Special Note: We were shocked and saddened by the shootings in Atlanta this week. The rise in hate crimes against the Asian American community over the past year is heartbreaking and unacceptable. We stand with the AAPI community - resources to help are available here. 

App Annie released its annual State of Mobile report! A few takeaways:

• TikTok overtook Facebook in average monthly time spent per user, with 325% YoY growth. The average TikTok user now spends 21.5 hours per month on the app, nearly 3x greater than Instagram at 7.5 hours per month.

• The average American now spends more time on their phone than watching live TV (4 vs. 3.7 hours per day). We don’t have the breakdown by age, but we’d expect this gap is even wider for Gen Zers and millennials.

• Hours spent in top investment & trading apps increased 135% YoY in the U.S. As a reminder, this data was for 2020, so it doesn’t include the GameStop-fueled surge in January and February.

• The top four apps by worldwide MAUs were all owned by Facebook. The core Facebook App came in at #1, followed by WhatsApp Messenger, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. Amazon rounded out the top five.

news 📣

💰 Stripe soars to $95B. Stripe became Silicon Valley’s most valuable private startup this week, announcing a $600M round at a $95B valuation (a ~3x increase from its last fundraise in April 2020). Stripe has benefitted from the surge in e-commerce - 90% of U.S. consumers have bought from businesses using Stripe, and the company added more than 200k customers in Europe since the start of the pandemic. Though Stripe started by targeting other startups and SMBs, it now has 50+ customers who process more than $1B per year in payments.

📱 YouTube launches Shorts. YouTube’s TikTok competitor has landed in the U.S. after months of beta testing in India. Similar to the early days of IG Reels, many Shorts are uploaded directly from TikTok (watermark and all!). YouTube has partnered with 250 music labels to make their songs available on Shorts, but users can also pull in audio from existing YouTube videos. We’re curious to see how this impacts video composition, as many viral TikTok audios come from old videos archived on YouTube! YouTube says the Shorts viewer already has upwards of 6.5B daily global views.

📈 eToro plans to go public via SPAC. Investing app eToro is going public through a SPAC merger in a deal that will value the company at $10.4B. eToro was founded in Israel in 2007 and primarily operates internationally, though it offers crypto trading in the U.S. and plans to launch stock trading later this year. The app differentiates in the crowded brokerage market via social features like following other users and copying their trades - you can even make money if others duplicate your trading strategy! The company has 20M registered users and did $605M in revenue last year.

💻 Squarespace raises $300M. We have a new decacorn! Squarespace announced a $300M raise at a $10B valuation ahead of a planned IPO later this year. Squarespace was founded in 2003 and didn’t raise external funding until 2010. The company was most recently valued at $1.7B in a secondary round in 2017 (this happens when new investors buy shares from existing employees/ investors). You may know Squarespace as a website builder, but the product has evolved to keep up with the creator economy - including the addition of paywalled memberships last November.

CRV portfolio company Airtable continues to make spreadsheet/database hybrids cool again! The company announced a $270M round at a $5.8B valuation (more than 2x the valuation of Airtable’s last round in September).

More than 250K companies use Airtable, from small startups to giants like Netflix and Shopify. Last September, Airtable announced a new marketplace where users can create and distribute apps built on top of the platform.

Huge congrats to our partner at CRV, Max Gazor, who led Airtable’s Series A in 2015! Check out his first blog post about the company here and his most recent post here!

what we’re following 👀

A new real estate fund allows investors to buy virtual land in the metaverse.

TikTok is making personalized ads mandatory starting April 15.

A look at the rise of VC-backed companies buying and flipping Amazon brands.

Alex Taussig on how Coupang came to dominate e-commerce in South Korea.

Axios published an updated analysis this week on gender diversity among decision-makers at U.S. VC firms. As the chart above illustrates, though we’ve seen clear progress over the past few years, we’re still nowhere near gender parity.

A total of 14.2% of decision-makers are now women, up from just 7% in 2017. Of all the new partners hired over the last five years, ~25% were women.

Larger funds seem to be doing slightly better, likely due to the size of their investment teams! Of funds that raised $1B+ between 2015 and 2020, 27% had two or more female partners, compared to 12% for the broader pool of firms with $100M+ AUM.

jobs 🎓

Linear - Chief of Staff (Remote)

Ollie - Strategy Associate (Remote)

General Catalyst - Early Stage Investment Analyst (SF, Boston, NYC)

Precursor Ventures - Analyst (Bay Area)

Cowboy Ventures - Associate (Bay Area)*

Loyal - Chief of Staff (SF)

Figma - Strategic Finance Associate (SF)*

a16z - Corp Dev Associate (Menlo Park)

Goldman Sachs - Growth Equity Associate (NYC)*

Umamicart - Biz Ops Analyst (NYC)

M13 - Growth & Data Strategy Analyst (NYC)

TrialSpark - New Ventures Associate/Senior Associate (NYC)

Primary Venture Partners - Portfolio Impact Principal (NYC)*

*Requires 3+ years of experience.

internships 📝

Google X - MBA Finance Ops Intern (Remote)

23AndMe - Archive Intern, Office of the CEO (Remote)

Twilio - Developer Education Intern (Remote)

Addepar - MBA PM Intern (Remote)

Compound - Research Intern (Remote)

Zendesk - GTM Finance & Strategy Intern (SF)

Flexport - PM Intern (SF)

Harper Wilde - Social Media Intern (LA)

Daily Harvest - Innovation Commercialization Intern (NYC)

Thrasio - Brand Ops Intern (NYC)

BACKED - Venture Fellow (London)

puppy of the week 🐶

Meet MacKenzie, a one-year-old standard poodle who lives in LA.

She enjoys cheering for the Rams, playing with her friends, and giving side eye to the camera. We also hear she’s going to be a TV star soon. 👀

Follow her on Instagram @mackenziethestandardpoodle!

Hi! 👋 We’re Justine and Olivia Moore, identical twins and venture investors at CRV. Thanks for reading Accelerated. We’d love your feedback - feel free to tweet us @venturetwins or email us at twins@crv.com.