Weekly Synthesis #25: Oct 30, 2020
This Week's Top Tech & Innovation News for Busy Executives
Next Issue on November 13:
Happy Friday everyone. After 25 straight weeks (6+ months) of writing and sending out this newsletter—even while on vacation—I’ll be taking next week off and restarting again on Friday, November 13. Next week are the U.S. elections, so I expect there to be less news than normal in the world of tech. Please go out and vote!
As some of you know, I started Synthesis in the Spring during the (first) peak of Covid-19—in part to cope with the stress from lockdowns but also because I wanted keep growing my network by being helpful to others in some way.
I hope you’ve found these emails helpful—in your conversations at work, at home, or with friends. Although I don’t personally know all 1,000+ of you who subscribe to Synthesis, it’s been a pleasure to do this for you for so many weeks, and I hope you’ll continue to be useful.
Top News of the Week:
Facebook reports decline in users in U.S. and Canada (link)
Apple launches Apple One (Music, TV, Arcade, Cloud) for $15/mo (link)
Juul’s valuation cut 75% from $38B to $10B (link)
SoFi gets green light from OCC to become a national bank (link)
U.S. faces biggest cash crisis since the Great Depression (link)
Weekly Synthesis:
This week was slower than usual, as all eyes started turning to the U.S. Presidential elections next Tuesday. I expect this to continue next week or even the next few weeks. Also as expected, this has led to greater volatility and a pullback in the markets (down 10% this week) and tech stocks in particular. But notably, Bitcoin has shown recent signs of a negative correlation with the markets, rising 5-10% over the same period to above $13,000. Chamath Palihapitiya, CEO of Social Capital, said in an interview this week: “I'm going to spend a lot more attention to Bitcoin going forward and make it one of the 4-5 things I'm an expert in.”
Lastly, vacant office space in San Francisco is on the rise as more people and companies move out due to the pandemic:
Big News from us at IDEO CoLab:
This week, we officially announced that IDEO CoLab raised a $21M venture fund focused on early-stage investments in crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. The fund is backed by IDEO, CSAA Insurance Group, GS Group, Hanwha, Fineqia, and senior executives from IDEO, Coinbase, Twitter, Fortress, and many other leading tech companies and financial institutions. After running the fund for over two years, we’ve had the honor to invest in and help incubate over 30 startups to date who are reinventing the future of the web, finance, and how we work and play. I’m excited that we’re able to finally share what we’ve done so far and where we’re going—we’ll be raising our second fund soon and are always looking for new people and organizations to collaborate with. So please reach out!
Our announcement of IDEO CoLab Ventures’ crypto fund (link)
Coverage: IDEO CoLab Ventures raised $21M to invest in crypto (link)
Coverage: IDEO CoLab unleashes $21M early stage crypto fund (link)
Coverage: Fineqia invests in blockchain fund IDEO CoLab (link)
About Synthesis
Synthesis is a weekly newsletter of the top tech and innovation news for busy executives. Stay up to date, and save time. Delivered every Friday.
About the Author
I’m Ian. I’ve been in the venture and corporate innovation space for the last 10 years and helped build and operate investing, venturing, and innovation units at IDEO, Citigroup, and Deloitte. You can find me on Twitter here, mostly rambling about the latest in decentralization and crypto.
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