- Howie Town
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- Social Leverage Saturday's
Good afternoon.
I get a lot of requests to share updates from/about our portfolio companies and SPV’s that we have led over the years. While we share them by email with LP’s, many would prefer more regular updates as they happen here in my newsletter so I will be trying to post here on Saturday’s.
Since our fund 4 Grass League tournament was held last night I will start with them. It was a fantastic tournament/event that went to sudden death. A 50 foot walk-off putt sealed the win for the Tampa Bay Swamp Dogs. The coolest part of this tournament is the open nature. LPGA pro Alison Lee and her boyfriend Trey Kid made the playoff. The tournament highlights how perverse the PGA overlords have been. LPGA players are allowed to play in events as long as there is no LPGA event overlap. PGA members (this includes thousands of members that are not even active players) are threatened by the PGA if they attempt to play in non PGA events. Phil Mickelson chimed in on the PGA actions of the past week here:
This is a clear violation of independent contract law. I’m so sorry these professionals are continuing to be blackmailed by the Tour. It’s not right and is in fact illegal.
— Phil Mickelson (@PhilMickelson)
1:27 AM • Dec 6, 2024
The highlights our the tournment from The Golf Channel and Peacock are here:
Next…from the way back machine of Social Leverage, Etoro is working on an IPO with the help of Goldman Sachs. We made this investment back in 2011 via an SPV before our first fund in 2013.
At Stocktwits (fund 2), we have expanded into premium video beyond ‘Trends With Friends’ with many new live shows and a documentary release. If you follow me here you know how I am a huge believer in real time 2.0 so expect much more fromm us here.
Fund 3 portfolio company Alpaca had a huge announcement this week successfully transitioning to self-clearing at DTCC. More from Hitoshi the co-founder:
It’s a pivotal milestone for us because this means Alpaca has joined the deepest layer of clearing and settlement in the U.S. marketplace. As it took us years of effort, this phenomenal event proves us as one of the mature players amongst the latest fintech companies.
How thrilling is this? When Yoshi and I started the brokerage business out of Y Combinator, we thought it would be ridiculous to spend so much time and money to become self-clearing ourselves. As our business grew quickly, we learned so much about the inefficiency and too many intermediary layers between customers and the core market, and we found big opportunities to innovate it as part of our mission, to provide financial access for everyone on the planet.
Alpaca builds a global de-facto financial platform from the ground up to achieve this mission. The traditional brokerage businesses have been built upon layers on top of layers, with legacy vendor technologies, and pay enormous amounts of money. This is one of the things that still prevent everyone on this planet from having fair access to the desired financial markets. At Alpaca, not only are we developer-first and API-first, but also we are a group of true technologists who build with the latest innovations to solve these problems.
Today’s achievement is not just stemming from our technology and cost reasons. Throughout our journey with hundreds of fintech players and hundreds of thousands of developers who come to our platform to build their next dreams, we learned so much about what Alpaca needs to do. Self-clearing opens up many more opportunities for our platform to enable, from seamless asset transfers to securities lending, as well as more sophisticated solutions such as DVP/RVP for institutional trading. We are very appreciative of everyone who taught us about this.
Executives from many of our fintech companies including Stocktwits and Etoro and Alpaca will be in Abu-Dhabi this week for the Bitcoin Mena conference:
We’ll be at @bitcoinmenaconf in Abu Dhabi next week (Dec 9-10)! 🇦🇪
If you’re attending, say hi to:
Hitoshi Harada, Co-Founder & CPO
Tarun Ajwani, SVP Business and Corporate Development
Scott Marshall, Sales Director, EMEAWe’re excited to connect with the Bitcoin community.
— Alpaca (@AlpacaHQ)
7:45 PM • Dec 4, 2024
From fund 4 some great news for Punchup.live as Tom Segura and Whitney Cummings joined the platform. Punch-Up is running the table signing the best comedians to share original content and build their brands and businesses via email and ticketing. A few weeks ago the legends Larry David and Louis CK joined Punch-UP because yes selling tickets and owning your customer relationship is
Also in fund 4, Archive Intel partnered with Stocktwits. From Larry the founder of Archive Intel on the partnership:
The financial industry is navigating an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. Firms must not only ensure compliance with stringent requirements but also manage the growing volume of digital communications across platforms like Stocktwits. By integrating our AI-powered archiving tools with Stocktwits, we enable firms to seamlessly capture, archive, and manage communications for compliance audits and reporting, while maintaining a user-friendly experience.
Finally from our emerging manager fund (SLAF)…
Sequoia and Sheva Backed Eon raised $70 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. Our manager Sheva Ventures was a seed investor.
Sixth Man Ventures made a seed investment last year in Pump.fun. Incredibly it reached $93 million in sales for November and rumored $1.5 billion valuation in private markets.
Have a great weekend.
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