A big week.
This week was a huge deal—Microsoft bids $68.7 billion for Activision Blizzard. That’s ~2.5X more than it paid for LinkedIn. Talk about asserting dominance.
But anyway, that’s just one story we have for you, we got a ton of more stuff this week. This newsletter keeps growing and growing, and we’re just happy we’re able to bring these stories + our own ones (+ more job postings) to you. Enjoy the read on this lovely Thursday morning!
As always, if you have any ideas about how we could improve this newsletter, please email us at ops@crescentfund.vc – and if you like what you see, we’d love it if you could share this with others.
Sincerely,
The Crescent Team
*If you’re a student building something cool, want to join Crescent, or just want to chat, reach out to us at ops@crescentfund.vc.
Crescent Partner Highlights.
On Social.
It’s been far too long since social media platforms have innovated. If we compare the current landscape to even a decade ago, we now have new ways of organizing ourselves (through DAOs), new paths toward monetization (through Web3 in general), and overall, new technological infrastracture within which we’re entitled to radically different means of making a living.
We can’t discount the advent of the creator economy as a result of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. However, when it comes to serving the fundamental purpose of social networks—to facilitate human connection—the big players have seemed to have stagnated in innovation. They have converged to a point where the architecture has become geared more towards entertainment and business rather than human connection.
The age of serendipitious introductions have seemed to wither, but that shouldn’t be the case. This is why whenever student founders tackle the moustache-twirling question of innovating upon our current social network model, we make a big deal out of it. This week, Crescent Partner Aung Si interviewed Meetsee, whose two co-founders Daniel Hanasab and Sean Toobi strive to answer this question. Through a blend of hyper-localization and a matching algorithm based on passions and interests, they aim to breathe life back into human interation.
Career Opportunities.
Check out the opportunities we've found over this week.
*If you want a job or listing featured in this newsletter, please reach out to us at ops@crescentfund.vc.
Featured.
*FROM CODA*
The Coda Growth Fellowship will remain open until 1/31! This fellowship is for undergraduate students interested in gaining experience across growth, entrepreneurship, and product this semester!
Coda is the all-in-one doc that brings words, data, and teams together. It starts with a blinking cursor on a blank page and can grow as big as your team's ambition. People have made Coda docs to do things ranging from launching products and scaling small businesses to helping them study for tests. Coda is a Series D startup building the future of all-in-one-docs backed by top investors like General Catalyst, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, and many more!
These are some of the opportunities within the fellowship:
Free lifetime Coda Pro
Speaker and workshop events to learn growth, product, startup ops from tech leaders
Lifetime access to Coda Fellowship Community
Get paid for generating new signups
Referrals for future internship and new grad roles based on performance
Learn more about the fellowship here!
More opportunities.
Electrical Engineer (Part-Time/Internship) - Nextera Robotics
Technical BusOps (Internship) - Culdesac
UX Writing (Internship) - Finku
Graphic Design (Internship) - Defy
Sales Strategy and Operations (Internship) - Snap Inc.
Content Marketing (Internships) - Slickdeals
Growth (Internship) - Media.Monks
Data Scientist (Internship) - Taboola
*See more listings from Y-Combinator and builtinLA.
*See last week’s shortlist.
The Southern Californian Tech Landscape.
Discover the current happenings in SC’s tech scene that Gen Z students are watching closely.
*ICYMI, here's what happened last week.
Microsoft is set to acquire Activision Blizzard. Between Xbox, this new deal, and competitive pressures from the likes of Sony, Microsoft is racing to compete in the recently-reinvigorated gaming industry by growing its cloud-game business and diversifying into consumer-facing businesses. Some even say this acquisition signals Microsoft’s move to the metaverse.
Filmhub, a film distribution startup aiming to cut out Hollywood’s middleman to allow filmmakers to distribute their films on streaming services, raises $6.8M in seed funding from a16z. With many lawsuits and grievances on the part of film directors regarding IP rights, the traditional studio model, “where filmmakers are often forced to surrender the rights to their work”, is ripe for this kind of disruption.
Culver City-based Clean Tech startup, Mote, unveils a $100M plan to build a gasification plant to extract carbon dioxide from wood waste. The company is targeting multiple markets at once; for instance, it is in talks with Carbon Cure Technologies Inc., a company developing a technology to inject carbon into concrete in order to lock it in. The 5-acre plant is set to be built in Kern County.
The Broader Tech Landscape.
Here's what's happening in the broader tech landscape.
*ICYMI, here’s what happened last week.
OpenSea acquires Dharma Labs, a DeFi wallet startup, and appoints a new CTO. The deal appoints Dharma Labs co-founder Nadav Hollander as the new chief technology officer.
Venture funding in Asia has drastically increased at the hands of SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China. “It unlikely the region will see a downturn in venture anytime soon,” says author Chris Metinko.
Google Play Games enters beta testing as they bring Android games to Windows. Developers are able to opt-in to the beta through a developer website.
*If you’re interested in helping out Southern California student founders through advising or becoming an LP feel free to reach out to ops@crescentfund.vc
…and that wraps up yet another week! Thank you for tuning in.
See you next week,
Crescent Fund