Brand risk thus derived to venture capital

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced look at this week’s startup news and trends from senior reporter and equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox.

One of the quieter conversations about venture capital has only gotten louder in my DMs and interviews in recent months: the well-known venture capital bias has been a branding issue for some of the many VC executives now emerging in the marketplace. Marketplace. Scene.

They all have a story, but they all sound a bit the same: A female VC creates a fund and is compared to every other female VC with a fund that must invest only in female founders or have a diversity, equity-angle and capture. as main script. The otherness that comes from an increasingly homogeneous group of LPs or even founders viewing female VCs as monolithic has led some VCs to completely rebrand their companies to be seen outside their gender.

Read my full take on this topic with Rebecca Szkutak at TC+: “For female VCs, bias is a brand issue.”

In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about the Upfront Summit 2023 and a surprising Better Deal. you can follow me as always tweet or Instagram to continue the conversation.

VC Confab brings surprises and AI

All your favorite business journalists were busy this week at the Upfront Summit 2023, a two-day, invitation-only event that brings together industry insiders and celebrities to discuss the future of capital. I interviewed the former and current Kapor Capital security guard. I shook hands with Jamie Lee Curtis and stole interview tips from Kara Swisher. And Al Gore tried to convince the entire public to take the fight against climate change more seriously.

Overall, the conference fueled my story plans for next month, so stay tuned for plenty of follow-up angles. And also some firsts. I’ll start with a summary of AI conversations on stage.

Why it matters: If you ask me, AI was the ubiquitous celebrity at Upfront. No wonder: promoted technologies often arouse excessive interest. But the sentiment is different from 2021, when investors poured billions of dollars into 15-minute grocery delivery companies and the web3. The dry dust of risk has been locked up, companies are closing more slowly and some investors are still licking their wounds from the recession so far.

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My colleagues took to the microphone at Equity this week to discuss the latest and greatest headlines. The whole show was a joke. Unexpectedly for everyone, it was the return of Better.com. News broke earlier this week that Amazon was allowing its employees to use their stock to fund home purchases and even second homes.

Why it’s important: It’s a creative collaboration, but also an incredible one. Better has been an Amazon Web Services customer since 2015, and the lending system is powered entirely by the software, a statement said. Still, Better has endured its fair share of battles that have cast doubt on its future. Should we check all files?

And so on and so forth.

Discovered on TechCrunch

The sales team strikes back

Everything Elon Musk and the executives shared (and left out) on Tesla Investor Day

Chamath Palihapitiya: It could take three years for the market to “accurately” recalculate end-stage costs

OpenAI releases an API for ChatGPT, as well as special capabilities for enterprise customers

Players fix a video game that was “taken” by hackers

Discovered on TechCrunch+

Maybe Substack can grow well without risk dollars

Teardown of Launchpad: Gable’s $12 Million Series A Deck

Now that AI is all the rage, does web3 need a rescue?

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