What We’re Reading in Venture
Articles we’ve enjoyed
The Ultimate Guide to Unbundling Reddit
A short fantastic article (with a longer in-depth version) from Greg Isenberg, founder of Late Checkout, on unbundling communities. 2020 has been a year of social isolation, social distancing, and (online) social gathering. Communities, now more than ever, are popping up on places like Slack, Discord, Tiktok. What started off as subreddits (which are sometimes poorly moderated), have now branded into many different directions. Greg Isenberg focuses on how builders and makers can leverage these communities to create better (and more targeted) products that accurately reflects the need of the community.
DATA: Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley isn’t a Place
A publication from Initialized on the future of remote work, Silicon Valley, and whether distributed startups are the future. Kim-Mai Cutler does a fantastic job breaking down information from her survey, highlighting that startups are moving towards a future that is based less around location and with the increase in remote work tooling, we're excited to see what happens.
People to follow
Smart people whose Twitter feeds we like to stalk
Brandon Brooks: Founder of Inventrify; VC focused on supporting underrepresented founders
Sarah Tavel: VC @Benchmark; focused on B2B and marketplaces
Memes
Because venture capital memes are a very real thing
Video/Audio
A video or podcast about VC because reading is hard sometimes
The Man Who Taught Me How to Invest — Mike Maples
Listen to Tim Ferriss interview Mike Maples, a venture capitalist at Floodgate and member of the Forbes Midas List since 2010
Original VWV Content
Check out everything we have to say on market trends, startups, venture, and everything in between
We recently made an investment in Minded, a telehealth mental health startup for DTC subscriptions. Check out our quick summary, done by our own Co-Director Ved Narayan
Brown Student Spotlight
Highlighting members of our community who are absolutely killing it
Q: Who are you/what’s your venture?
A: My name is Ben Collier, and I am a founding member of the Farmlink Project. I am a senior studying applied math. I played for the tennis team for my first three years at Brown and due to an injury, transitioned into a coaching role this year.
Early in the pandemic, I read article after article about how farmers, in the wake of a stalling commercial food industry, were forced to destroy entire crops of produce. Even as billions of pounds of fresh food rotted in unharvested fields, other stories exposed that millions of people could not put enough food on the table and food banks were overwhelmed by the largest surge of need since the Great Depression. Determined to address this paradoxical crisis of simultaneous surplus and shortage, we began The Farmlink Project. In the nine months since April, I have led the operations at Farmlink to provide 24,000,000 pounds of farm-fresh food to nearly 300 communities across 43 states.
With a team of over 150 people, from over 50 colleges and careers, spread across 35 states, Farmlink is the definition of a digital community. With Slack and Zoom as our shared workspace, there is no barrier to entry. I credit much of our reach and our rapid growth to that; we went from an idea to a national organization almost overnight in the midst of a pandemic. Though I have yet to meet 90% of my teammates in person, I feel better connected to this team than any prior, largely because we are united behind a mission that brings people hope.
Q: Most game-changing experience/class/activity at Brown?
A: My favorite classes at Brown so far have been Blues to Beyonce and Persuasive Communication.
Q: Favorite piece of advice?
A: You don't just take care of people when you need something.
Q: Role Model/Person you’re obsessed with?
A: I really admire the work Jose Andres is doing in the food space.
Q: One daily habit that you can’t live without (think: meditation, morning coffee, etc.)
A: It isn't daily, but I love playing Mario Kart and pool with my roommates when we find time.
Q: Anything else to add?
A: Over the past eight months, I’ve learned a critical lesson: solely redirecting food is not a panacea. We serve food to communities in need as a means to address acute and immediate hunger, knowing that the very same families will be waiting in line the next week, again hoping that there will be enough food for them. Food banks address immediate hunger, which is just one symptom of another American and global pandemic, food insecurity. On top of our food rescue organization, we have to build towards systemic change. We aim to ensure that people all over the United States not only have reliable access to nutritious food but access that preserves their dignity and humanity. Capitalizing on our youth-driven energy, we want to advocate for policy changes, inform the public, and ultimately, bring attention to and offer solutions for the root cause of hunger: poverty.
VWV Wishlist
Here we will list all of the features and products we wish entrepreneurs would make for us
Public Notion API
Zoom feature that makes the platform not work on days that should be snow days
Robinhood that actually lets you buy GameStop
VWV Updates
A good spot to learn all the hot VWV gossip
Just hired six brand new associates to the team and we can’t wait to see what they do!