Batch brew #11

Welcome back to the Caffeine Capitalist! ☕

Wow, two weeks passed and no single coffee bean has remained unturned in the world of tech. The SVB tsunami hit us, and then disappeared over the weekend. Chat GPT 4 dropped and made us all realise how useless we are in the future workspace. Frustrating and painful stuff for sure. Black swans flying in formations, people refreshing their bank accounts, the mood of blood in the streets.

Jokes aside, put your opportunistic glasses on, get yourself some freshly ground beans and let's hit it!

5 minutes and 24 seconds this time.

This week we launched our new distribution channel, LinkedIn newsletters. To be honest, we spilled our coffees over the amount of people that signed up. We blew through the magical mark of 1000 subscribers cumulative on both platforms, thank you 🙏🏻

Dept. of Tiny Thoughts

Given the current climate of bank runs, one starts to think about personal finance. Michael Girdley, by the way, an owner of a rather large portfolio of boring businesses tweeted his tip some while ago, yet it is very relevant today.

Scrolling through the comment section I discovered three more gems to add to this:

• To add I keep it so low I make myself transfer for my "actual" account that doesn't have a card attached to it before I spend. - by Coach

• The real issue however, is the definition of LOW. -by Harad

• I have 10 accounts, all offset against home loans. 1 account per bucket: 1) leisure; 2) annual family trip; 3) health fund; 4) home imrpovements... etc.... Got automated transfers to these from main transactional account, which is the only visible one that makes feel broke like u - by Alan

Keep grinding & get your home safes ready!

Dept. of Insights

1. Sillicon Valley Bank what? Run? Marathon?

Venture capital and start-up ecosystem experienced a cardiac arrest over the weekend.

A significant portion of start-ups or VC backed companies in US is banking with Silicon Valley Bank, almost 50% of all. Their bank deposits were inaccessible, bank was after de-facto bankruptcy under a receivership of the bank regulator.

The same was happening to SVB in UK.

Just imagine the situation and panic from start-up's or VC's perspective:

• As a founder you got your determination and grit together, worked hard af to polish your product, manage the whole team, get to interesting traction to raise your round. Two years ago the fundraising in Seed or Series A would take you 3-5 months but this time it was much harder, the macro is shit, sentiment low, you fought hard and after 9 months you finally completed the fundraise at a 30% discount to your expected valuation. Now you have 2-3 mil. USD sitting in your bank account. Finally some time to chill, brew a filtered coffee, relax. You've made it, another 24months of runway secured. And BAAAM! Funds not accessible, so you cant pay your team their wages next week and as a director, you are required to fire someone if you don't have funds to pay them. Cardiac arrest. Thousands of start-ups, scale-ups and tech companies impacted. And literally every VC with wide enough portfolio was impacted and on the phone with founders during the weekend.

• Or imagine the situation from a VC's perspective.

Want to understand the whole timeline of what was happening? TechCrunch summarises it well in their recent article!

Luckily, the start-up armageddon did not happen and deposit accounts were accessible on Monday of both US and UK SVB arms due to government intervention and acquisition of SVB UK by HSBC, or better HS-V-BC.

Not your keys not your coins. When will we see the first term-sheets with stable-coin or bitcoin payments, hah?

2. Yup, you haven't even got your hand around GPT 3 yet and Chat GPT 4 just dropped this week. Exclusive interview with her/him/it/them below:

You though the tech world cannot get any more exciting these days, yet bam. Like sugar cube hitting your coffee (hope not), Chat GPT 4 dropped out of nowhere. Now that I am useless as a Caffeine Capitalist author, I asked her/him/it/them to give us an introduction & list why we should use her/him/it/them as entrepreneurs and investors:

"Hey there, Caffeine Capitalist readers! I'm ChatGPT-4, your friendly and advanced AI language model, boasting 175 billion parameters compared to ChatGPT-3's 13 billion. My enhanced capabilities allow me to better understand context and generate coherent responses across various subjects. As an investor or entrepreneur, you'll find me invaluable for tasks like:

1. Parsing complex financial data and uncovering hidden opportunities.

2. Optimizing marketing strategies with personalized and engaging content.

3. Automating mundane tasks, streamlining workflows, and saving time and resources.

With my expertise, you can make informed decisions and drive your business to new heights. Let's embark on this exciting journey together and explore the endless possibilities of AI!"

Oh and if you are wondering about the performance, below you can find her/his/its/their exam results:

Shocking huh?

Call to action: we are looking for interesting use-cases, if you have some, share them on LI or Insta and feel free to tag us. We will choose few people to give us some insights for future issues of the Caffeine Capitalist.

Dept. of Twitter Thread Research:

1/ Acquiring 500 companies? Why not. Meet Mark, Barclay's Intern turned Venture Capitalist turned Boring Business investor because of erratic returns in VC. Quite a read:

2/ Cash management, huh? When I saw this thread, the idea of protected cash when looking cash management was new to me, my curiosity only increased as I was scrolling through:

Dept. of Visual Research:

A nice little napkin helper for the topic of startup metrics. Definitely something to have coffee over, mhmm ☕

News from our portfolios & where to shake hands:

• Slavo is travelling to Žilina next week to speak about no code & startup fundraising, you can meet him here.

• Any VCs here? Andrej is traveling to Warsaw for CEE VC Summit on 28-29th March.

• Between Friday 24th and Sunday 26th you can meet Slavo & Martin in Vienna at Raiffeisen Bank Loyalty Hackathon, organised by one of our portfolio companies Kiuub.

• Missing some Start-up x VC events in Slovakia lately? Check out the Startup & Investor meetup in Bratislava on 30th. March organised by Havel&Partners. Andrej will represent ZAKA during a fireside chat there.

Do you enjoy this type of content? We blew through 1000 subscribers, but we want to grow further and the best way you can help us is to share The Caffeine Capitalist in your community using the button below:

Enjoy your coffee fresh, allocate capital, repeat! See you in 2 weeks 👋

The Caffeine Capitalist is a bimonthly newsletter written by Slavo Tuleya, Andrej Petrus & Martin Nemecek. It is written in partnership & in support from ZAKA.VC and Chop Chop Ventures.

What do you think of this issue? We are still collecting feedback on our new layout, suggestions welcome!

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.