Welcome to another edition of Business Twitter, where we collect the best tweets to come out of Silicon Valley so you don’t have to. This article is part of a newsletter — if you want a weekly Business Twitter roundup sent to your inbox every Friday, subscribe here.
This week: Jack Dorsey makes an incredibly obvious point about cryptocurrency, Lakehouse Capital wins big in Square’s Afterpay acquisition, trends confirm that VC valuations are on the rise according to Hustle Fund, and why diverse VC firms perform better.
1. Bitcoin = Bitcoin
This week, Jack Dorsey continued his crypto promoting spree with a less than coherent tweet. Writing simply, “Bitcoin is Bitcoin. (and that’s all it needs to be),” Dorsey was likely saying that Bitcoin isn’t a solution to the world’s problems or the future of currency — it’s just Bitcoin.
This seems to go against what Dorsey has been saying for years — last week in fact, he said in a webinar that “My hope is that it creates world peace or helps create world peace.”
Binance’s CEO, CZ, seemed to echo Dorsey’s sentiment, retweeting it and adding “1 #BTC = 1 #BTC. It's everything else that's volatile.” Binance even sent out a tweet with a similar message.
2. One VC’s bet on Afterpay
Last week, Square announced plans to buy Australian fintech company Afterpay, a leader in the buy now, pay later industry, at $126 a share. Meanwhile, Joe Magyer, CIO of Lakehouse Capital, wrote a thread about the firm’s investment in Afterpay at $2 a share back in 2017.
“What we saw at the beginning was a business that had come from nowhere to claim 15% of all Aussie online apparel sales,” Magyer wrote. “User growth was 1,100% year-on-year and merchant growth was 75% in the latest quarter. The business clearly had escape velocity.”
Magyer also noted that many older analysts didn’t notice the growing popularity of buy now, pay later among younger generations.
3. VC valuations on the rise
VC firm Hustle Fund analyzed over 3,000 pre-seed firms in the US to determine if higher valuations really are a thing in venture capital.
Wil Bricker, a VC at the firm, confirmed the trend, tweeting, “Well, it's true (I know, anticlimactic). Valuations are up 55% from pandemic lows (I'm using a 4-week moving average, so the drop and rebound are a little delayed).”
Despite the increase, Bricker noted that the majority of deals are still less than $10 million — the increase in large deals, and the prices of those deals, is what’s driving up the average. And while most companies are seeing larger deals, companies that have a track record of revenue are getting the most cash.
4. No diversity will cost VCs
Diversity is top of mind for hiring managers in venture capital, and not just for diversity’s sake. According to a thread by Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick, diversity means lower profits.
“What is the cost of a lack of diversity in venture capital?” Mollick wrote. “If the VC partners are all from the same school: 11% lower VC performance. If the partners all have the same ethnicity: around 30% lower performance. If they are all men: 20% lower performance.” Mollick then linked back to the original study from Harvard Business School.
Paul Graham replied: “Cause or effect though? The highest performing funds tend to be the most famous, and the most famous get the most pressure to conform to current social norms. Whereas no one cares who works at the 100th ranked fund.”
