NVTC Newsletter No. 14
Happy Thursday everyone! The long-anticipated weekly newsletter has arrived at last. For those new here, welcome to the NVTC weekly newsletter. Here you’ll find recent updates from the tech world, insightful articles related to startups and highlights from NV portfolio companies.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ⚡
🎢 Making Waves – A Tesla Roadster on water.
⭐ Slacking Off? – Stewart Butterfield fantasizes about gardening.
⭐ Chipping Away – We might not get microchips in our brains afterall.
⭐ The Twitter Blues – An expensive check marks the spot.
📈 Out In Public – Historically huge IPOs.
NV Portfolio Highlight 🎢
Arc Boats is developing electric watercraft that are more than just environmentally friendly–they’re luxurious and powerful. Cofounder and CTO Ryan Cook spent almost 10 years at SpaceX as a lead engineer before joining Arc Boats when he decided to apply his rocket background to the new design challenge. The electric-boat market mainly consists of recreational, low-speed watercraft. Arc Boats takes it to the next level, proving that electric boats can in fact compete with gas ones. They can also traverse protected waterways where noise and exhaust pollution otherwise interfere with wildlife.
Amusingly, Cook has been quoted with the mentality: “rockets and boats have more in common than you think.” His rocket approach to electric boats shows in both the sleekness of the design and also the speed at which Arc Boats brought its first product to market. This past summer, the just 17-month-old company began selling its very first electric boat, the Arc One. A common comparison of the Arc One is a Tesla Roadster, but for water.
Arc Boats designs all its battery packs, powertrains, control systems, and software in-house. Having just raised $30 million in Series A funding at the end of 2021 from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Lowercarbon, Eclipse, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Will Smith, and Diddy, the company is in full throttle. You can explore open roles at Arc Boats here.
If you want to be entertained and hear Ryan Cook’s perspective on the Arc One, I highly recommend this article for a fascinating inside look.
GOOD READS 📖
Here’s another CEO step-down to add to the list of high net-worth individuals leaving their post to support the greater good. This week, Slack’s cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield announced he will be leaving Slack’s parent company Salesforce. This news comes suspiciously close to the resignation announcement of Salesforce’s co-CEO Bret Taylor. The best part of the step-down is this Butterfield quote: “These days my fantasies are about gardening.”
This Forbes article provides a helpful framework for data in the context of businesses. When data is limitless, and wrapping your head around it can feel like trying to understand blackholes or pineapple on pizza. This article breaks it down into four more easily digestible items: caring for data, finding a data story, discovering relationships in data, and the future of data.
Kaley’s Comment: Data really is everywhere. A recent, novel application of data includes scientists leveraging data to save the ocean. The challenge lies in converting observational datasets to “data stories” for understanding and managing complex natural environments. Data is currently used to monitor ecosystems, determine locations for offshore wind farms, and predict marine heat waves, among other applications.
If you were excited about implanting a brain-computer interface in your head, you might have to wait a bit longer. The USDA is investigating Neuralink for potential animal welfare violations, having killed 1500 animals during testing. Employees have reported that many of these deaths were due to faulty experiments stemming from Elon Musk’s increased pressures on and threats towards the company.
Twitter Blue, the new premium subscription service to attach a blue check mark to your account, is planning to relaunch with two different price points. When purchased using Twitter’s iOS app, it will cost $11 per month. When purchased using the Twitter website, it will cost only $7 per month. Some theorize it’s an attempt to circumvent Apple’s 30% commission on in-app purchases. Regardless of the reasoning, I can’t help picturing who would win in a boxing match between Elon Musk and Tim Cook.
Kaley’s Comment: Although Twitter’s decision to monetize verification is highly controversial, Twitter is on to something. The Internet was not built with protections in mind. Right now, no one can readily distinguish information from disinformation, mainly due to a social media identity problem. For all the accounts out there, no one is being held accountable. Filters to verification propose a potential solution.
STARTUP SNIPPETS 🔮
Tea is an open source unified package manager for software developers, challenging well-known platforms like NPM and Homebrew. The company just raised $8.9 million in seed funding led by Acuitas Group Holdings to capitalize on its momentum.
NeuReality is a double-whammy AI chip inferencing company, offering both hardware and a supportive suite of software and services. NeuReality just raised $35 million in Series A funding, led by Samsung Ventures, Cardumen Capital, Varana Capital, OurCrowd, and XT Hi-Tech.
Pebble is a startup focused on health benefits, using AI to create plans for companies with up to 500 employees. The company just raised $12 million in second seed round funding led by XYZ Venture Capital.
Rokt is a marketing software platform that employs machine learning to analyze shoppers’ engagement with products and services. Rokt just raised a Series E secondary funding round led by Square Peg and Wellington Management at a $2.4 billion valuation.
Reddit Highlight 📈
This graphic features the largest IPOs in history. What’s perhaps more interesting than the size of the IPOs themselves is the year that many of these companies went public. It’s almost shocking that several massive companies that dominate the world today, like AliBaba and Meta, have been public for less than 20 years.
OUTRO
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