We chose a name this week — Buried Reads. This newsletter, along with our upcoming engineering focused newsletter, will both use that brand name. We hope to be sending this email next week from the new domain, so don’t be surprised to see a different domain soon.
The Next Generation of Series A Lead Investors
In our most interesting read this week, Semil Shah of Haystack highlights a new batch of firms that have graduated from seed investments in “A New VC Crop of Series A Firms”
From the Operators
John Cousins of MBA ASAP explains how to calculate “IRR Internal Rate of Return”. This is a metric VCs almost universally use to measure themselves, as an angel investor it was helpful. Scott Hirleman’s piece “Why IRR Is The Most Important VC Performance Metric” is a better place to start to understand the context IRR fits into within venture investing.
Kevan Lee of Buffer writes “An Intro to Diversity and Inclusion in Business: Resources for HR, Hiring, Managers, Founders, and Allies”. If you’re around 50 employees and formalizing HR this will save you a lot of time.
Brett Hurt of data.world outlines several hard won lessons from his journey as CEO in “Seven lessons learned on the journey from founder to CEO”.
From the Investors
Jeffrey Carter of West Loop Ventures predicts what startup investors should expect as interest rates rise in “The Fed And Valuation”. It’s a timely read this week with the 4% dip in the S&P 500 and NASDAQ composite.
Glenn Solomon of GGV Capital identifies Elastic Search’s innovate facets in “Why the Elastic IPO is So Important”. I am amazed to learn they only burned $120M lifetime to get to a $200M run rate.
Lindsay Knight of Chicago Ventures shows us just how overloaded venture capital job titles get in “The Many Flavors of Venture Partners: From the Platform Braintrust”