Summit

  • hosted by: Meagan (Gen Z VCs)

  • I’m speaking at the summit!

tuesday 8/13

• Female Founders, Funders & Friends

  • hosted by: Jaiya (Carry + Ankur)

Resources: Discounts + Tools

• Need an EA but can’t afford one? Howie is the fastest and most responsive scheduling assistant on earth. You can email him anytime to set up meetings and coordinate your calendar.

• Wanna start a newsletter? I use Beehiiv for all three of my newsletters. Cannot recommend enough.

• Wanna sell digital products that actually convert? I’ve been working with Michael and Faisal for a couple of months now. Pillar is an all-in-one creator store that actually converts. You can offer lead magnets, sell digital products + appointments w/ Apple Pay checkout, and even boost deal flow with their brand deal funnel. It’s like LinkTree, Calendly, Kajabi, and Clickfunnels in one. Click to get 1 month free + your 1st lead magnet made for you in Canva by their team!