I’ll be in SF Tuesday - Thursday :) LMK if you’re around. Welcome to the first weekend edition of No GPs Allowed. There’s been so much more news since Wednesday.

No GPs Allowed IRL Bay Area Edition

Join us this Wednesday for our first IRL edition of No GPs Allowed featuring the classics: a tarot card reader giving venture-themed readings, friendship bracelet station (my bracelets all say equity on them), and a mario kart station. RSVP here.

VC News

• More investors have been trying to add a specific clause to funding round documents, dubbed unofficially a “portfolio sale clause”, venture lawyers tell Sifted.

• Musk’s xAI is close to raising $6B from Sequoia & others

• Rubrik began its life as a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. By the close of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth over $756 million.

• Seed-stage firm Eniac Ventures raises $220M across two funds

• Pitchbook analyzes the world’s top 50 startup cities; SF in first, NYC in second, and Beijing in third. See charts below - my hometowns Hong Kong & Singapore also made it onto the lis :)

• Klarna scores major payment deal with Uber ahead of hotly anticipated IPO

• Norwest Venture Partners raises $3B for 17th vehicle, maintaining fund size despite market downturn

• A VC lesson from the ‘Rodney Dangerfield of SaaS’

• Ramp vs. Brex risks becoming fintech’s Uber vs. Lyft, some VCs warn

• Latino-led venture capital firms helped create more than 50,000 jobs

• Jason Calacanis had some choice words to share on CNBC’s Last Call “we’re seeing the burn off of ‘venture tourism’ in startups” TLDR Jason shared that only 15% of “ZIRP” era VC firms founded in the last two years will go on to raise another fund. Watch the interview here.

• Tech is global (Balaji): 2,800+ startups have achieved a $1B+ valuation or exit since the year 2000, across more than 420 cities worldwide. 1,400+ are still private and venture-backed. (see below) 

• The ‘valley of death’ for climate lies between early-stage funding and scaling up

• How Venture Capital Became Less Lucrative: an asset class that once yielded nearly 35% sank to roughly a 6% yield (from the WSJ earlier today)

• From Dan Primack author of Axios Pro Rata — Dear venture capitalists: You're blowing it

• The number of investors at the 500 largest US VC firms by assets under management swelled 77% from 2017 through the end of 2022. But over the past 15 months, that growth slowed to just 2%, according to an analysis for PitchBook by Live Data Technologies, which tracks job change data (see below).

• Are European LPs the answer to US VC’s fundraising woes? Leah at Pitchbook dives deeper.

• Techcruch’s Deal Dive: Givebutter is turning a profit making tech for nonprofits

Fan Behavior: Consumer Trends & News (more news geared towards the Consumer trends + VC — if you want to subscribe to my newsletter dedicated to all things consumer check it out here.)

• L Catterton Acquires Majority Stake in Kiko Milano: The private equity fund backed by LVMH aims to further accelerate the growth of the Italian beauty company, whose sales totaled nearly 800 million euros last year.

• L’Oréal’s Q1 2024 Sales Rise, Bolstered by the Consumer Products and Dermatological Beauty Divisions

• Behind probiotic brand Seed’s ad approach, from a celebrity tiktok to times square nature videos: the DTC brand aims to disrupt the supplements space with provocative creative (remember the insanely weird video Gwyneth Paltrow made about them?)

• Shopify sets its sights on big-ticket clients: the e-commerce platform for millions of merchants has ambitious plans to expand at the high end

• Threads offers creators $500 to post about ‘positivity’ The Information reports

• Hermès soars and Kering stumbles in widening luxury divergence: quarterly sales at the two groups and market leader LVMH show the winning brands are those targeting the very wealthy

• Nikita Bier cosigns this tweet that breaks down the three foundational areas