Roses are red, violets are blue, FTX has no gift for you
Necessary Nuggets
Happy Valentine’s day everybody! If you’re reading this instead of prepping for dinner reservations, we’re delighted to be your Valentine this year. There’s not a SINGLE thing that would make us happier. And if you’re new here, welcome to Necessary Nuggets. We deliver exciting updates from Necessary Ventures and some helpful tidbits on the tech world to you bimonthly (sorry, no flowers and chocolates). If you can’t get enough of the newsletters, don’t worry! You can access every edition on our blog — perfect for when you can’t wait for the new edition and are dying to read more or just need a midnight snack.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ⚡
🚨 Finding your passion this Valentine’s Day – NV portfolio companies are hiring! Check out jobs from Taro Health, Relief, and Particle Health.
⭐ The Spirit of Un-Giving – FTX doesn’t follow the golden rule of “no take backsies.”
⭐ Farmer’s Dozen – From big tech to big fields.
⭐ On the Promptenade – A newly found need for creative writers.
📈 Two Chatbots Walk Into a Bard – A Google/Microsoft showdown.
JOBORTUNITIES 🚨
A few exciting opportunities with Necessary Ventures’ portfolio companies:
Taro is on the hunt for a product engineer to help them deliver health insurance designed to keep you healthy.
Are you someone who likes developing good software and is looking to make a big impact on not only a product but also a company’s growth and operations? This is your gig.
From Taro: “Our patients and doctors are actively using our software to navigate care and billing now, and we have lots of workflows we want to improve. We’d love any referrals to this role!"
Relief is looking for a strong back-end engineer to help them get people out of toxic debt.
Do you want to contribute to a fast-growing startup in the FinTech space? Even better, do you want to help Americans say bye to their debt for free? This is the perfect chance.
If you know of anyone, please reach out to us or send an email to careers@relief.app.
Particle Health is looking for a senior software engineer to help create the new world of healthcare data exchange.
Are you exhilarated by the thought of using your skills to think big and reinvent industry standards? This might be for you.
This role allows you to own all steps in the development process from design to implementation, solving complex technical challenges and driving adoption of those solutions.
Feel free to reach out with any questions! All 182 open job postings are listed here.
NV Portfolio Highlight 🎢
It’s that time of year. The W2s are flying into mailboxes; TurboTax subscriptions are reluctantly refreshing on desktops; cold sweats are plaguing every taxpayer in the night. The reckoning hour is coming where every U.S. citizen is forced to balance their checkbooks and face-off with the scariest d word of all: debt.
But what if there was an easy way out of your debt and all the tax season anxiety that comes with it? Relief is a nifty startup automating debt relief. Its app uses machine learning algorithms and collective bargaining to decrease people’s debt balances. You can file your taxes from the bath, while Relief does the math for you and negotiates directly with creditors, bringing you one step closer to fiscal freedom.
The company was founded by serial entrepreneur Jason Saltzman who co-founded SeamlessDocs and The Alley, a co-working space in NYC, before moving on to co-found Relief. It raised a $15M Series A round last February with a who’s who of investors and is currently hiring. If you’re curious to know how they weave people out of debt, or maybe you want to try your hand at freeing people of debt, scroll through this link for job opportunities.
GOOD READS 📖
FTX became the donation grinch when it requested that politicians, PACs, and other recipients of FTX funds return their donations. The loss for FTX was far more severe than the Starbucks gift card your Great Aunt gives you for every birthday and holiday – the donations were once valued at a whopping $32 billion. This is the first step in what many assume will be a lengthy legal case for FTX to claw back its funds.
Kaley’s Comment: “Requested” is a generous term for FTX’s current undertaking. Any politicians or groups that don’t voluntarily refund the donations will likely face a bankruptcy court lawsuit. Many politicians have already returned the money they received in an effort to preserve their reputations.
For those dying [faster than the earth] to know when we might have a Planet B, researchers at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are leading the charge. This past week, the company released news of its efforts to pioneer power systems made from materials native to the moon’s surface. If successful, the technology would eliminate power as a constraint of operating on the moon. One hope is to eventually transition heavy industry off of Earth and onto the moon.
An unexpected shark in the pool of laid off tech workers is big construction and agricultural equipment manufacturers, such as Deere & Co. With the rise of autonomous tractors, mining, and smart farming technology, agritech companies are eager for tech workers to fill innovative roles. In order to meet growing farmers’ equipment demand, companies are hoping to lure in enough top talent to make speedy progress.
We’re not done talking about AI yet. The AI race is on: Google released chatbot Bard, Microsoft released a supercharged version of Bing, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still buzzing. With many investors recognizing generative AI as the next frontier of the Internet, a new industry has popped up founded on the art of prompting: producing feeder text to evoke the desired response from generative AI models.
In medical areas where there is scarce data, how well doctors perform is directly related to how many images they see. Enter Stable Diffusion, Stability AI’s text to image AI model with the capability to produce thousands of new images in a short time. A Stanford graduate student joined forces with a researcher at the Stanford Center for AI, and together they discovered that Stable Diffusion could successfully be trained to perform well at creating synthetic medical images.
STARTUPS TO WATCH 🔥
Acceldata is building a data observability platform that helps businesses understand the health of their data and identify any potential problems. Last week, it announced a $50 million Series C funding round led by March Capital to further expand and innovate its products.
Caldera is developing a no-code web3 infrastructure platform to simplify creating app-specific blockchains. The company raised $9 million in two rounds led separately by Sequoia Capital partner Shaun Maguire and Dragonfly Capital investment partner Ani Pai.
Redwood Materials takes end-of-life electric vehicle batteries and other automotive scrap and turns them into raw materials for new EV battery cells. The startup secured a $2 billion loan from the US Department of Energy to build a new battery recycling facility in Nevada.
Abacus Bioscience is creating a powerful approach for vaccines to treat people with cancer. The company raised $4.4 million dollars led by the Washington Research foundation as part of an ongoing seed round to continue refining its technology.
REDDIT HIGHLIGHT 📈
In case you’re looking for a pick-me-up today, here’s a solid work of art trending on Reddit.
… and one of my favorite comments from this thread:
I have to agree with Reddit on this one. Of all the names Google could have chosen, Bard?! Maybe Google should have asked ChatGPT for some help naming.
OUTRO
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Thanks for reading, and see you next week!
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San Francisco, California