Posts by lucidcapitalism

(Axios) Limited partners’ grumpiness about VC distributions is not for naught: the industry’s cashflow ratio at the end of 2022 (-$48.8 billion) was at its most imbalanced since at least 1998, per new PitchBook data. Why it matters: Investors are giving more scrutiny to VCs in their portfolio who didn’t return much cash during 2021’s extraordinary…

(Bloomberg) Google’s Bard artificial intelligence chatbot will answer a question about how many pandas live in zoos quickly, and with a surfeit of confidence. Ensuring that the response is well-sourced and based on evidence, however, falls to thousands of outside contractors from companies including Appen Ltd. and Accenture Plc, who can make as little as…

(Politico) When do you know a bill might have legs? When there’s a bit of horse-trading going on. A first-in-the-nation bill to compel large corporations to disclose their planet-warming emissions is picking up steam in the California Legislature, where it passed the Assembly Natural Resources Committee on Monday. Read more here.

(Reuters) Global tech investor Insight Partners has raised $118 million in its second 20/20 Vision Capital fund that aims to invest in venture capital funds led by diverse managers, the firm told Reuters. This new fund expands a strategy Insight first started in 2020, after its own employees pledged $15 million of their personal capital…

(TechCrunch) Meta’s planned Twitter killer, Threads, isn’t yet publicly available but it already looks like a privacy nightmare. Information provided about the app’s privacy via mandatory disclosures required on iOS shows the app may collect highly sensitive information about users in order to profile their digital activity — including health and financial data, precise location, browsing…

(PitchBook) What GPs, LPs really think about Impact and ESG Opinions on Impact investing and ESG frameworks in the private markets are often described as politically polarized, and there are no signs that portrayal could soon fade. But between the sustainable investing die-hards and the anti-ESG stalwarts, there’s a much bigger set of investors with…

(Politico) Corporate diversity efforts could be on the chopping block following the Supreme Court’s decision barring the use of race as a direct factor in college admissions. The court’s six conservative justices ruled that two colleges’ admissions practices discriminated against white and Asian American applicants through race-based policies that benefited applicants from other backgrounds. Read more here.

(WSJ) New international sustainability reporting standards could fulfill their ambition in becoming the global baseline as the advantages of using a single standard worldwide may, for many companies, outweigh the disadvantages of being more demanding than the SEC’s coming climate reporting rules. On Monday, the International Sustainability Standards Board released its initial two reporting standards. The…

(WSJ) California Public Employees’ Retirement System ratcheted up its scrutiny of private-equity manager Blackstone in the wake of a child labor scandal at a company the firm owns.   During a Tuesday investment committee meeting, Anton Orlich, managing investment director for private equity, said Calpers had demanded that representatives of Blackstone come to the pension’s Sacramento headquarters…

(TechCrunch) Earlier today at a Bloomberg conference in San Francisco, some of the biggest names in AI turned up, including, briefly, Sam Altman of OpenAI, who just ended his two-month world tour, and Stability AI founder Emad Mostaque. Still, one of the most compelling conversations happened later in the afternoon, in a panel discussion about…