Bet Against Zuck At Own Peril

Meta Opens Its Mixed-Reality OS to Third-Party Headsets Beyond the Quest

“In the suddenly more heated VR/AR wars between Meta, Apple, Sony, and eventually Google and Samsung, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg just made a fascinating chess move. Meta just announced that its VR OS, now called Horizon OS, will work on devices beyond the Quest. And partners are already coming: Asus, Lenovo, and Microsoft.”

Read the full article from CNET

Bitcoin ushers in fourth halving as miners' block subsidy reward drops to 3.125 BTC

“There have been three halving events in Bitcoin's history before today, reducing its block subsidy inflation from 50 BTC to 25 BTC in 2012, then to 12.5 BTC in 2016 and 6.25 BTC at the last halving on May 11, 2020.”

Read the full article from The Block

Cloud security unicorn Wiz in talks to acquire rival Lacework

“Cloud security unicorn Wiz is reportedly in advanced negotiations to acquire its rival Lacework for $150-$200 million, a fraction of its previous valuation of $8.3 billion after its Series D funding round in November 2021.”

Read the full article from SDX

Hot Links

Twitch is bringing its TikTok-style feed to everyone this month

Tesla lowers price of ‘Full Self-Driving’ to $8,000, down from $12,000

Drone startup Zipline hits 1 million deliveries, looks to restaurants as it continues to grow

Sandhill Live Schedule

THURSDAY: Things I Wish I Knew About Building Self-Serve Software

Join us live this Thursday, April 25 at 3 pm EST to learn more about the highs and lows of building self-serve software, from tech industry veteran, Russ Heddleston.

​More about Russ:

• ​Co-founder and previously CEO of DocSend where he led the acquisition by Dropbox in 2021 for $165m (raised under $15m).

• ​Previously he was co-founder of Pursuit, a social referral company that helped source referral candidates; sold to Meta in 2011, where he then ran Product Management for the Pages product.

• ​Russ also led product and management roles at Microsoft, Trulia (acq by Zillow), and Greystripe (acq by EPSN.)

• ​Previously, received an MBA from Harvard Business School, a master's in Computer Science from Stanford and a bachelor's in Computer Engineering from Stanford.

Click here to RSVP!

​This event is brought to by Sacra.

ICYMI: How We Sold Clearbit To HubSpot

Earlier this week I got the chance to sit down with Matt Sornson to talk about his journey at Clearbit and their ultimate sale to HubSpot in 2023. It was a great conversation with some notable surprises based off of what a brief look at the timeline might suggest:

The decision by co-founders to step back and bring in an external CEO was more about them being honest about their skillsets and allowing the business to “grow up” than anything else.

When Matt came back as CEO it was because AI had created a existential threat to Clearbit’s business as well as new exciting opportunities. It had nothing to do with preparing the business to be sold.

They were not looking to sell when HubSpot approached them. They were actually as far away from wanting to sell as they had been in a long time.

If you want to check out the full conversation, you can find the recording on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here.

Thank you to everyone who showed up live and to Sacra for helping bring it together.

LAST WEEK: Demo Day Is Back With SeedChecks

​Thank you for coming!

​In case you missed part of the presentations, you can find the full recording on Twitter here and on Linkedin here.

​If you would like to get in touch with the founders that presented last week, you can reach out to them through Linkedin using the links below:

​Andrew Nijmeh - Glist

​Brianna Guidotti - JoinMe (got app store approval today!)

​Wenhao Yang - AuthPay

​We use LinkedIn as a way to provide better context to founders about who's reaching out. They will be expecting the outreach.

​I'd also encourage you to follow / connect with our awesome panelists:

​​Eric Jorgenson (Twitter / LinkedIn) is an investor at Rolling Fun. He is also CEO at Scribe Media and author of The Almanack of Naval and Anthology of Balaji. 

​​Christian Keil (Twitter / LinkedIn) is the Chief of Staff at Astranis, where he helped launch their first communications satellite and scale to $1B in sales. In his new show, First Principles, he asks deep tech founders dumb questions until he understands how their tech works from the ground up.

​​Turner Novak (Twitter / LinkedIn) is an investor at Banana Capital. He makes great memes, writes a newsletter, and hosts a podcast.

​Thank you again for your support and we hope to see you at the next one!

Letters From The Editor

Misc. (short for miscellaneous)

Quarterly Reminder To Not Bet Against Zuck

I forget when I wrote this last, but it’s worth saying again. Some points:

• Founder led companies outperform generally (worth googling if you’ve never looked into that).

• Zuck is arguably at the top of his game both mentally and physically (pictured above).

• There is an ongoing technology shift that seems to largely benefit incumbents (AI).

• Zuck has been on the AR / VR thing since before it was Meta (Oculus purchased in 2014 lol).

• The cultural pendulum seems to swinging back towards open source and Zuck is making a move (Tim/Apple continue to look stagnant).

Definitely not financial advice. Just sayin.

BloomTech Poll Results

More split on this than I would have expected. Would be interested to hear the point of view of people who voted “Disagree” here if you’re willing to share.

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Agreed. This is a side show compared to typical college debt stuff. (12)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Disagree. BloomTech should be punished even more. (8)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Not sure. Seems like a complicated issue. (6)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Other. Leave a comment after you click. (2)

Talk soon,
Adam

PS - Do you want to sponsor this newsletter or an upcoming live event? Reply to this email and/or shoot a note to [email protected] to learn more.