Silicon Valley Funding News - Week of January 9, 2023. 15852 Startups Raised  $238.3B in 2022

This week, I am hosting an in-person event in Hong Kong with my partner Alfred Chuang, founder of Race Capital and Dr. Kai-Fu Lee - Chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures and former president of Google China.  We will chat about our 2023 Outlook for Venture Capital, Technology and Startups. If you are in town, join us and sign up here. 

Here are a few great reads and statistics for this week:

• 15852 Startups Raised  $238.3B in 2022 - US VC deal count fell 14% YoY in 2022 from 18,521 to 15,852, deal value fell 30% to $238.3B, according to VentureBeat. Generative AI companies raised $1.37B+  across 78 deals, almost as much as the investment in the previous five years combined.
• Tech cut 150,000 jobs in 2022 - Consumer and retail were the two hardest-hit parts of the tech sector, combining for about 40,000 layoffs. Meta (Facebook) accounted for roughly half of the cuts in the consumer group, while Amazon represented about half of those in retail.  Nearly 100 healthcare-related tech companies laid off an estimated 11,000 employees in 2022.
• OpenAI is Microsoft's Best Friend - It is unusual for a major technology firm to lean on an external software provider the way Microsoft has discussed doing with OpenAI, especially given Microsoft’s investment in its own AI research and development (e.g. Turing) over the years.  Today, Microsoft not only resell GPT-3 and Dall-E 2 to enterprise customers alongside its Azure server- and compute-power rental business. It is planning to integrate GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) into Bing, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and more.
• 🇨🇳 Foreign Capital Flees China  - Foreign capital is reluctant to dive back into the China and remain wary about the reversal of a brutal regulatory campaign. In the past two years, Beijing has levied huge fines on internet players, forced Jack Ma to give up control of Ant Group, launched probes over data abuses, limited children’s gaming hours and nearly wiped out the entire edtech sector. Alibaba’s market cap dropped 70% and Tencent’s by 50% since both companies’ share prices peaked, in October 2020 and February 2021 respectively. Will foreign investors trust China again?  Read more
• 📚 Measure What Matters by John Doerr - OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and it is the core concept written in this awesome book by John Doerr.  It was Andy Grove who turned a simple method “OKRs”, into a devastatingly effective business tool which became the lifeblood of Intel. Check it out on Amazon or Audible.

This week a total of 7 startups raised $303.3M in funding, 1 M&As:

• $3.3M goes to 1 Enterprise startup
• $7M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
• $287M goes to 4 BioTech startups
• $6M goes to 1 Manufacturing startup