“There’s more dry powder powder than ever before.”

“There’s never been a better time to start a startup.”

“Discipline is the new scale.” (OK, OK, I made that last one up, but didn’t you kind of believe it?).

Tracking personnel activity in venture land offers a few examples. For example, Initialized Capital’s co-founder Garry Tan is leaving the firm to join Y Combinator as president. Tan’s exit is shaking up the firm he helped found. He held down the fort after the firm’s other co-founder, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, stepped away in 2020.

Marooney, a GP at Coatue, says that firms “have to earn the right” to survive. “There was the path where you did some investments and made money. It’s like, no, you’ve got to earn the right and not everybody is going to earn that right … and I think that is healthy,” the investor said.

If we combine quiet quitting with natural selection cycles and the difficulty of tracking just how active a venture capitalist is, we experience a confusing, fragmented landscape. No one is incentivized to say that they aren’t doing business as usual, which creates a landscape of extremes.

Sure, there are natural career cycles, but I imagine it is getting harder to track who is doing what and how often in a remote world where a partner at a VC firm has been diluted to mean many, many things. Today, there are the investors doing the ghosting due to the sheer deal flow out there, and there are the investors who are becoming ghosts themselves. Ha.

Just something to keep in mind. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about Clubhouse, the latest in tech layoffs and why $1 billion in capital can’t save AV tech.

Here’s why it’s important via Korosec: Commercializing AV tech has always been a capitally intensive game, meaning the barrier to entry is more like a wall than a speed bump. The winds have shifted over the past two years toward driver assistance systems and monetizing passenger vehicles that exist today.

Image Credits: Argo AI

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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Venture capital will soon be brimming with ghosts by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

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