One of the first things folks get when they join CB Insights is a list of sites and newsletters we recommend they track to stay on top of what is happening in startups, technology, venture capital and M&A. Recently, we’ve also added a section at the bottom on understanding venture capital which highlights insightful articles on the topic.
We thought this list might be useful / interesting to others so have shared it below. If you have recommendations on other sources you’d recommend, definitely leave them in the comments.
It is broken into the following sections:
- Blogs by VCs
- Tech sites to read (and some newsletters to get)
- Understanding venture capital & angel investment
BTW, we’re hiring in research, marketing and technology (we’re doubling our team this year so here’s all of our current job openings)
Blogs by VCs
- Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) – avc.com
- Brad Feld (Foundry Group) – feld.com
- Mark Suster (GRP Partners) – bothsidesofthetable.com
- Bill Gurley (Benchmark) – abovethecrowd.com
- Ben Horowitz (A16Z) – bhorowitz.com
- Rob Go (NextView Ventures) – robgo.org
- Phin Barnes (FRC) – sneakerheadvc.com
- Josh Hannah (Matrix Partners) – joshhannah.com
- Chris Dixon (A16Z) – https://medium.com/@cdixon/
- Jason Calacanis (Angel) – calacanis.com
- Jeff Jordan (A16Z) – jeff.a16z.com
- Nabeel Hyatt (Spark Capital) – https://medium.com/@nabeel
- First Round Capital Review – firstround.
com/review/ - Lightspeed VP Blog – lsvp.com/blog/
- Hunter Walk (Homebrew) – hunterwalk.com
- Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures) – continuations.com
- Benedict Evans (A16Z) – ben-evans.com – sign up for newsletter
Tech Sites to Read
- CB Insights Research blog (of course!) – Newsletter archives | Sign up for newsletter
- Term Sheet (by Dan Primack) – sign up for daily newsletter
- VentureBeat
- TechCrunch
- WSJ.D
- Re/Code
- GigaOm
- HackerNews
- PE Hub
- Quora – read VC-Oriented Q&A content
- StrictlyVC – sign up for newsletter
- Tech.eu *
- VentureVillage *
- ArcticStartup*
Understanding Venture Capital & Angel Investment
Demystifying Venture Capital Economics
https://blog.wealthfront.com/venture-capital-economics/
This post on the Wealthfront blog by Andy Rachleff (a former VC at Benchmark) does a great job of illustrating how VC works and why the economics are tough. Andy pulls no punches in describing the space and talks about the power law nature of returns. He highlights the challenging economics and why most VCs don’t make money for their investors also known as Limited Partners (LPs)
VC Math 101
http://www.startupcfo.ca/2013/02/venture-math-101/
This post is by Mark MacLeod, a former seed stage VC and now at Freshbooks (a company we use). This article does a nice job of walking through fund economics. Coupled with the Demystifying VC post by Andy Rachleff which we’ve highlighted, you get an appreciation for what motivates VCs from an economic perspective with a nice simple example.
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/billion-dollar-exit-venture-capital/
This one is by us and puts some data behind the above briefs by Andy Rachleff and Mark MacLeod and highlights just how few VCs actually are able to regularly invest in billion dollar companies. It is low.
Why Angel Investors Don’t Make Money
Another post by Andy Rachleff which talks about the challenges of making money in angel investment. He presents many cogent arguments and does a good job myth-busting writing “People love recounting the one time they caught a big fish, not the many futile hours they spent waiting for a bite.” The one negative of this article is that it is largely based on anecdote and doesn’t have much data (although it does reference a couple of studies). But for our team, this is a good contrarian argument to remember.
* Thanks to Paul Van Cotthem for these suggestions