#254 | European Resilience, Algorithmic Don Draper, Circular Deals, & more

Oct 19th | The latest from Bessemer, Sequoia, Altimeter, Floodgate, First Round, and others

SandHill.io aggregates and shares the latest investment themes, market insights, and best practices for operating and investing from 700+ VCs, analysts, and operators.

This newsletter curates a selection of posts featured on the website each week.

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Investment Themes & Theses

• Roadmap: European resilience (Bessemer Team)

• The Algorithm Ate Don Draper (Brian Sugar, GP @ Sugar Capital)

• When Stocks Go On-Chain (Dan Rosen, GP @ Commerce Ventures)

Industry Developments & Analyses

• Circular Deals & Supply Chain Dynamics (David Cahn, GP @ Sequoia)

• The Freight Market Has Bottomed Out. Now What? (Annelies Gamble, Partner @ Zetta)

• LLM hallucinations aren’t bugs: the real challenges are confidence and context (Zachary Hoffman, SignalFire)

• From Data Quantity to Data Quality (Jamin Ball, Partner @ Altimeter Capital)

• The Data Pendulum Swings to Consolidation (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Theory)

• Supply Chain Resilience as a Service → Embedded Risk Infrastructure (Amir Kabir, MP @ Overlook)

Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating

• Languaging: The Software of Belief (Mike Maples Jr., GP @ Floodgate)

• 15 Tips for Scaling your Startup’s Hiring Process (Alex Iskold, GP @ 2048)

• Founder-led sales and marketing never ends (Mark Gustaferro & Craig Rosenberg, Scale)

• Renew Your Co-Founder Vows — and Other Tactics for Strengthening the Most Important Relationship in Your Startup (First Round Review)

• Building Outbound from Scratch: A Founder’s Playbook (Liz Christo, Partner @ Stage 2)

• A B2B founder’s guide to generating demand from scratch (Bessemer Team)

Additional Reads

• Reserves Are A Scam (James Heath, Principal @ dara5)

• “But AI companies grow so fast” (Yoni Rechtman, Principal @ Slow)

• The Moat Problem (Parul Singh, Board Partner @ Initialized)

• The Greenfield Strategy: AI-native startup Bingo (James da Costa & Alex Rampell, A16Z)

• The OpenAI Economy (Tanay Jaipuria, Partner @ Wing VC)

• The Compounding Stack (Vivek Ramaswami & Sabrina Wu, Madrona)

• Data Network Effects vs. the Innovator’s Dilemma (Peter G Schmidt, Sr. Associate @ Refinery)

• Anatomy of an Enterprise Platform Company(Sarah Wang & Justin Kahl, A16Z)

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Notes:

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