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Together With:

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Hi there, 👋

What took them so long?

Crypto .com finally acknowledged that the company lost well over $30 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum after a hack that took place on January 17th.

​483 users had their accounts compromised, but the company says that all affected customers have been fully reimbursed for the losses. Good to know, but these types of hacks are not uncommon, which is bad.

In this issue:

• Private Markets Are Opening
• Decentralized Domain Investing
• Startup opportunities in Eastern Europe

From the snippets: Card payments for NFTs, CityDao's Discord breach, funding for women disappoints, and Wall St. pros watch the amateurs.

As always, thanks for being here.
Juliet Lyall
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Private Markets Are Opening

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The United States is celebrated as a free-market economy, yet access to one of the largest and most important asset classes - private equity & venture capital - is reserved almost exclusively for institutions and high net worth individuals.

There is good news.

Thanks to the confluence of regulatory advances, technology innovation, and macroeconomic factors, the tides are turning.

The private markets are opening, which also provides more opportunity for diverse communities to share in equity upside. Entrepreneurs building tools and platforms that democratize the private markets will shape culture and wealth creation for decades to come.

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) cover the factors which they believe will propel the consumerization of private market investing & fundraising:

1. Everyone is an investor

2. Community ownership

3. Regulatory changes, and

4. Fund and SPV infrastructure

As an investor, BVP also outlines the products and businesses that most interest them.
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Privacy-Friendly Analytics

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Google Analytics (GA) is free - except it's not.

Google makes money off the personal data they collect from you: In simple terms, you are the product.

If you're searching for an ethical alternative to Google analytics, then Splitbee is one of the most attractive and privacy-friendly options around.

The super-fast dashboard shows you incoming traffic in real-time. At a glance, you'll get insights into where your visitors come from and which pages they visited.

While GA's bloated script will affect your site speed, SplitBee is lightweight and adds <4kb to your site. One line of code and you're done.

Another great feature is the ability to automate almost anything. For example, you can send emails to onboard new users or receive notifications for every sale you make.

Splitbee is for free for 2,500 monthly page views, 1 x active A/B test, and 1 x active automation.

​Paid plans offer generous features from $17/month on an annual plan.
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Together With MicroAcquire

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💎 Acquiring SaaS Businesses

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Every investment involves risk and SaaS acquisitions are no different.

Skip due diligence and you expose your flanks – you might as well toss a coin and hope for the best.

Do your research, however, and you’ll know what to acquire and when. Instead of pouring money down the drain, you’ll be planting the seeds of phenomenal growth.

The three C’s of SaaS business viability- churn, code, customers - are the three main areas to focus on before making an offer.

No matter how much research you do, the fastest way to learn whether acquiring a business is a good idea is to talk to the founder directly.
​Download MicroAcquire’s ebook on how to assess SaaS businesses and learn the right questions to ask.

As always, you can browse all seller listings with a free MicroAcquire buyer account. Upgrade to a Premium subscription to engage sellers and get access to more business metrics.
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🕵️ Free eBook: 3 Signs a SAAS Business Is Worth Acquiring​
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Decentralized Domain Investing

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It's begun.

The new fractional domain marketplaces are coming to town.

After the sale of Directions .com on Rally, we noticed that Cloudname.com is getting ready to launch an NFT-based domain investing service.

Cloudname wants to "democratize and decentralize domain investing."

Their platform was built to run across multiple blockchain networks including Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), Polygon, and Solana.

What does this mean for you?

In essence, you'll be able to register traditional and blockchain domains anonymously, pay in crypto, and tokenize your domain names.

If you're new to this game, tokenization is the fractionalization of any physical or digital item into one or more tokens.

This process is made possible by blockchain technology and it offers several advantages:

• You can buy and sell a domain in real time, through the purchase and sale of its tokens
• Costly domains can be split (fractionalized) into numerous tokens. This allows you to buy a share of a particular domain which you co-own with other token holders
• You can trade with domain tokens

Cloudname offers some additional useful features like the option to create a domain portfolio or rent your domain, as well as free access to trend data and statistics.

Among other benefits, these types of platforms could help solve the problem of liquidity and high price tags for premium domains.

Any bets on how many similar platforms will launch over the next month to take advantage of this trend?

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Get curious about the Eastern European startup ecosystem.

​Ihar Mahaniok is the Managing Partner of Geek Ventures, a tech venture fund that invests in immigrant founders.

Mahaniok's track record is impressive. He has invested in 80+ startups, (including several unicorns) and was an early investor in Slack, Instacart, and Pandadoc.

At the 2021 IT Arena conference in Lviv, Ukraine, Mahaniok spoke to Tech.eu about the challenges and opportunities for CEE tech companies and the importance of storytelling and communication skills for startup pitching.

Mahaniok discusses his angel investment experience and the proven approaches he uses to identify high-growth companies at an early stage.
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Simple, Secure Chat

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There's an easier way to have a private, peer-to-peer chat.

​P2pchat's encrypted service allows you to create a unique, secure room to keep you safe from "call bombing".

Rooms are generated by creating a unique encrypted hash of the room name, making room links effectively unguessable.

Just share your link and start talking.

​p2p.chat is a free and open source project.
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Brought to You by Smash Digital​
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🦄 SEOs with Skin in the Game

​Smash Digital - a growth agency, filled to the brim with unicorn images and SEO memes.
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A team of SEOs with actual skin in the game, ranking their own portfolio of profitable businesses, and offering the exact same services to clients.
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An agency with so much link juice you’ll need a mop and bucket to clean it all up.​

​Check. Them. Out.
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✅ Snippets to Send You on Your Way

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​🔷 Rookies changed the landscape: Last year, amateur investors took financial markets by storm. This year, Wall Street professionals are watching them closely. Fund managers who might have once derided small-time day traders as "dumb money" are scouring social-media posts for clues about where the herd might veer next. Some 85% of hedge funds and 42% of asset managers are now tracking retail-trading message boards. (Good luck not being on the wrong side of some of those plays)
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🔷 The rising tide did not lift all boats: Funding for women founders continues to disappoint as data indicates that less than 2% of VC funding last year went to all-female teams. How is it that despite the recent boom in startup funding, the venture capital industry is actually becoming an even tougher place for women to raise money? What's going on?​

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​🔷 It turns out you can raise a small crypto fund: As crypto funds reach the billion-dollar mark and often soar right past that figure, it’s almost nice to find a smaller capital pool. Inflection raised a blockchain-focused fund worth just under $41 million. (Their existing portfolio includes dead man switches and open-source drug development)
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🔷 Expanding the audience for NFTs: Coinbase is partnering with Mastercard to allow card payments on its upcoming NFT marketplace. This means you’ll be able to directly purchase an NFT with fiat currency using your Mastercard credit or debit card, all without having to buy cryptocurrency first. Coinbase NFT still hasn’t gone live, but you can sign up to their waitlist for early access.
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🔷 Still at it: Andreessen Horowitz plans to raise up to $4.5bn for a new set of cryptocurrency funds, aiming to more than double the amount it raised less than one year ago in a sign of the growing frenzy surrounding digital assets. Andreessen was one of the most active cryptocurrency investors last year, striking large deals in the gaming start-up Sky Mavis, blockchain developer Solana Labs, and NFT marketplace OpenSea.
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🔷 Ridiculous breach: CityDAO, the group that bought 40 acres of Wyoming in hopes of "building a city on the Ethereum blockchain," announced that its Discord server was hacked and members' funds were stolen. The attack worked by compromising the Discord account of a moderator, a core-team member and early investor who goes by Lyons800. (Is Discord the weakest link?)

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🦧 Zoopranos:

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Not financial, investing or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly for information, entertainment and education purposes. Nothing in here is investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This newsletter is not tax advice. Talk to your professional advisors. Do your own research.

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