Sequoia Goes Long, Ye Muses on a $1 Trillion SPAC, and Live From NYC The New Tech Epicenter?
November 12, 2021: Stretch Four Insights Volume 3
Hello All,
I am live from New York this week and it has been refreshing. The weather is on point, people are out and about and in my little community of fintech meets venture capital, NYC is getting all the press. I have always taken an annual one-week trip to NYC before December since I moved out to San Francisco in 2017. After missing last year, I am back and I do feel a bit of uptick in the energy. In your typical rom-com serendipitous NYC moment, I ran into a regular at my Equinox gym in SF here in the Soho gym in the middle of the day. You can't make this stuff up.
I started my east coast road trip catching up with a lot of old college friends. I went down to my alma mater James Madison and checked out our crazy new basketball facilities. I was a scholarship athlete and lately, I have missed my old school, it was my first time back in eight years.
After my homecoming trip, I stopped through DC to catch up with friends where we shared some cocktails while watching the UFC and Showtime Boxing compete for head to head for an epic fight night. I then jetted up to Hershey, PA for a GovTech conference that focuses on merging decision-makers within the federal government's $600B annual acquisition industry and leaders in contractors of all stages. This was my first pursuit of growing my network here and expanding our business into the government sector. This year, my team at ModernTax participated in our first government contract proposal. We were unsuccessful but it was certainly a learning experience that opened my eyes to this industry and opportunity. If you are building software for financial institutions like we are, you have to consider the largest financial institution on the face of the earth as a customer so I made my way to connect with three major decision-makers at the IRS.
Let's dig in.
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📚 What I'm Reading
Admittedly, reading took a backseat while traveling this week. I did dig through a few chapters of Ask Your Developer by Jeff Lawson who has always been one of my favorite tech CEOs. As I grow as a leader and CEO it's interesting to learn how some of the most successful arrived in their current venture and built their proverbial empires. Lawson is what I call an engineer's engineer. He's been shipping code since he was in his teens and it's safe to assume he was not voted most popular in high school. Seeing how the Twilio story emerged from his background as a founder who sold their company during the stock market crash of the 2000s, how he tinkered around with helping build household names like StubHub, and then going to work at a massive company like Amazon before restarting his entrepreneurial journey all over again shows the cyclical nature of startups. It's a long game.
🎧 Listens
Roelof Botha - Sequoia’s Crucible Moment Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
While driving from the DMV down to James Madison I had the pleasure of doing something I rarely find the time to do - listen to entire long-form podcasts in one sitting. And this was an enjoyable one. It gave a first-hand explanation of the moves Sequoia announced last week. I also picked up some good insights on how venture capital works behind the scenes. Being a founder has become so much more than what it was even five years ago when I began my journey. Understanding how the best in the business think and run their institutions is important and Patrick O'Shaughnessy is one of the best at unearthing somewhat obscure areas of capitalism.
Kanye West On "Donda," Drake, Marriage W/ Kim Kardashian, His Legendary Career & More | Drink Champs
Ye, FKA Kanye West, graced Drink Champs with his presence last week and he did not disappoint. Not surprisingly, this broke all previous Drink Champs records with 6M+ views on YouTube which was streamed live on a Thursday night. My favorite sound clips were Ye's take on Silicon Valley, meeting with J. Prince and Elon Musk, and "infecting us with the Ye way." This was a good weave between the Botha podcast and the Doerr podcast (see below). Ye has become a multi-billionaire in one of the most interesting ways possible and he even takes some digs at Silicon Valley while boasting of his $9 billion net worth. Last but not least and in typical Ye fashion, he muses he is creating a $1 trillion SPAC where you can buy him as a stock. There has to be more to come on this...
My favorite quote from Ye….
"I ain't never made money with not one person from Silicon Valley." - Kanye West
📰 Recommended Readings
Discord: Imagine a Place: A Not Boring x The Generalist Collab on the Internet's New Home | Packy Mccormick & Mario Gabriele
Packy is a big inspiration for independent writers and he excels at explaining fairly complicated things in a succinct way. I streamed this article on his podcast and it was 48 minutes. While, I still have a lot to learn about Discord this piece definitely explains how massive it is, why it's so valuable, and some of the more technical aspects of how it was developed.
‘Every Firm Is Talking About It’: Venture Capital Is Having Its New York Moment | Alex Conrad
Is it not ironic Conrad dropped this piece while I was visiting NYC. This piece highlights what all VCs are saying right now - that NYC is the new epicenter for all things venture. While I think NYC is definitely showing an energetic investing community I think it is still unclear how all this will work out. Generally, what you have is the best city in the world being resilient and coming off an 18-month window of closures. So naturally, it's a perfect time to run this piece but in early January I'm sure we'll see the top VCs will migrate south to Miami and Conrad will do a hype piece on this city being the "hot venture capital epicenter".
🎵 My Jam of the Week
Jerusalema by Master KG (featuring Burna Boy)
While in D.C. I stepped out to watch two marquee fights with some friends and we went to a spot on H Street to catch the match-ups where the DJ played my jam of the week. I don't typically listen to African hip-hop/house artists but this song slaps and the energy went up to 100. It's definitely a hit. In D.C. you have to appreciate the culture and music as the diaspora is a major part of the region.
Other Stuff
I am still launching a business-in-a-box course for new tax professionals that are starting firms. It will be geared toward folks looking to do at least one of the below three things within the next six months:
Start an online tax business
Expand their current tax business
Grow their team of certified tax professionals
If you or anyone you know is interested, shoot me an email. My experience in the industry over the last five years has afforded me the knowledge to understand what can be improved on. Much more to come on this next week.
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Check out last week's Stretch Four Insights Volume #2 here and tell a friend to tell a friend.
Back to the trenches.
Best,
Matt