Insight Partners raises $118 million fund to back underrepresented VCs

July 6, 2023

(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…

meta’s threads app is a privacy nightmare that won’t launch in eu yet

July 5, 2023

(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…

2023 Sustainable Investment Survey

July 5, 2023

(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…

ruling on college admissions could fuel attacks on corporations’ diversity efforts

June 29, 2023

(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.

pro take: forget the sec, international climate reporting standards could become the global baseline

June 26, 2023

(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…

Calpers Scrutinizes Blackstone Portfolio Practices Over Child Labor Fine

June 22, 2023

(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…

get a clue, says panel about buzzy ai tech: it’s being ‘deployed as surveillance’

June 22, 2023

(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…

shares of startups are turning dirt cheap, attracting venture funds

June 22, 2023

(Bloomberg) It’s a bargain-hunter’s dream, and for sellers it’s sometimes the only good option left. Secondary markets — where backers of closely held startups can sell their stakes to other investors — are drawing increasing interest from venture capital funds and other money managers seeking to snap up chunks of private companies on the cheap.…

saving capitalism from the culture wars

June 21, 2023

(Financial Times) Advocates of more environmentally and socially responsible models of capitalism have had the upper hand in recent years. In the US, however, they have run into a serious backlash: red-state politicians have sought to blacklist banks and asset managers they deem to be boycotting fossil fuels, brands including Bud Light and Target are…

AI Is a Lot of Work

June 20, 2023

(The Verge) A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I’ll call Joe got a job as an annotator — the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged…