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The fight over Miami

Hello and welcome to Pipeline. This week: why pregnancy is not a PR crisis, a fee to be "founder-friendly" and a fight over Miami Tech Week.
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Miami Tech Week had managed to meme its way into existence.
Silicon Valley and NYC folks traveled to the city to check out what the tech scene was about, attending Founders Fund hosted parties and striking handshake deals for investment. The startup Eight Sleep hastily bought a floating billboard to advertise the new Miami Tech Week. It even had its own hype video.
The only problem? It wasn't the inaugural Miami Tech Week by any means, as local entrepreneur and previous organizer Auston Bunsen pointed out.
Bunsen then wrote a blog post that was a play-by-play about his confusion between different tech weeks, how the locals had tried to organize a response and what he viewed as the lack of collaboration between the communities.
But the fight over Miami Tech Week raised some bigger questions about how to build the next tech hub. Can you just move in a bunch of SF and NYC VCs and call it a tech scene? Does it need to come from the ground up with locals leading the charge? Or is it supposed to meet somewhere in the middle?
There's also the question of whether all the VCs have to invest in entrepreneurs in Miami to call it a startup hub, or whether they will just have Miami addresses and still invest in traditional Silicon Valley companies. Founders Fund's Keith Rabois tweeted Friday that he had already signed two new term sheets for Miami companies with Asparouhov.
The fight over Miami Tech Week may have exposed different approaches to building the next tech hub, but in the end people pulled together for another event next year, this time with everyone's versions of Miami Tech Week onboard.
When it comes to sources we trust, the masterminds at Harvard are certainly up there… so when they say that at least 20% of your portfolio should be invested in a mix of alternative assets, we're inclined to listen. Meet Masterworks, your passport to the contemporary art market, where prices crushed S&P returns by 174% from 1995–2020. Protocol Pipeline Subscribers can skip their 20,000 person waitlist with the special link below. *See important information.
Aike Ho is a principal at Acme Capital, which focuses on seed to series B investments. She invests in fintech, consumer and digital health and has invested in Curology, Pill Club, Savage X Fenty and Tia. A serial entrepreneur, she worked in several roles at J.P. Morgan, in 2014 helping launch the bank's electronic trading desk.
What area are you most excited about?
The area I'm most excited about that's also underrated is compliance. Every financial institution has to comply with laws and regulations in whatever country they're operating in. Compliance is a portion of running your business that's nonnegotiable. If you're not compliant, you can't operate. There's some severe consequences that come from that. If you're a new institution getting into crypto or also some areas of payments, then laws, rules and interpretations are changing each year. The way most companies do it now is they literally Google search what laws and regulations are, and probably keep track of it in Excel. I'm really excited by companies tackling that problem.
What area is most underrated now?
Online gambling. It's only going to get bigger. You're seeing consumers really accelerate this trend. If you think about it, it's not too different from the stock market. In the last year, consumers are a lot more proactive and more willing to try new ways to generate alpha for themselves. One is playing the online gambling of public equities. The other is just more traditional online gambling of sports or election outcomes. I think you'll see that becoming a more prominent aspect of day to day consumer life. It's a form of generating yield and also a form of entertainment. That cross section of investment and entertainment: we're really in the early days of it.
What's the trend that's worrying you?
The same thing. Investing as entertainment. It's amazing if retail traders can get access in a way that didn't really exist five years ago. But also part of it is, what are the responsibilities of these financial institutions and regulators to ensure that the retail traders are educated on what the risks are? That's a really big tension we'll see coming up this year. You could see a lot of people losing money. Now everything's going up, but what happens when the market corrects and people lose money? I feel like we're punting the question a little because the market's been rallying so long. At some point, the music stops, and what does that mean from a consumer protection perspective in terms of laws and regulations?
What's your favorite pandemic meal?
This place, Zuni Cafe in San Francisco: They do a roast chicken bread salad. The pan has the drippings from the chicken and they toss the bread in it with the salad and Champagne vinaigrette dressing and gravy. It's so good. With our neighbors we re-created it. I don't care about the chicken. The bread is really good.
What's an obsession of yours that people may not know?
I've always been obsessed with figuring out the real nature of reality. I've been meditating a long time. In Silicon Valley, you hear people have a theory that we're in a simulation like "The Matrix" or a game. I don't necessarily subscribe to that theory. But scientifically speaking we're already in a simulation. All of our senses — sight, hearing, touch — only pick up a small gradient of data. Sight is a lot more color spectrum than what our eyes are able to pick up. We have limited perceptive data and our brain takes it and creates a model of what it thinks is happening in the real world. I find that really heartening in a way. Once you understand that, whatever experience or reality you think can happen, now you can change it.
When it comes to sources we trust, the masterminds at Harvard are certainly up there… so when they say that at least 20% of your portfolio should be invested in a mix of alternative assets, we're inclined to listen. Meet Masterworks, your passport to the contemporary art market, where prices crushed S&P returns by 174% from 1995–2020. Protocol Pipeline Subscribers can skip their 20,000 person waitlist with the special link below. *See important information.
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Correction: An earlier version of the DocSend report said teams with a minority member raised 30% more. The company later updated it to be 42%. Pipeline was updated 5/10/21 to the corrected number.To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.