Hello from Hawaii and welcome to week 3 of our newsletter. We appreciate your patience (and suggestions!) while we work on finding a name for this publication.
New newsletter alert! Kevin is working on finding the best writing on software engineering. If you would be interested in receiving a separate newsletter with the most thought provoking posts for coders, let us know by replying to this email. We’re early in the process, and anxious to hear what readers value the most. Tell us what you’d like to see in a technologist focused newsletter by dropping a note to editor@buriedreads.com
From the Operators
Henry Ward of Carta opens up the books on their internal cap table data, revealing the discrepancy between the proportion of women in tech and their relative share of equity in “Women on Cap Tables”
David Cummings of Atlanta Tech Village narrows down the key drivers for startup ecosystems in “Growing the Startup Community”. Assuming he’s right, look for Shenzen and London to get a shot in the arm from IPOs of X Financials and Farfetch respectively.
Jason Cohen of WP Engine reminds us that just as performance driving has sudden acceleration, lurching stops, and scary turns, so too does running a high growth startup in “When ‘fits and starts’ is the most efficient path”
James Gill of GoSquared looks back on the success of his company’s weekly newsletter in “17,000 subscribers. 450 hours. 150 issues of GoSquared Weekly.”
From the Analysts
Alex Wilhelm of Crunchbase News gives us the lowdown on how to decode an S-1 statement in “From Private To Public: How To Read An S-1”. It is especially useful this week given the IPOs of Upwork, Eventbrite, X Financial, Farfetch, and Survey Monkey.
From the Investors
Semil Shah of Haystack lends an outside perspective on the shake up at KPCB, most noticeably highlighting the addition of Mamoon Hamid formerly of Social Capital as an encouraging sign, in “Reflections On The Big Shake-Up At Kleiner Perkins”
Jason Lemkin of SaaStr candidly answers a question on the mind of many struggling founders in “When should a CEO tell startup employees that the company is going under?”. This is only the beginning of an answer for an incredibly touchy subject; more founders and investors should write about this.
Stephanie Simon of Y Combinator announces that YC will be taking applications a batch ahead for their upcoming accelerator. They’re well on their way to grabbing a toehold across a huge swath of the early stage funnel, when you consider this is coming on the heels of their giant 15,000 company Startup School batch.
Bruce Booth of Life Sci VC charts 50% growth in the number of publicly traded biotech stocks from 2011 to 2016 in “The Incredible Expanding Universe of Biotech Stocks”
This Week’s Podcast Pick
If you don’t already know about the Internet History Podcast, you are missing out. Brian McCullough the creator started out by researching and telling the history himself in January 2014. By March of 2014 the podcast was discovered by an early Netscape engineer who volunteered for an interview. From there, Brian has gone on to interview over a hundred insiders who built the web as we know it.