The Stonks Blog

Elon Musk and Sam Altman tussle over AI regulation

CEO of TikTok goes to Washington.

OpenAI, SVB, Stripe, and much much more.

$6B round moves towards close at $50B value.

Narratives continue to unfold across crypto.

A slew of legislative proposals could really boost the startup space

The internet comes to terms with AI.

Six Dating Analogies to Demystify the Startup Hiring Process

Google and Microsoft prepare for battle

How to Raise a Seed Round amidst Economic Collapse and a Global Pandemic

On Microsoft in the Nineties and Timeless Lessons from the Dot-com Bubble

The metaverse can wait. Zuck promises efficiency and AI.

The Future State of Startups according to a Tenured Operator & Investor

On startup creation and investor interest in a down market

Nikita Bier is the Gen-Z Whisperer

On the Dyson Sphere, Customer Discovery, and the Two Variables of Founders

The FTX Fiasco has the Feds Fuming

Or: Direct Transfers and Forward Contracts and Equity-linked Financing Notes, Oh My!

Satya and Sam buddy up as Microsoft flexes OpenAI partnership.

The Opportunity Cost of Being an Entrepreneur and How to Hedge your Risk

A review of Demo Days in 2022

Hemant Teneja calls for change in VC.

Episode #22 | Investing via Gen Z Interests & Adapting to Fast-Changing Times

Managing Partner Albert Wenger weighs in.

Examining Q4 2022 and Projecting to Q1 2023

The Definitive Ranking of the 150 Most Active & Influential Angel Investors of 2022

What does it mean and who's getting rich?

Episode #21 | On Founding a Company, Becoming Homeless, and Breaking into VC

Episode #8 | Adam and Tom talk SBF and the situation that continues to unravel

Five Tested Tactics to Turn “Maybe” into “Yes”

Takeaways from their 3 hour demo day.

Episode #20 | On Showing Grit, Finding Innovation Avenues, and Investing for Tomorrow

Quick hits on all things Stonky

Three Signals that Early-stage Angel Investors Can Use to Invest in More Unicorns

Chatting with Composer COO & Co-Founder Ananda Aisola about their recent Customer Round

Episode #19 | Automating Growth, Building with Community, and the Need for Grit

Episode #6 | Adam and Tom talk SBF and the situation that continues to unravel

SBF was a very well connected sociopath

A Deep Dive into Africa’s Startup Ecosystem and Fundraising Landscape with Ajim Capital Founding Partner Eunice Ajim

Or: The Reports of Crypto's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Episode #5 | Adam and Tom deal with the fallout of FTX thanks to CZ exposing SBF. Plus, why are there so many acronyms?

They are literally not going to make it

Episode #4 | Adam is left on his own to tell you about this week in the markets.

A Tale of Two Layoffs

Fund of Fund Manager Ben Ehrlich Shares His Framework for Assessing VCs

Five Lessons Founders can learn from legendary horror Producer Jason Blum

Episode #3 | Adam and Tom finally learn that less is more. Also, we're still discussing Elon Musk & Twitter...r

Vibecap GP Dave Goldblatt Explains Why Decentralization Really Matters

We invested in 35 companies from the YC S22 batch! Read about who they are and how we did it.

Episode #2 | Adam and Tom talk Elon's plans for Twitter and VCs investing in public equities

Brand name VCs look to buy low in the public markets

Episode #1 | Introducing Secondary Saturdays

How COVID Paved the Way for Venture’s New Era

Consolidation is headed our way as big players eye M&A

On the Power of Emotive Marketing and Neumann’s Second Act

Episode #18 | On the Rise of the Solo Investor and the Relationship between Team & TAM

The on-again, off-again tech drama continues

Serial Founder Nick DeWilde’s Six Traits that Distinguish Expert Generalists from Novices

ARK and Titan partner to bring venture to the people

A Deep Dive into Southeast Asia’s Startup Ecosystem and Fundraising Landscape with Veteran Operator and Investor Viktor Kyosev

Super-Angel Sam Huleatt on Being the Most Helpful Investor Around

Big cash (hopefully) coming to a startup near you

Episode #17 | From AngelList to Angel Investing

At Stonks, we’re focused on building the absolute best demo day experience in the world. We host nearly 200 demo days a year with partners like 500 Global, Techstars, Tachyon & others. Over 100 Unicorns have come from these partners’ demo days in the past — startups like Uber, Dropbox, Canva, Sendgrid, Carta, and Paypal.

But ETH is... down?

A Founder’s Guide to Captivating VCs through Word and Phrase

Five Phrases to Never Say during a VC Pitch

No Gas, Big Problems | The ETH Merge Cometh | Bessemer Gets Big

Episode #16 | Capital and People in Crypto Investing & Focusing on the Fringe.

JPoww in Jackson Hole | Porsche Zooms towards IPO | GoPuff's Pumping Up its Cash Reserves

On Investor Interest in Troubling Times

It's sketchy that TikTok is run by a country that openly hates the United States.

Or: It’s Time to B̶u̶i̶l̶d̶ Invest!

Due to the seemingly inevitable march of globalization, our world is more interconnected today than it ever was before. Ironically, despite this growing overlap, inter-regional correlation rarely follows. That is, startup and venture capital conditions in one market seldom (if ever) correlate directly to the conditions in another. A wide variety of factors — whether currencies, climates, commerce, or disparate socioeconomic conditions — generate a myriad of diverse environments for local startups and investors.

$350M from our friends at a16z and a whole lot of press.

They're down. They're up. They're down? Who knows.

YC’s Changes

Everyone's favorite accelerator goes small! Or at least smaller.

Investor demand, early-stage deal trends, fundraising activity, and other measures of relative market performance can vary materially by geography.

**Spoiler Alert: This is the largest change to the Stonks platform since we started.**

What we're seeing and how it lines up with headlines.

The amount of capital earmarked for startup investing has never been higher. Ripe market conditions, record-breaking funding levels, and an influx of traditional and non-traditional investors in 2021 has helped insulate the world of early-stage investing.

Maybe markets will be stable once I get back from Italy.

With headlines increasing mentions of bear markets, inflation, and stagnant IPO / public equity demand, the worlds of startup investing and venture capital continue to show promising trends and insulation from broader market downturns.

Musk leaves - Twitter sues - A legal/meme battle for the ages

Event RSVP count is a strong indicator of a Demo Day's ability to generate higher levels of investment interest.

Capital still needs to be deployed, just not as hastily

Following an impressive start to Q1, Stonks saw investment interest on the platform slow on a per startup basis towards the end of March into April. Looking at the numbers, the weeks of March 27th, April 3rd, and April 10th saw 16, 20, and 9 startups receive investment interest on Stonks, respectively. Over those same periods, median investment interest generated per startup remained low, failing to eclipse $350K in any week.

LPs line up for $2.25B of new U.S. focused funds

The FDA is set to kick Juul out of the U.S. for good

Merit Circle DAO vs. Yield Guild Games

At Stonks, we think Demo Days are one of the most exciting ways to bring founders and investors together and we’ve set out to build the ultimate Demo Day Platform; starting with how you host and run a demo day behind the scenes.

At Stonks, we believe everyone should be able to invest in startups.

Buyers and sellers struggle to find common ground.

OpenSea's former head of product was indicted yesterday.

A 52-slide presentation outlining the trouble ahead.

YCombinator started in 2005, and has been used to launch over 3000 startups, which were collectively valued at over $300 billion as of Jan’21. Some well-known ones include Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox and Reddit.

Elon continues to tweet and no one knows what's going on.

Coinbase is down bad and Terra is... dead?

Startup investing is limited to those who are accredited investors, per SEC rules. Deals cannot be discussed or shared publicly, unless the startup or a qualifying platform is verifying accreditation. This has historically been a significant burden for both startups and platforms.

Two Silicon Valley success stories go down different roads.

Traditional financial institutions look for crypto native allies.

$1M to founders at the earliest stages. Will it work?

Will they or won't they? The tech courtship of the decade.

$560M is getting spent on crypto whether you like it or not.

Startups that raised big rounds look to avoid public comps.

Downturn Shmownturn. These PE shops are bargain hunting.

Bessemer creates DAO with $250m earmarked for crypto.

Your favorite Hedge Fund turned VC continues to shake things up by committing $1B to early-stage funds.

We’re a small team of 16 at Stonks.

We watched our investor base spike with 279 new investors all while handling our own accreditation, signing and wiring. We were stunned by the quality of investors that came inbound through our event without a single meeting — founders of unicorn companies, media moguls, GPs at top funds and many, many more.

Index investing in the public markets has yielded superior returns for most investors than active stock-picking. The data shows that fewer than 20% of active money managers outperform an index (such as SPY) over 10 years. Stretch it out to 15 years, and fewer than 5% of active money managers will outperform a broad index.

As the resident software engineer amongst my friends, I get asked all the time for advice on how to bring their ideas into the real world. The good news is there are more options than ever, but the nuances between them are important to understand before jumping into development.