Welcome to another edition of Business Twitter, where we collect the best tweets to come out of Silicon Valley so you don’t have to. This article is part of a newsletter — if you want a weekly Business Twitter roundup sent to your inbox every Friday, subscribe here.
If you’re here for Facebook/Meta-related tweets, sorry to disappoint you — there’s simply too many to cram into one newsletter, and you’ve probably seen enough about the name change anyway.
This week: Sequoia Capital announces a completely new fund structure, Justin Kan on how to craft the perfect pitch deck, Joe Lonsdale calls workers who take parental leave “losers,” and one trader’s Shiba Inu crypto grows from $8,000 to $5.7 billion as the token explodes in value.
1. The Sequoia Fund
Sequoia Capital is one of the most revered venture firms, so its announcement this week of a major structural change naturally rocked the venture capital world. GP Roelof Botha tweeted about the change and shared a blog post that detailed exactly how Sequoia’s new financial model will work:
“Moving forward, our LPs will invest into The Sequoia Fund, an open-ended liquid portfolio made up of public positions in a selection of our enduring companies. The Sequoia Fund will in turn allocate capital to a series of closed-end sub funds for venture investments at every stage from inception to IPO.”
Botha added, “Today is a crucible moment in @sequoia’s journey. The traditional 10-year fund cycle of VC has become obsolete.”
Dozens of VCs shared their thoughts on the shift, including Box CEO Aaron Levie, who wrote, “Sequoia’s move toward a single open-ended fund that can hold companies through their post-public life is game changing. Companies will become longer-term oriented and venture will become more public market savvy, all critical as tech continues to scale.”
2. Justin Kan on the perfect pitch deck
Justin Kan has raised over $150,000,000 as a founder, he says, “simply by being a good storyteller.”
The Twitch and Atrium co-founder tweeted about the best ways to make your pitch deck stand out and get investors to take out their checkbooks.
“A big mistake founders make is thinking that the purpose of a deck is to get people to invest,” he wrote. “The truth is that whoever is reading your deck is likely distracted/not interested. Your job is to stand out, and make them excited.”
Kan’s advice centered around storytelling — make sure your framing is clear. The problem you’re addressing should be clear and the solution should be concrete. Position yourself as an expert who can solve that problem.
Lastly, Kan says, show investors what the world would be like if everyone used your product. Communicate a grand vision but don’t make it too outlandish.
3. Joe Lonsdale takes a weird stand against parental leave
When it comes to parental leave policies, Silicon Valley is more generous than just about the rest of corporate America. That doesn’t mean every tech founder supports paid leave for new fathers, however.
Joe Lonsdale, VC, co-founder of Palantir, and father of three, tweeted about his disdain for leaders who take parental leave, calling them “losers.”
“Great for fathers to spend time w their kids and support moms, but any man in an important position who takes 6 months of leave for a newborn is a loser,” he wrote. “In the old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future - that’s the correct masculine response.”
Initialized Capital founder Garry Tan jumped into the fray, replying, “Initialized has 4 months leave, and I took all 4 months to make sure everyone at Initialized felt like they could do it. Respect that people have different choices, but being a dad is awesome and there is more to life than work and money.”
Lonsdale appears to have had a change of heart by this point in the discussion — either that, or he didn’t want to get into an argument with someone as influential as Tan. “Cool. I should not have written ‘loser’ and appreciate the pushback,” he replied later on in the thread.
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian then replied, “The correct masculine response is to do whatever it takes for your family + newborn. No one should have to choose between the ICU/NICU and keeping their job.”
He also linked to a 2020 op-ed he wrote for The New York Times on the subject entitled, “Paternity Leave Was Crucial After the Birth of My Child, and Every Father Deserves It.”
4. The greatest Shiba trade ever
Move over, Dogecoin. There’s a new dog-related token taking over Reddit. Shiba Inu, an Ethereum-based cryptocurrency created in August 2020, has skyrocketed in value this week.
An unknown user who bought $8,000 of Shiba that month now has a stake worth a whopping $5.7 billion. In just 14 months, Shiba became 712,500 times more valuable than it was when the user bought it.
Morning Brew shared the image, adding, “We may actually be looking at the greatest individual trade of all time.”
Investor Turner Novak also shared the trade and wrote, “This investor figured out a way to do less diligence than a VC and still outperformed them all.”
