Fast growing fast, tons of podcasts, lots of tweets, and much more to check out over the weekend.
Startup and tech news and happenings from the past few weeks.
Welcome to The Takeoff, a newsletter and podcast helping students and young professionals learn more about startups, tech, venture capital, and more. In this newsletter, we share content that our team found worthwhile over the past two weeks. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe below, share it with friends, and give us a like by hitting the ❤️ button!
Hey everyone — Michael here 👋,
Happy almost February (wow!) and welcome to the January 29nd Edition of What We’ve Been Following, our (mainly) bi-weekly newsletter highlighting some of the newsletters, podcasts, blog posts, tweets, startup news, and more that our Team found interesting over the past few weeks.
If you missed the last Edition of What We’ve Been Following, published on January 2nd and written by Roshan, be sure to check it out, here.
Before getting into today’s newsletter, I want to give a quick shout out to Domm Holland, Jason Alderman, and the rest of the team at Fast. Domm came on The Takeoff as our 8th interview guest! He took a bet on us, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without that.
Fast recently announced a $102M Series B from Stripe, Lee Fixel at Addition, and Index, among others. They’re building a 🚀 and will be hiring for a TON of roles in the near future. This is a company you want to get involved with!
New content since the last What We’ve Been Following newsletter from Jan 2.
(Mini Deep-Dive) I (Michael) wrote a post on the SaaS Management space, highlighting vendors such as Intello, Blissfully, Torii, G2 Track, BetterCloud, Cleanshelf, and more. I had a lot of fun putting this together, and, if you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d highly recommend doing so 👇.
(Podcast) I chatted with Eric Glyman (Co-founder & CEO of Ramp). Ramp is a leading corporate spend management startup that has raised over $55M to date from D1, Coatue, and Founders Fund, among others.
Listen on Substack, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
(Q&A) Vinay Iyengar (Investor at Two Sigma Ventures) joined The Takeoff to discuss his path into venture, what he focuses on at TSV, and his recent blog post, The Ultimate Guide to Finding a Startup Job.
What’s coming up.
(Podcast & Newsletter) Our first interview collab! Roshan and Rick Liu (Junior at WashU | Founder of The Seed) recently chatted with Square Co-founder and WashU alum, Jim McKelvey. Rick is actually releasing the episode via The Seed today, and we’ll push out a text version of the conversation, as well as our own podcast, next week :)
(Newsletter) Roshan recently chatted with VC & TikTok legend Turner Novak about his thoughts on some interesting social media companies. Release date: stay tuned!
(Podcast) I recently chatted with Sara Mauskopf, co-founder & CEO at Winnie for the pod! The episode will go live on February 15.
(Podcast) Dave Fano (CEO of Teal) joined the pod to discuss what he’s building with Teal, advice he has for aspiring founders, and more. Release date: sometime in February.
What We’ve Been Following.
(Subreddit v. Hedge Funds) Many of you have probably already been following the craziness in the stock earlier this week, but if you’re late to the party, here’s your chance. Basically, $GME, $AMC, $NOK, $BB, and a handful of other stocks saw crazy jumps, largely due to retail investors betting against large hedge funds’ short positions in these companies. Thursday, Robinhood removed GameStop and AMC from its platform.
(Building a city) Mario Gabriele over at The Generalist is building a “city” for people in tech. If you haven’t had a chance to check out what Mario is building, go do so.
(Podcast) I went “all-in” on The All-In Podcast the past few weeks. My favorite episodes:
(Podcast) Tristan Harris joined Joe Rogan to discuss ethics in tech. It’s a great listen. And, if you haven’t already watched The Social Dilemma, go do so.
(Podcast) Calm’s co-founder and co-CEO Michael Acton Smith joined Venture Stories to discuss the early days of Calm, where the business is today (they just hit 100M downloads!), and more.
(Podcast) Old but gold. I relistened to Chris Dixon’s “What’s Next for the Internet?” podcast the other day. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go give it a listen.
(Newsletter) I’m late on updating our OKRs for The Takeoff, but Elaine Zelby’s post from December on the “Rise of Curators, Calendar OKR Tracker, and Better Audible” is a great read. My favorite quote from the post: “There are 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, over 850,000 active podcasts, and more newsletters in my inbox than I could ever possibly read.”
(Blog) Brex’s Pedro Franceschi on why he is long on the growth mindset.
(Blog) Check out Wealthfront’s 2021 Career-Launching Companies List to find a list of 100 of the best companies to join after graduating!
(Podcast) Roshan’s old boss, Ram Parameswaran, joined Patrick O'Shaughnessy on Invest Like The Best to discuss how he approaches investing at Octahedron and how internet businesses scale.
(Cool read) Tribe Capital’s Firstlook, a new model for venture co-invest vehicles.
(Blog) The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class by Alex Danco
(Blog) The Evolution of Social Media: Splitting Into Social and Media by Rex Woodbury
Some funding rounds.
Tweets, threads, and other Twitter fun.
Some of Austin Rief’s insights from building and selling Morning Brew.
Affirm IPO’d. Its stock rose a lot on day one of trading.
Visa acquiring Plaid is off! Personally, I think this is great for Plaid.
My buddy Jack put together a guide on how students can help VC firms.
Yes.
The three C’s of business communication, per Lenny Rachitsky.
Lol.
NBA TopShot is taking off.
Uber defrauded out of $100M of their ad spend.
Quick shout out to another newsletter
My buddy Leo is working on a substack called Consumer Startups. He writes about the founding stories behind the most successful early stage B2C startups and how the best B2C investors like David Tisch evaluates early-stage startups. Make sure to check it out if you are interested in social apps, brands, marketplaces, and all things consumers.
Did we miss any good content, venture rounds, and job postings from the past two weeks? If so, let us know on Twitter.
Let us know your thoughts on today’s newsletter! It helps us make them better moving forward!
That’s all for today’s Edition of What We’ve Been Following!
Thanks for being a part of The Takeoff fam! Help us grow and expand our impact by sharing The Takeoff.
We have some amazing interviews lined up to be released in the coming weeks! Let us know your feedback by shooting us a tweet or DM on Twitter (@_TheTakeoff).
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Written by Michael Spiro (Founder at The Takeoff. Senior at Washington University in St. Louis. JMI Equity, Equal Ventures, Ground Up Ventures, Intello).