i finally did the damn story

plus batmmaan, debanking, drinkable mayo, googly eyes

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•by your best friend erin griffith•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

Friends, EGTttHoB™ took a lil break while I scrambled to finish up all my stories by the end of the year, and incredibly, I (mostly) did it! We have:

🏦 Crypto Debanking (It’s real!)

✈️ Ev Williams’s social-emotional journey (and new app) (It’s social, but do not call it social media.)

🤝 An extremely random news story about a Big Four agency merger (This harkened back to ye olde Adweek days)

And the big one:

📈📈📈 What is Venture Capital Now Anyway? 📈📈📈

This story started almost three years ago when my editor me asked why all the V.C. funds were suddenly so enormous. $5 billion here, $8 billion there. Those kinds of announcements were pretty much unheard of before the ZIRP era of 2021, and would have been insane-sounding when I started covering finance in 2006. Back then nobody on Wall Street gave a crap about the tiny cottage industry writing little checks to little start-ups on the West Coast.

So how were once-tiny V.C. firms suddenly managing tens of billions of dollars and expanding into every possible investment strategy? How were these investors—their deals, their opinions and their money—now dominating our economy? It was a perfectly fine story to do.

But in early 2022 it was a bit off the zeitgeist. V.C. spent much of that year melting down. Start-ups were failing, interest rates were spiking and Sam Altman had not yet “cancelled the recession.” Everything was awful. I stalled, thinking maybe those V.C. mega-funds would just shrink back to normal size and the past few years would disappear as a ZIRP-y fever dream.

The opposite happened, of course. V.C. funds only got bigger. The firms now manage tens of billions; nearly 20 of them are RIAs so they can hold stocks and crypto and whatever else they want. So I finally did the damn story. I focused it on two firms: One that led the industry’s last decade of aggressive expansion (Andreessen Horowitz) and one that has refused to follow that path (Benchmark).

It is still a bit off the zeitgeist, since all anyone wants to talk about right now is what the loudest and richest V.C.s are doing to our politics / country / democracy / etc.

But it might appeal to anyone interested in how these V.C.s got so rich and powerful and how venture capital went from one small corner of the finance industry to a major force in our economy.

Take it from this satisfied reader, who says I peaked.

Guess its time to retire? In writing this newsletter I realized I unintentionally answered his question. The way one writes a piece like this is to procrastinate for two years, then talk about it nonstop for one year, then get so sick of it you have no choice but to write approximately 10 times more words than you will ever publish. Easy!

Important Business Matters

Startup everyone’s into: Duolingo, incredibly.

Startup everyone’s over: Perks culture is CANCELLED.

Reason to go on living: FANG is dead. The “Magnificent 7” is out. From now on, the cool stocks shall be known as BATMMAAN. 🦇 (Personally, I would have went with TAMBAMAN or MAMBATAN but I don’t make the stock slang.)

Reason to take up residence under your weighted blanket: Why bother counting how many wrecks are caused by self-driving cars?

Latest crush: All the people who tried drinkable mayo and lived to tell about it. The onesie king of San Francisco.

Latest heartbreak: The human doom loop is even worse than the urban one.

Latest thing the kids are into: Shopping malls, incredibly.

Latest thing the olds are into: Googly eyes.

Latest thing the CEOs are into: Renting an apartment across the street from your office to poop in. And of course, LSD.

a dall-e summary of this newsletter:

“a serious and accurate history of venture capital”

*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•the end•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•*´¨`*•.¸¸.•

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