Notable Capital’s Hans Tung on the state of VC and the upside to down roundsTo some investors, “down round” is a dirty phrase, but not to Notable Capital’s Hans Tung.
Hans is a managing partner at Notable Capital, formerly GGV Capital, a venture firm focusing on investments in the U.S., Latin America, Israel, and Europe.
Hans, whose portfolio includes the likes of Airbnb, StockX and Slack, sat down with TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to discuss the overall state of venture and why he still believes down rounds can make a lot of sense.
Of course, we dug into recent changes at his own firm, which evolved from 24-year-old cross-border firm GGV Capital and rebranded its U.S. and Asia operations to Notable Capital and Granite Asia, respectively.
GGV’s transformation is the latest in a string of changes we’ve seen in the world of venture capital, including personnel changes at Founders Fund, Benchmark and Thrive Capital.
SBF sentenced, Worldcoin hit with another ban order and big web3 pre-seed rounds are backWelcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction.
This week in web3Crunching numbersThis week the crypto market prices were a bit more chipper, with the top cryptocurrencies being green on the week.
The second-largest crypto, ether, increased 2.6% on the week to $3,550, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic action used to prove something about a piece of data, without revealing the origin data itself.
Scott and I discuss Space and Time’s origin story, how data warehouses work in Web 2.0 versus web3 and the importance of data transparency.
The largest funding rounds raised by startups are becoming rarer and rarer.
The venture deceleration, and its late-stage glaciation, are not stopping the companies that want to reinvent energy from raising huge rounds.
Powering upNine-figure rounds are often called “megarounds” due to their massive heft.
Inside energy’s power surgeIn 2023, China dominated energy megarounds, with most of the money going to makers of solar panels and battery materials.
Fast forward to this year, and the picture in energy megarounds looks dramatically different.
There is no question that 2023 was a tough year for the venture and tech ecosystem.
Seed valuations have remained steady through 2022 and 2023, yet achieving the necessary traction for these rounds has become more challenging, which can create misaligned expectations for founders.
In 2020–2021, it was relatively common for $3 million to $5 million seed rounds to get done with very little, if any, traction, and they were typically getting done at $12 million to $25 million valuations, depending on the space and the founders’ background.
The bar is much higher to raise an institutional seed round, and a founder/company often needs to prove a lot more in today’s market than they used to.
This dynamic means that many founders have to first raise a pre-seed round to get to those milestones and therefore raise multiple rounds to get to a Series A.
Many people turned to money laundering during the pandemic, as the Alternatives to Remission (ATR) resources and trading platforms were scarce. This allowed criminals and corrupt officials to get rich…
