It's all in$ane $tock and Fed $timuloot that is con$tructing our en$lavement:
"COVID-19, recession haven’t slowed venture capital deals in Mass.; More than $4.2 billion was invested in 176 deals from April through June" by Andy Rosen Globe Staff, July 16, 2020
Venture capital continued to flow into Massachusetts companies during the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis, as investors sank money into highly valued private life-sciences companies in spite of an emerging recession that shuttered much of the economy.
A pair of industry reports released this week provided a snapshot of this year’s second quarter, which ran from April through June — a period that had been closely watched for signs the turbulence would disrupt investors’ appetites for stakes in startups.
The top-line numbers, so far, show the region has weathered the challenging circumstances relatively well. The quarterly PwC/CB Insights MoneyTree report on venture investment showed Greater Boston was one of only a few metro areas to to see financing increase from the first quarter to the second.....
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"CRV raises new venture fund, despite pandemic; Investment firm lands $600 million without face-to-face meetings" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, July 20, 2020
You might not expect a venture capital firm to have much success raising money in the midst of a deadly pandemic and a global recession, but the venerable CRV recently celebrated its 50th anniversary by closing a new $600 million fund to be invested in early-stage companies in fields like enterprise software and bio-engineering, and though the money is real, all of the fund-raising was conducted virtually. “It was 100 percent over Zoom, without meeting a single person in person,” said CRV partner Izhar Armony, working from his Arlington home.
That is their ultimate goal, people never meeting in person again.
CRV, once known as Charles River Ventures and now based in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area, had expected to throw a massive anniversary party in April, followed by a meeting with key investors — the heads of major pension funds, university endowments, and charitable foundations, but the pandemic and subsequent lockdown scuttled that plan.
Overall venture funding of startups has proved remarkably resilient. According to a report released last week by Pitchbook and the National Venture Capital Association, the number of US venture deals during the second quarter of 2020 declined by 29 percent from the same period the year before, but the total value of all deals was down by just 5 percent.
Other Boston-area venture firms that have raised new funds in 2020 include Flagship Pioneering, General Catalyst, Material Impact, and Founder Collective.
CRV found that some of its longstanding investors had less money to offer, but the fund made up the difference by recruiting a number of new investors, who agreed to put up cash without a single face-to-face meeting.
Armony said that CRV already has plenty of investment prospects in mind and is especially interested in technologies that simplify remote work, including telemedicine and corporate meeting software. Armony said that due to the pandemic, “I think that the way we work and live will change dramatically and for a long time.”
As the sickening, globe-kicking eugenicists have said, we are NEVER going back to NORMAL.
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"State biopharma firms raise venture capital briskly despite pandemic" by Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff July 28, 2020
Massachusetts biopharma startups raised $2.1 billion in venture capital in the first half of 2020 — $600 million more than the same period last year — despite the coronavirus pandemic and recession.
That’s one of the notable findings in the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council’s 2020 Industry Snapshot report, which was released Tuesday morning.
The report shows that biotechnology remains a powerhouse in the state’s economy. Industry jobs reached nearly 80,000 in 2019, growing 7.7 percent from the year before. That was the largest annual increase since 2007.
More than half of the biotech jobs in the state are in research and development. Overall, biopharma jobs in Massachusetts have grown 94 percent in the last 15 years.
Robert K. Coughlin, president and chief executive of MassBio, the industry trade group that produced the report, said COVID-19 has upended the economy but also underscored the importance of biopharma in addressing health crises.
“It’s also made clear the outsized role Massachusetts life sciences companies are playing in the pandemic, with over 85 companies here working on tests, treatments, or vaccines, many of which are small to mid-sized biotechs that make up the backbone of our cluster and the majority of MassBio membership,” he said.
Although many industries have had layoffs as a result of the pandemic, biotechs have largely weathered the storm, with some pivoting to developing potential COVID-19 drugs, vaccines, and diagnostic tests.
The market for initial public offerings has also remained strong. Seven IPOs from Massachusetts biotech companies took place in the first half of 2020. Those firms made up a third of all US-based biotech IPOs and raised an average of $187 million when they went public.
How is your business doing, fellow citizen and average American?
Among the notable firms that went public in the first half of the year was Akouos, a Boston biotech trying to develop the first gene therapy to treat hearing loss. It raised $213 million when it made its stock market debut on June 26, which was 70 percent more than the firm had projected four days earlier.
Say again?
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They are literally just waiting to pick over our carcasses:
"Venture capital is still soaring, but the business is changing" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, August 4, 2020
If you wanted to look for a part of the economy that is having a totally normal 2020 — actually, better than normal — look to the venture capital firms that put money into fledgling and fast-growing companies.
Now I really am going to puke.
“The venture business has been like the stock market this year — somewhat divorced from the real economy,” observes Antontio Rodriguez, an investor at Matrix Partners in Cambridge, but some important things are changing when it comes to how VC firms write checks — and the companies to which they make them out. More on that later.
Where do you think the loot is coming from?
The money comes from places like pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy families — all seeking to get better returns than they could from investments like bonds and stocks.
No wonder tuitions have gone through the roof and your retirement is gone!
These a$$holes gambled it away on plans to enslave you!
If that rate continues for the second half, 2020 would set a record for money poured into venture capital firms. For VC firms that invest in the biotech sector, the second quarter of 2020 has already set a record, and in Massachusetts, it looks like a pretty good year, in terms of how that money is spent. VCs made about 800 investments last year in Massachusetts companies, and in the first half of 2020, about 400, according to the National Venture Capital Association data, but the amount of money they invest here seems likely to be higher in 2020 by as much as 40 percent, if it continues on the same pace as in the first half, when $8.3 billion went into startups in the state.
Did anyone invest in you, permanently unemployed person?
No, the "inve$tors" inve$t in $elf-$erving projects to further their sick agenda.
Did no one in the venture capital biz hear about the pandemic?
Michael Greeley explains that part of what we’re seeing is a delay between when investors start planning which VC firms they want to put money in, and when those “fund closes” actually happen — industry terminology for finalizing the paperwork and the roster of investors who are giving money to a particular VC firm, which will typically be invested over eight to 12 years. Greeley, a cofounder of Flare Capital Partners in Boston, says that discussions about what to do in 2020 “were happening in the fall, pre-COVID,” and that “2019 venture capital performance was great.”
This whole damn thing was planned!
To earn a significant return these days, argues Michael Skok, a cofounder of the Boston firm Underscore VC, “where do you put your capital? You’re not going to put it in a bank, or invest in a legacy industry like travel or entertainment right now. You want to be putting it into the investors who are going to find the next great technology breakthrough, and guess what? That’s venture capital. It’s the brain-dead, obvious place to be, if you’re investing for the long term,” but the money in VC is flowing at a greater rate to more-established VC firms that have demonstrated they can crank out home runs, Greeley and others observe. “That’s why you see General Catalyst raising $2.3 billion — the investors are saying, ‘Let’s buy the ones we know,’ ” he says.
Governor Chuck has connections to them.
In March, Cambridge-based General Catalyst announced it had collected $2.3 billion in fresh capital; in July, one of its investments, the insurance startup Lemonade, had the most successful stock market debut of 2020, its share price rising 139 percent on the first day of trading, but the pandemic is changing some crucial things about how venture capitalists invest — and how startups use that money to hire — that could affect Massachusetts in worrisome ways.
In pre-COVID times, VCs would bump into each other at breakfast, introduce one another to the entrepreneurs they were dining with, and compare notes on investments in process. That created a dynamic: One Cambridge investor would tell another about a company his or her firm had passed on — but which the other might find interesting — or invite the other to put some money into a promising startup that was raising money.
There was a “center of gravity” effect, with VCs in Boston, San Francisco, or Seattle having the best information about the startups in those cities, and entrepreneurs most often finding it easiest to raise money from the firms where they were based.
Eric Paley of Founder Collective tells me that the main way he’d see Rodriguez, the investor at Matrix Partners, was by bumping into him on the sidewalks of Harvard Square, but that hasn’t happened in the past four months. Now, conversations happen on Zoom instead of street corners.
“My last two investments were in Chicago and Austin,” says Paley, whose Cambridge firm has backed startups such as Uber and Venmo, the payment app now owned by PayPal.
“Am I even a little bit more open to those geographies than I was in the past? Yeah, I think so. I can’t get to know Boston entrepreneurs, or help Boston entrepreneurs, any better than I can help entrepreneurs in those places,” as long as face-to-face meetings and meals aren’t a normal part of doing business, Paley explains, and what does it even mean that a company is based in Boston or Austin now — given that tech companies are increasingly using the venture capital money they raise to hire the best talent they can find, regardless of where it lives? When entrepreneurs talk about hiring, it’s not about hiring great people within a one-hour commute — it’s about how many time zones away it makes sense to hire, so that scheduling meetings doesn’t become a huge headache.
In 2019, says TJ Mahony, many of the most promising founders he met were already deciding to make their companies entirely remote: no HQ, and hires from anywhere.
“My three most recent investments are fully remote,” says Mahony, a partner at Accomplice VC in Boston. One of them, Postscript, which supports text message marketing campaigns for e-commerce sites, has one founder in Denver and others in the Los Angeles area and Phoenix. On the company’s website, every job listed has the same location: “Remote, Anywhere in North America.”
In tech, the future will look a lot like that. A Cambridge startup announcing that it has raised $10 million in venture capital will no longer lead to 50 new high-paying jobs in Cambridge — or all of the office space or Sweetgreen lunches or Somerville apartments that those employees would require.
“We might have just seen the end of these super-node cities, where all of the startups get started — like San Francisco, Boston, LA, Seattle,” Rodriguez says.
They will all be total $hitholes.
Did you know that's what you were getting when you $igned up to this fraud, Globe?
In biotech, things might be different. For companies that are running experiments in a lab daily, assessing the results, and deciding what to move forward with, location still feels important, and much of the key talent is already planted in the Boston area.
The medical tyranny being constructed around us.
The vast majority of the companies Atlas Venture has invested in, says partner Bruce Booth, are in the Boston area, including the firm’s most recent deals.
“While we haven’t been face-to-face in recent months, we haven’t changed our strategic or geographic focus during the COVID quarantine. Several of our recent deals” — that is, startups Atlas has backed — “will be incubating with us when we get back into the office.”
When, exactly, will that be?
TBD, Booth says.
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Related:
"Cambridge startup Glympse Bio has raised more than $45 million for its nanoparticle-based biosensors, and it’s hoping the alternative to traditional biopsies can help drug developers test whether their own medicines are actually treating a patient’s condition. The company’s first biosensors will be tested in some of Gilead’s clinical trials for people with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, the fatty liver disease known as NASH that is the target of many new experimental treatments. Glympse is clearly hoping it can follow in the footsteps of Foundation Medicine, a buzzy company also based in Cambridge that sells blood tests to help people with cancer determine which drugs might be particularly effective. Notably, Glympse’s new investors include Steven Kafka, a former Foundation Medicine executive who is now an investor at Section 32. Its other backers include Temasek, New Leaf Venture Partners, and ARCH Venture Partners....."
The problem is it won't come off, even if you try to wa$h it:
"Kymera Therapeutics, a Cambridge biotech that has cut deals with several large drug firms, closed up more than 66 percent Friday after its first day of trading in a market that has been white-hot for biotechs making debuts. Kymera also has a partnership with the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline that gives the latter access to Kymera’s technology for screening small molecules....."
Kymera Therapeutics chief executive Nello Mainolfi (Jen Randall Photography)
I guess I would be $miling, too.
Quack, quack:
"Boston’s newest publicly traded tech company is also among the most valuable: Shares in Duck Creek Technologies started trading on Aug. 14, and the company’s market capitalization quickly climbed past $5 billion. Haven’t heard of Duck Creek? That may be because it specializes in software for the property and casualty insurance industry. There are plenty of opportunities for growth in that $15 billion global market, but it’s not particularly consumer-friendly. Chief executive Mike Jackowski plans to use the IPO proceeds to invest in expansions in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and in making more mergers and acquisitions. “We just have an incredible opportunity in front of us,” Jackowski said. “Our opportunity is based on the premise that the industry will transition to run core systems in the cloud. We’re in the early innings, if you will, of that transition.” The company is hiring more employees in the Boston area, and across its global operations, to keep up with the demand for its software and to grow the business, Jackowski said. Duck Creek has the potential to be a flagship company for Boston’s burgeoning “insurtech” scene, a roster that includes the likes of Corvus, EverQuote, Insurify, and Openly....."
Believe it or not, they have ties to Accenture, an arm of the defense intelligence community with links to DARPA.
I'll bet it gets one hell of a return.
