Week 0 Roundup
5 top stories this week
1) Flow Carbon Raises $70m
Crypto + Climate tech = aka a VC dream… second time founder with a unicorn exit… even dreamier… founder left WeWork then continued to consult for them for a $185m fee (a contract that he then apparently violated)
If there’s anything Neumann did well it was to play VCs… WeWork even wrote a guide on how to do this in 2014
Notably absent from this round was Softbank, and on a cursory scan of Dealroom and Business Wire seemingly any of the other early investors in WeWork
2) A16Z raises it’s latest $4.5bn crypto fund
With $4.5bn to deploy, leading the FlowCarbon round makes sense, even just to justify the 2% management fee.
More seriously however, it does show that despite market turmoil and long term pessimism in the market, there is enough dry powder that needs to be deployed. All the more reason to build.
Size of the fund however does call into question just how much of web3 VCs own. Great responses in the Bankless podcast
3) Delphi released the merge report
Vitalik endorsed it so you can trust it’s accurate.
In other news the merge is coming… I’ll probably repost this and add snippits of more detail on why this is so huge as it becomes interesting… but the merge is coming.
Other Observations:
If you’re wanting to understand just how substantial the drop has been since the bull market, was looking into a punk this week. It was almost half it’s price in Eth a year ago yet much higher in USD… :,(
