Hola,
 

People talk a lot about the value of data, but they do not talk enough about the right data. 

There’s a gulf between what is easy to measure, and what is important to measure. 

Take an iconic example from sports. NBA player Shane Battier was the subject of a 2009 magazine profile by the great nonfiction writer Michael Lewis. The headline was “The No-Stats All-Star,” which is misleading since it’s not that Battier was a “no-stats” player, it's that one-dimensional/superficial stats did not capture what he did. 

Battier did not rank for scoring, rebounds, assists. What made Battier a tremendous player were harder-but-not-impossible-to-measure contributions like shutting down opposing offenses and raising teammates’ game.

Especially in frothy markets like today’s, business media obsesses on stats like startup funding, public-company market caps, and billionaires’ net worth. But these are vanity metrics. The right data would reveal unrecognized potential and lend a unique edge to those who have it. The sorts of questions to ask are:

• Who is the Battier of startup companies, public-company stocks? 
• Who is the Battier among your employees?
• And which is the right data to find the answer? 

A start, by the way, might be to focus less on vanity metrics and more on information like a company’s business relationships.

Musings on a VC’s musings

Union Square Ventures is known for its early bets on Twitter, Indeed, and Etsy. 

From board diversity to market fit vs. revenue growth, here are 14 lessons we gleaned from Fred Wilson's prolific blog posts.

Now in one handy guide

As consumer priorities have shifted amid the pandemic, tech-enabled solutions ranging from on-demand warehousing to smart home tech have come to the forefront. 

It's in my DNA

Innovations in isolating, sequencing, and analyzing cell-free DNA (cfDNA) — short fragments of DNA released from tissues into the blood — are accelerating diagnostics, from infectious disease identification to prenatal genetic screening.

Clients can read more about how cfDNA tech could improve and accelerate disease diagnostics here.

527 unicorns: HR management platform Personio, healthcare chatbot company K Health, and payments infrastructure provider PPRO all raised funding at $1B+ valuations to become the latest unicorns. The global tally of unicorns now stands at 527. Personio was one of CB Insights and Fast Company’s Future Unicorn picks — see the rest here. 

$30B: Microsoft joined a $2B round for autonomous vehicle company Cruise, majority-owned by GM, which brought its valuation to $30B. The partnership will see Cruise use Microsoft’s cloud services to run its vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are gradually moving toward commercialization — find out what 40+ corps are working on the tech in this report. 
 

204M subscribers: Netflix said that it had reached 204M paying subscribers, buoyed by an influx last year likely attributable to the pandemic, and is now cash flow positive. We look at how the company battled Blockbuster to become a dominant media incumbent — potentially at risk of being disrupted itself — in our teardown of 7 innovation frameworks. 

$14.3B: Singapore-based “super app” Grab — which is backed by SoftBank and was last valued at $14.3B  — is reportedly considering filing for an IPO this year. Super apps, which offer a broad range of services like ride-hailing and payments on a single platform, are catching on across the world. Clients can see the Latin America-based companies vying to become the region’s dominant super app in this analysis.  
 

6.8 miles: Virgin Orbit released 10 satellites into space after launching a rocket from a modified Boeing airliner which had flown to a height of 6.8 miles. The approach is only the latest in a series of efforts by private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, to bring down the cost of launching satellites. See how Musk’s plans for SpaceX expand far beyond launching satellites here. 

$2.3B: Virtual workplace Citrix said that it would buy project management platform Wrikes for almost $2.3B. We look at how remote collaboration tools will remain in high demand even when offices begin to reopen in this deep dive report. 

Bernie Sanders is once again at the Future of Fintech and asking you to buy a subscription to CB Insights (just kidding...unless?).

At some point, this meme will stop being funny. But today is not that day. 
 

In an interview with CBS, the US senator commented on his style: “In Vermont, we dress, we know something about the cold. And we’re not so concerned about good fashion. We just want to keep warm. And that’s what I did today.”

Have a great rest of the week.

Marcelo