The latest Venture Capital & Startups posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
IPOs take 11-13 years from first check to meaningful VC liquidity, with founders selling only ~4% annually post-lock-up. The IPO path must deliver 2–3x a strong M&A offer to justify the wait, dilution, and risk versus a faster cash exit.
AI is enabling a new class of profitable, capital-efficient software companies that venture is ill-equipped to fund. The author proposes a hybrid structure—priced equity plus revenue-share repayment—to capture durable mid-market exits while delivering faster, more predictable LP returns than traditional venture.
The Cognitive Revolution mirrors the Industrial Revolution's transformation of physical work—machines will handle 99.9% of cognitive tasks within decades, collapsing the cost of intelligence and unleashing latent demand. Society must prepare for rapid job displacement and retraining, while recognizing that new categories of human work will emerge, as they did after mechanization.
AI agents' full autonomy in both offense and defense will reshape software security and corporate innovation. Incumbents face structural incentives to keep humans in the loop—risking catastrophic failure—while startups, with nothing to lose, will fully automate and disrupt.
Bell Labs achieved epochal breakthroughs because it combined patient capital from AT&T's monopoly rents, a concrete mission with bottomless technical depth, and direct manufacturing scale—conditions that modern antitrust, capital markets, and VC structures have made illegal. Recreating such institutions requires "synthetic rent" without the predatory monopoly, a structural puzzle we've largely abandoned.
VCs see a tiny fraction of founders seeking capital each year—a typical firm meets ~200 companies and invests in 3, against 55,000+ that raise angel money. AI-powered sourcing is flattening this coverage advantage, but the binding constraint remains finding time to meet the best founders who actually reach your calendar.
Venture capital cycles are cyclical by nature, but data suggests 2026 may mark a local funding maximum; the author models a 75% probability of downturn by end-2027 driven by macro shocks or AI lab failures, with distinct implications for mega-funds, micro-funds, and growth-stage companies.
AI has not replaced SDRs; leading AI-forward companies are hiring more of them. Sam Nelson, founder of SDRLeader.com, reveals why automation works on inbound but outbound still requires human credibility, the one metric that predicts SDR success, and domain risks that silently kill email programs.
A Wealth of Common Sense (46) · Saastr (36) · Newcomer (20) · Sammy Abdullah (20) · Lightspeed Venture Partners (19) · Earnest Sweat (19) · Lenny's Newsletter (17) · A16Z (16) · USV (15) · Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (14)
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