Top 4 Curated VC Picks + Must-Read Top 3 Books for 24Jan2024

🗒️ Boards Must Adapt as Tech Advances Show Cyber Training Gap

Technology Magazine: With Research Finding That 60% of Board Members Have Not Received Sufficient Cyber Resilience Training, Boards Must Adapt Quickly

Cybersecurity continues to be a concern for businesses, with a report conducted by technology services company Accenture highlighting how CEOs lack confidence in their organisations’ ability to protect against cyberattacks, despite seeing cybersecurity as vital to business growth.

And according to recent report findings, that concern extends to the boardroom, with the report finding that almost two-thirds of board members have not received adequate support and training regarding cyber resilience in the past 12 months.

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🗒️ Countdown Capital winding down is not a bad omen for micro funds

Techcrunch: Last week, my colleague Aria Alamalhodaei wrote an exclusive on defense and space tech venture firm Countdown Capital’s plan to shut down. Jai Malik, the founder of Countdown, said in a letter to his LPs that due to how competitive the industrial tech sector has become, he is no longer confident about smaller venture firms’ ability to secure the meaningful stakes in startups they’d need to produce worthwhile returns.

As Aria wrote, the letter reads like a cold glass of water to the face. While winding down the fund is a mature move — GPs have a fiduciary duty to their LPs, after all — the news doesn’t help the growing scuttlebutt in the VC world that most micro funds can’t survive outside of a bull market like 2021’s.

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🗒️ The Final Foundry Fund

Foundry: Foundry 2022 will be our final Foundry fund.

While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm —one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required. For nearly 20 years now, that cadence has been to raise a new fund every three to four years. Each time, we make a deliberate decision to raise a subsequent fund. But not this time.

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🗒️ Threat of irrelevance looms over emerging VCs

Pitchbook: Holiday jet lag isn’t the only thing keeping VCs up at night.

Countdown Capital‘s announcement last week that it is shutting down marked a rocky start to 2024 for emerging managers. Jai Malik, founder and GP of the early-stage industrial tech investment firm, wrote in a LinkedIn post that, despite strong performance, “the future of this space favors larger firms than mine.”

Emerging managers are worried: Many are giving LPs more leeway on terms and extending their fundraising time frames, and even top-tier firms are holding off on introducing premium carry. 2024 will be a year that decides which GPs turn into tenured players.

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Top 3 book summaries this week 📚

Selling To The C-Suite by Stephen Bistritz and Nicholas Read
According to Stephen Bistritz and Nicholas Read, selling to senior-level, or ‘C-Suite’, executives requires different skills and strategies from the more traditional departmental-level sale. It’s all about timing.

SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
Having spent time observing top performers, Neil Rackham has distilled their expertise into a methodology we can all use to better our sales: SPIN Selling. Nearly all effective sales calls can be broken down into four stages.

Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham
A great organization must not only accommodate the fact that each employee is different, it must capitalist on this difference. Rather than focus on addressing the weaknesses of our teams, we need to exploit their talents and turn them into strengths that we can exploit.