Hey Everyone 👋,

Welcome to the 100th issue of the SandHill.io newsletter! These past 2 years, since the newsletter was launched, have truly flown by.

As we continue publishing and evolving the newsletter, I’d love to hear from you on any ideas for improving the weekly email or for collaboration opportunities. You can reach me directly by responding to this email.

And as always, we’d appreciate if you could share this with a friend or colleague who might be interested in following the latest theses, market insights, or operating best practices from 700+ VCs.

Best,

Ali

Investment Themes, Theses, & Outlooks

• Building the American Workforce (Oliver Hsu, Partner @ A16Z)

• How new risks are driving opportunities in insurtech (Mouro Capital Team)

• What We’re Excited About: The Verticalization of B2B Fintech (Jillian Williams, Principal @ Cowboy)

• 3 Things: ZoomInfo for Devs, Generative AI Books for Kids, Trusted Health for Locum Tenens (Elaine Zelby, Partner @ SignalFire)

Industry Developments & Analyses

• Charts to Chew On: An Ominous October. (Meera Clark, Principal @ Redpoint)

• The State of Vertical SaaS 2022 (Fractal Software Team)

• Why America Must Develop Space, and How We’ll Do It (Ryan McEntush, Partner @ A16Z)

• How Payments Were Won: An Inside Look At Fintech’s Original Embedded Service (Medha Agarwal, Partner @ Redpoint)

• Partner Bank Compliance and the Impact on Fintech (Marc Andrusko & David Haber, A16Z)

• Insight: Here’s What Industry Experts Told Us About the PropCo Landscape + What’s Next (Alpaca VC Team)

• The Evolution of Infrastructure Markets — Cloud Computing (Nandu Anilal, VC @ Canaan)

Guides, Case Studies, and Best Practices for Operating

• How to Build A Winning Paid Membership Program (Connie Chan, GP @ A16Z)

• OpenCloud 2022: How to Navigate Stormy Markets and Other Tips for Cloud Founders (Battery Ventures Team)

• Figma’s Early Days — How Patience & Discipline Fostered a Killer Product (Sean Whitney, VC @ Craft Ventures)

• Product Marketing as fuel for Category Creation (Akash Bajwa, VC @ Earlybird)

• Inside Hotjar’s bootstrapped PLG strategy (Kyle Poyar, Partner @ OpenView)

Additional Reads

• Markets, Markets, and Markets (Kyle Harrison, GP @ Contrary)

• Cutting R&D to Grow GTM Spend : Is it Happening Across Software Companies? (Tomasz Tunguz, MD @ Redpoint)

• Identity: The Mega Theme of the 2020s (Doug Clinton, MP @ Loup)

• The Rise of the Digitally-Native Job (Rex Woodbury, Partner @ Index)

• Thinking outside the (text) box: better interfaces for generative models (Kojo Osei, VC @ Matrix)

Did we miss something?

We’re now pulling posts from over 700 Medium writers, Substack newsletters, and blogs (full list here). Let us know if you notice someone we’re missing and we'll include their content starting with our next digest! Just respond to this email with their URL if that’s the case.

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