(Wired) A few years ago, Rocío van Nierop visited the tech accelerator Y Combinator. Nierop is the cofounder and executive director of the advocacy group Latinas in Tech. As she walked through the building, she passed by photo after photo of the teams that Y Combinator had funded. Nierop noticed they were all white men.…

(Wall Street Journal) Federal regulators proposed measures that would significantly increase their visibility into private-equity funds and some hedge funds, the first in a range of plans to expand oversight of private markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-1 to issue a proposal Wednesday that would increase the amount and timeliness of confidential information…

(Protocol) Twitter was abuzz Tuesday over a long thread written on Monday by Bolt CEO Ryan Breslow, who claimed that Stripe and Y Combinator are “mob bosses,” using “every power move imaginable” to block competitors from becoming successful. In other words: Silicon Valley is cutthroat. Who knew? Or at least, that summarizes most of the…

(Harvard Business Review) Businesses should be ready to defend what they’re doing about the climate crisis and how they’re taking meaningful action. If they don’t, they could face challenges from many directions, from the SEC to activists to litigators. This is more important than ever, especially when there’s a growing and justified anger directed at…

(Pensions & Investments) Some venture capital managers may be interested in considering ESG factors in investments, but many lack adequate resources to apply those considerations and influence over portfolio companies and do not consider ESG to be material to the asset class, according to a report released Monday by the Principles for Responsible Investment, a…

(Pensions & Investments) Investors are stepping up efforts to understand and better manage the impact of climate change on their physical investments in real assets, including private equity, from farmlands to urban office buildings. It is an increasingly urgent mission as the transition to a net-zero economy ramps up. “Physical climate-risk scenario analysis is particularly…

(New York Times) Daron Acemoglu, an influential economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been making the case against what he describes as “excessive automation.” The economywide payoff of investing in machines and software has been stubbornly elusive. But he says the rising inequality resulting from those investments, and from the public policy that…

(Venture Capital Journal) Investors are scrutinizing the ESG credentials of their private equity managers like never before. “While ESG is a relatively new priority for LPs, interest is not only increasing but accelerating,” says Jennifer Choi, managing director of industry affairs at the Institutional Limited Partners Association. Indeed, ILPA published the ESG Assessment Framework earlier…

(Qontigo) The list of sustainable investment (SI) frameworks guiding portfolio design is long and continues to proliferate. Many countries now have their own ESG labels to ensure a certain quality of SI for the growing pool of funds targeting sustainability goals. But with each one having different stated aims, scope and criteria, how should fund…

(Bloomberg) Prices for carbon offsets – verified emissions reductions equivalent to one ton of carbon each – could be as high as $120/ton or as low as $47/ton in 2050, according to research company BloombergNEF (BNEF). The outcome will mostly depend on what types of supply are eligible to meet the rapidly expanding universe of…