Happy Monday!

Silicon Valley really took time off from the Independence Day Long Weekend. Only two startups got funded last week!

Meanwhile, I am making good use of our San Francisco pop-up office and hosting three more events during July:

AI & The Art of Customer Understanding w/ Asana, Anecdote and Notion on July 10,

FoundersHK Summer Social 2024 on July 18 (a group from HKU are visiting SF),

How to Build and Scale an Open Source Company on July 24.

Here are a few great things to read/watch/participate this week:

📢 What Do You Read, Listen and Follow? - Staying informed and inspired is crucial for navigating the dynamic landscape of startups, technology and venture capital. 

My new survey aims to delve into the diverse sources of knowledge and trends that shape your learning journey. Whether it's blogs, podcasts, newsletters, or thought leaders, we want to understand the unique mix that fuels your curious mind. We will share the results with you, and thank you for your help in contributing to this valuable research! Click here to fill out the survey.

💰 The Coachella of Deal Making - the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference is starting this week! Disney’s acquisition of ABC, AOL’s bid for Time Warner and Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post were all reportedly negotiated either in full or in part at this event. Read the history and who are attending this year.

🎂 As Amazon Turns 30, Three Factors Will Define its Next Decade - Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing is waning with the OpenAI/Microsoft partnership. In 2022 its market share was 13% higher than that of Microsoft. Today the difference is just 6%. (The Economist)

🇨🇳 Why Developing Countries Should Look to China to Leapfrog into LLM Markets - China cannot compete with US tech giants on financial capital and computing power. No matter how many GenAI patents China filed or sneaking in millions of Nvidia Chips into China, they must focus on AI applications in areas where they have unique advantages, such as: 1) Existing data resources 2) Data curation for business-specific models 3) Small language models. (World Economic Forum)

Here are just a few popular Chinese LLMs:

1. 01.ai by Dr.Kaifu Lee

2. 360 AI

3. Doubao by Bytedance

4. ChatGLM by Tsing Hua University

5. Ernie by Baidu

6. Hunyuan by Tencent

7. Kimi by Moonshot

8. Kling by Kuaishou

9. Mars LLM by iFlytech

10. Minimax

11. Moonshot AI

12. Qwen by Alibaba

13. Taichu LLM by Chinese Academy of Sciences

14. Tiangong AI

15. Zhipu AI

My friend Tiefeng sent me a few very useful articles here and the latest China LLM Report 2024 in Chinese can be downloaded below 👉👉

	国产ai大模型报告final发布版 2.57MB ∙ PDF file
Download

🌍 How Investors Are Navigating Geopolitics - “It was a reminder that politics is not to ever be taken for granted,” says Sawikin, who leads the firm’s eastern European and Russian investments. “You can love your portfolio from the bottom up, but if something major goes wrong at the macro level you’re going to have a big problem.” (Financial Times)

This week a total of 2 startups raised $17.1M in funding, 0 M&As:

• $7.1M goes to 1 BioTech startup

• $10M goes to 1 Interior Design startup

If you love this newsletter, forward it to someone who would also enjoy it and have them subscribe.

Edith
X, LinkedIn

Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)

BioTech

• Granza Bio (therapeutic delivery platform) raised $7.1M Seed led by Felicis, Refactor

Interior Design

• Collov (AI home furnishing design tool) raised $10M Series A led by Ameba Capital, Xiamen Goldenhome

IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)  

• N/A