🏦 DRF portfolio company goes public!
ft. thoughtful essays and profiles, important news on the VC industry, immersive podcast episodes, and exciting job and internship opportunities!
🏡 community update
FiscalNote (NYSE: NOTE) has become the first publicly traded company in Dorm Room Fund’s portfolio! An AI-driven enterprise SaaS company that uses data and expert insight for global policy and market intelligence insights, FiscalNote first met with Dorm Room Fund back in 2013 when co-founder Tim Hwang was a student at Harvard Business School. Later that year, FiscalNote raised a $1.2 million seed round from Dorm Room Fund, New Enterprise Associates, and Mark Cuban. Almost a decade since first meeting the team, DRF congratulates FiscalNote for its huge accomplishment in becoming a publicly traded company!
Co-founder Tim Hwang joined senior leadership, company employees, members of its Board of Directors, and customers in ringing the Opening Bell at the New York Stock Exchange. (Source: NYSE)
📱 tech news
Carried interest survives. In the eleventh-hour, Senate Democrats dropped a provision in their proposed Inflation Reduction Act that would have increased the tax on carried-interest income. Carried interest is the share of profits (generally 20%) from an investment that is paid out to the partners in VC, private equity, and hedge funds. Last week, Senator Joe Manchin III and Senator Chuck Schumer struck an agreement last week that would have shrank the carried interest exception by extending the holding period required for an investment to be eligible for preferential tax treatment. However, at the insistence of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat, Democrats have since dropped the provision in order to win Sinema’s support for the Climate Bill in the 50-50 split Senate.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Democrat, Arizona) announced her support to the Climate Bill after striking a deal with other Democrats that would scale back certain tax provisions. (Source: Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call / Zuma Press) Amazon’s latest acquisition. In its fourth-largest deal to date, Amazon announced the $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the makers of Roomba robot vacuums. Amazon has made several hardware plays over the year, such as with the company’s Alexa digital assistant, the 2018 acquisition of Ring smart doorbell, and the Astro home robot. While iRobot has struggled recently due to supply chain constraints and low sales, the company also launched an AI-powered software platform earlier this year for its robotic vacuums and mops. With the addition of iRobot, Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of smart home products.
Crypto’s security woes. Solana announced that hackers had stolen around $5.2 million worth of crypto tokens from over 8,000 wallets due to vulnerabilities in Slope, a web-based crypto wallet platform built for Solana. Meanwhile, hackers stole $190 million from Nomad, a crypto bridge protocol backed by OpenSea, Polychain, and Coinbase. Crypto bridges allow for interoperability and serve as the infrastructure for users to exchange assets between different blockchains. The Nomad attack occurred due to a flawed update that allowed hackers to easily copy and paste transactions with a new address to access tokens. The persistent nature of attacks in the crypto space emphasizes the importance of strong cyber standards and quality code.
Make Instagram Instagram Again. A few weeks ago, Instagram announced a variety of changes that would be coming to the platform. In an attempt to compete with TikTok, Instagram began testing full-screen photo and video posts on their platform, and increased the number of recommended posts users saw in their feed. However, following massive backlash from millions of users including the most followed woman on Instagram, Kylie Jenner, Instagram head Adam Mosseri revealed that the platform would temporarily pause tests of its full-screen app view and reduce the number of algorithm-recommended posts in user’s feeds.
Tatiana Bruening's post has received over 2.2 million likes since it was first posted on July 22. (Source: @illumitati on Instagram)
📣 new startup + VC jobs
internships
👉 Sequoia-backed stealth healthcare startup: Business Strategy and Operations Fall Intern (Remote or SF) 👈
Susa Ventures: 2022 Venture Fellow (Remote)
Cohere: Machine Learning Fall Intern (Remote)
Tencent: Investment Analyst Intern (Palo Alto)
full-time
👉 Bluedot: Marketing Director (SF) 👈
Uber: Associate Product Manager (SF)
Facebook: Rotational Product Manager (Menlo Park, Seattle, NYC)
Bain: Bain Capital Tech Opps Analyst (Boston)
Salesforce: Associate Product Manager (SF)
Ava: Product Manager (Remote, SF, LA)
Blackstone: Innovations Investment Team Analyst (NYC)
a16z: Games Investing Team Analyst (Remote)
OpenStore: Investment Analyst (Miami)
Canaan: Investor (SF and Menlo Park)
Tribe Capital: Investment Analyst (Hybrid Remote)
Worklife Ventures: Chief of Staff (LA, NYC, SF)
Balanced: Founding Product Designer (NYC)
📖 new essays we’re reading
Elad Gil provides an outlook on the startup markets over the next few quarters
Rahul Rana joins Not Boring with a deep-dive into the history and future of deeptech innovation
Bessemer outlines the rise of synthetic media for a variety of different use cases
Meghna Rao profiles Gaby Goldberg and her journey into crypto investing
🎙️ recent podcast episodes we’re (still) replaying
♻️ Miranda Wang, Co-founder and CEO of Novoloop: We talk Miranda’s formative years in college, maintaining strong co-founder dynamics, and the thought process behind raising institutional capital. Novoloop invents sustainable ways to convert end-of-life plastic into specialty materials.
💳 Jonathan Chang, XIR at Brex and Founder of GenZScouts: Jonathan works with startups and venture funds at Brex, and leads a quarterly fellowship for college students and startup sourcing platform via GenZScouts.
🦄 Connor McEwen, Engineering Lead at Uniswap Labs: Tune in for Connor’s thoughts on how to land a role at an attractive early-stage startup, plus hot takes on Web3 and crypto. Uniswap allows people to swap, earn, and build on the leading decentralized crypto trading protocol.
🥛 Josh Belinsky, Co-founder of Slate Milk: Slate Milk is a DTC milk brand available in over 3,500 stores nationwide. Learn how Josh raised over $7 million in venture dollars and made an appearance on Shark Tank!
📱 Ansh Nanda, Co-founder and CEO of Un1Feed: Ansh (our Head of Ops from 2021-22!) talks Duke basketball games, turning down a Google APM offer, and challenging Big Tech with his startup. Un1Feed is a platform that allows users to reclaim ownership of their social media feed by overriding the social feed algorithm.
👩💻 sign up to the talent network
Lastly, want to work with a Dorm Room Fund-backed company? The talent network’s where the info is! This is your reminder to create a profile and get access to our ever-growing jobs database. 🧠
This issue was written by: Andrew Xu (andrew.xu@dormroomfund.com).
More DRF fun: Twitter + website + company application. Send job opportunities, feedback, requests, and hot takes to info@dormroomfund.com 🚀