Term Sheet Newsletter

Venture capital performance may be measured in ten-year chunks, but only an elite club of firms can claim to have stayed consistent—let alone functional—for anywhere close to that timeframe. David Tisch’s BoxGroup, which boasts 16 years of operation and just closed $550 million in new funding, can claim a spot among those ranks. For Tisch, the secret has been to serve as the Switzerland of VC.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sold his Seattle mansion. He and wife Lauren Sánchez moved to Miami about two years ago and own $237 million worth of property there. The Seattle mansion sale was the biggest on record for Washington state as of April. Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos sold his Seattle mansion this spring after about two years of living in Miami with his wife, Lauren Sánchez.

After securing his breakthrough role as Rajesh Koothrappali in The Big Bang Theory at just 26 years old, Kunal Nayyar quickly rose to fame, earning a staggering $1 million per episode at the height of the show’s success and becoming one of the highest-paid actors on television ever.

Mario Carbone’s flagship restaurant in Greenwich Village has around 75 seats, representing one of the most sought-after reservations in New York City. For diners hoping to score a slot, the process is almost an art form—a blend of opening Resy at the exact right second, or knowing someone who knows someone. But for Carbone, deciding how to fill each of those seats is not only a science, but his entire business.

For decades, the formula for success seemed clear: go to college, get a degree, and land a stable job. But for many Gen Zers, that equation no longer adds up. With rising tuition, heavy student debt, and a shaky job market, more young workers are rethinking the four-year degree and turning to faster and cheaper routes to a steady career. Bianca Miller was one of them. Initially, she enrolled in a four-year program, hoping to build a career working with machines and engines.

Rob Biederman thinks there’s such a thing as too much money. “Excess capital covers up intellectual laziness,” he said. “The best, best companies never burned any capital, because they were rigorous about finding ways to make people pay for their product.” Biederman, managing partner of Asymmetric Capital Partners, has a point.

Leopold Aschenbrenner begins his monograph Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead with one striking line: “You can see the future first in San Francisco.” What follows are 165 pages about what the future of AI will look like, drawn with clarity and theoretical forcefulness. The essay went viral and a new Silicon Valley wunderkind was born.

A venture capital firm, if you think about it, is an extremely weird acquisition target. VC firms have malleable time horizons that are long (and getting longer), and fundamentally are devoted to high-risk investing that’s reasonably likely to fail. To boot, VC firms getting acquired is an exceptionally rare occurrence—examples exist, but they’re all scattered and odd, like Meta’s half-acquisition of AI two-man-show NFDG this year, or StepStone Group’s 2021 acquisition of Greenspring Associates.

At 14, Pari Singh made just enough money to stir up an existential crisis. 17 years later, Singh still can’t talk about the details of that business (at least, not to a reporter). But the deal kicked off a seminal episode in his life. “It wasn’t a lot of money, but enough that I thought I’d sold out,” said Singh, who grew up in London. “I was 14 and I had to work out what I wanted to do with my life. So, every day for two weeks, I thought about it really deeply. I did nothing else.

“I love the business of risk,” Jonathan Crystal tells me. He didn’t really have a choice. After a brief career as a consultant, he joined his family’s insurance brokerage firm, Crystal & Company, rising through the ranks to become CFO in 2014 before helping broker a sale to Alliant in 2018. But despite spending his career in insurance, Crystal was always frustrated with how slow it moved, joking that the only thing his grandfather would be surprised by now about the industry would be email.