Senior editor
@Forbes
covering venture capital and tech. Edit the Midas List, Cloud 100 and 30 Under 30 VC. Plus one to
@N_Sportelli
. email: akonrad
@forbes
.com
News: CEO Sam Altman has said he holds no shares in OpenAI. Startup bets like Helion, Stripe and Reddit have now made him a billionaire.
@_pheebini
and I poured through filings and spoke to a dozen-plus people for the closest accounting yet, in
@Forbes
:
Big VC news: Sequoia is splitting into three firms. Sequoia China is now HongShan. Sequoia India is now Peak XV Partners. And Sequoia’s U.S. and Europe business continues as Sequoia Capital.
I spoke to the leaders of all 3 firms exclusively for
@Forbes
:
Scoop: OpenAI investors were caught by surprise by Friday’s board ouster of CEO Sam Altman. Key firms like Khosla Ventures, Sequoia and Thrive Capital got no advance warning of the board’s shock plan, sources told
@Forbes
.
By me and
@kenrickcai
:
Twitter committed about $20M to back Black, Latinx and women VC fund managers after the murder of George Floyd.
Under Elon Musk, it's now trying to quietly sell those stakes -- while not wiring the leftover millions it promised.
My story in
@forbes
:
Zapier reached a $5 billion valuation without an office and barely raising any venture capital dollars.
CEO
@wadefoster
explains how his startup reached $140M ARR working with mom and pop shops -- and why he's avoided the VC "hamster wheel."
Zoom's IPO wowed Wall Street yesterday. Behind the $16B market cap bonanza: new billionaire Eric Yuan, the immigrant founder whose video conference app just works better. Here's my exclusive deep dive into how he did it, in the next issue of
@Forbes
.
In a work from home world, Zoom is seemingly everywhere. I spoke to CEO
@ericsyuan
about coping with high demand and his newest commitment to battling coronavirus: Zoom is now giving away its video tools to any affected K-12 school for free.
tech influencers on X are like “no one achieves greatness working just 5 days a week” and on Instagram stories they’ve been in Capri and Fiji for the past 6 weeks
Exclusive: Patrick and John Collison built Stripe into one of the world’s biggest startups. But they're facing new challenges as they look to “grow the GDP of the internet.”
I flew to Dublin to learn more first-hand for my newest
@Forbes
cover story.
Scoop: Elon Musk's X has begun selling defunct usernames for as much as $50,000, per emails obtained by
@Forbes
.
A dedicated "@ handle" team is overseeing the new marketplace, which was rumored to be in the works for months.
PR person: please just reply, even a no is so helpful
Me: ok fine no
PR person: while i have you, wait here are 3 more things to check out
Me: no
PR person: ok lets just get coffee
Me: ....................
In 2020, ex-WeWork CEO Adam Neumann invested in a women-led startup called Alfred. Less than two years later, his new company Flow – backed by $350 million – sounds strikingly similar.
@_IainMartin
and I spoke to 8 sources to investigate for
@Forbes
:
A number of OpenAI employees are already quote tweeting Sam Altman to express support, almost at once.
My serious read: this is a public rallying cry / show of strength that staff are behind Sam to the board. Also not something you’d maybe do if close to an agreement.
Visa is acquiring startup Plaid for a whopping $5.3 billion.
Wondering what Plaid does? I profiled the fintech unicorn in the April 2018 issue of
@Forbes
:
A secretive firm called Newlands has amassed nearly $10B in tech stocks and is now quietly building a startup portfolio.
Led by an ex-Sequoia partner, Newlands is mostly bankrolled by one person: WhatsApp billionaire Jan Koum.
My latest for
@forbes
:
Figma gets $1 bil from Adobe for 15 months of limbo, and is now back on its own. A huge VC exit, un-exited.
Last valuation: $10 bil (2021)
Valuation at sale: $20 bil (2022)
If Figma were to raise again now, what kind of valuation could it command on the private market?
After an intense 15 months of review, today Adobe and Figma have decided to end our pending merger, as we no longer see a path toward regulatory approval of the deal.
The most successful CEOs I know:
—peak in their 40s
—wake up at 5:30am
—go to bed by 8:30pm
—shun caffeine, tomatoes and nightshades
—sleep in special bioceramic underwear
—work out and play brain exercises daily
—have won 7 Super Bowls
—are literally just Tom Brady
Australian startup founder Melanie Perkins faced long odds and VC doubts. She built Canva into a profitable $3.2 billion global design software leader anyway.
I went to Sydney in June to find out how she did it for my newest cover story for
@Forbes
:
@mcwm
this is one of the big weaknesses with the MCU... it's like all these stories are happening concurrently but walled off. an Egyptian moon god blocked out the sun? a god killer is about to kill all gods in the universe? meh, seems like a one-hero job
When Matt Huang and Fred Ehrsam raised $400M for their new fund Paradigm in 2018, they did something bold: put it all into Bitcoin.
The trade is already up 3x. But the ex-Sequoia partner and Coinbase cofounder have a bigger goal: bring crypto mainstream.
Scoop: Twilio has agreed to acquire fellow cloud company Segment for $3.2 billion, sources tell
@forbes
. The startup was last valued at $1.5 billion in 2019.
Immigrants Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson faced skepticism when they launched their debut VC fund in 2013. One of their first five investments: DoorDash.
Here's the story of how the Pear VC founders turned $1.9 million into a $440 million windfall.
Personal news: today is my 10 year anniversary starting at
@Forbes
🎉
I honestly can’t believe it’s been a decade covering tech here with so many amazing colleagues over the years.
My new cover story for the next
@Forbes
issue is live!
Valued at $8 billion, Flexport is Silicon Valley's answer for global supply chain woes, and CEO Ryan Petersen has emerged as the public face of solutions. So why do insiders hope his startup sinks?
Investor Lee Fixel turned bets on Flipkart and Peloton into billions for Tiger Global. Now with his own $1.3 billion fund Addition, the low-profile VC is looking to do it again.
Three years ago, UiPath was an unknown little Romanian startup. Today, it's a $7 billion global leader in a red-hot new area of tech called RPA.
Beyond excited to share my latest
@Forbes
cover story on UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, the first bot billionaire.
tech CEO: I’m stepping down
twitter: amazing! congrats!
CEO: …and I’m becoming a VC
twitter: more amazing, more congrats!
CEO: …actually, I’m coming back
twitter: omg EVEN MORE CONGRATS
Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover has raised a $10 million second fund to invest in more early-stage founders -- and help others tinkerers take the plunge into entrepreneurship.
VCs in person: omg did you read that story about the VC “homeless date” in SF
VCs on Twitter: to attack venture capital is to attack the very fiber of society and what makes us human
VCs on LinkedIn: I’d like to join your professional network on LinkedIn
I appreciate
@alexisohanian
doing this and fear his Times Square billboard will end up in the background of a lot of tightly-packed tourist group pics
Exclusive: Amazon’s consumer chief Dave Clark is joining supply chain unicorn Flexport as co-CEO.
Founder Ryan Petersen will move to an executive chairman role next year.
@Forbes
spoke to both logistics leaders about the surprise move.
Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh's life was outsized -- and so was his impact on a generation of startup founders, investors and online business owners.
Here, I did my best to explain what made Hsieh special, in the words of tech leaders who knew him best.
GitLab, a DevOps leader with no office, just raised $268 million at a $2.75 billion valuation, more than double its valuation at its last funding one year ago.
I appreciate Freestyle Love Supreme making you lock away your phone because the internet could not handle
@Lin_Manuel
rapping about Baby Yoda just now 🤩
today I met with a CEO for coffee and instead of oatmilk, the restaurant brought him a big bowl of oatmeal
his own PR person couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the meeting
that is all
Scoop: investors are scrambling to restore Sam Altman to OpenAI in a shocking return.
They lack direct power, but leverage could be used before Altman committed to a new startup, sources tell
@Forbes
, with Microsoft a key player.
By me and
@DavidJeans2
:
News: a group of ad execs privately lobbied Linda Yaccarino to resign as CEO of X following Elon’s recent activity.
Big scoop by
@JohnPaczkowski
and
@DavidJeans2
and the
@forbes
tech team:
News: more than 200 venture capital firms have signed a public statement in support of Israel and its tech ecosystem.
I spoke to Harry Valner, the U.S.-based startup investor who led the effort since Monday night.
Always amusing when schedulers ask if you're free to talk to a CEO or VC at a hyper-specific time a few months away.
Like... 6:15 pm on Dec 2? I have no idea what I'm doing at 6:15 pm today, but sounds like a cool plan we can both cancel in a couple months. In.
GPT-4 launched today. But 99% of people don't understand how it could have rescued SVB and Signature Bank.
Here are 9 things you can do right now to cause and resolve your own bank run, using GPT 👇
SF twitter: a friend just purchased a dormant volcano to live in to escape the virus. do they get WiFi?
NYC twitter: lmk when the virus makes it easier to get a table at carbone
The latest: Microsoft may take a board observer seat on OpenAI's revamped board if Altman returns. That would mean no voting power. Other new board recruits could be Bret Taylor, Marisa Mayer, Brian Chesky, Roelof Botha & Reid Hoffman w/
@aaronpholmes