.Li Jin is co-founder and General Partner at Variant, an early-stage crypto venture capital firm.

Previously she was a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest VC firms, and Product Manager at shopkick.

She's made waves in the investment world with her keen eye for

Unicorn: a startup valued $1B+ 🦄 aileenlee

Dragon: a startup that returns the entire fund 🐉 John Backus

Centaur: a startup with $100M+ ARR 🏇 Bessemer

Pony: a startup valued under $100M 🎠 Dave McClure

Camel: a startup that survives and thrives outside major tech hubs

With the noncompete band lifted, Tech Mafia groups are going to 📈! No better time to create an investment club to invest in the new startups that will spin out of these top tech companies.

This week we've got an exciting tech mafia group lined up...

The Klarna Mafia 💰

Quick stats:

📌 Money raised by Klarna alumni: $196M
📌 Companies founded by Klarna alumni: 17

Fill breakdown dropping tomorrow.

🚨 we're hiring a head of operations/strategy to work with our communities of angel investors & founders

if you:
- love startups and founders
- love getting into the weeds of ops & automating processes
- talking to users daily
- have experience doing ops at an early stage

.Tomer London is the co-founder of Gusto which is valued at $9 billion.

He is also a prolific startup investor.

Here are some of his top angel investments:

🚀 Figma ($10 billion in valuation)

🚀 Checkr, Inc. ($4.6 billion in valuation)

🚀 Retool ($3.2 billion in valuation)

Everyone always talks about the outliers like Uber, Instagram, Canva, etc.

But what about all those startups that raised $100M+ and failed?

Here are the 10 biggest startup failures of all time:

📌 1. Zume

→ Disclosed Funding: $446M

→ Reason for Failure: Unable to sustain

This week in tech mafia news:

Shutterstock!

Quick stats:

📌 Number of companies founded by Shutterstock alumni: 26

📌 Amount of money raised by Shutterstock alumni: $526 million

Stay tuned for the full breakdown tomorrow!

.Shaan Puri chairman of The Milk Road - the fastest growing American newsletter for crypto investors, and the founder of bebo, is also a big time investor.

Here are some of his top angel investments:

🚀Triple Whale 🐳 ($51 billion raised)

🚀deel ($12 billion in valuation)

Top 20 VCs in the world & their best investments:

📌 1. Bill Gurley - Benchmark
Notable investments: GrubHub, OpenTable, Zillow, Uber, Stitch Fix, Nextdoor

📌 2. Chris Sacca - Lowercase Capital
Notable investments: Twilio, Twitter, Stripe, Uber

📌 3. Jeff Jordan - Andreessen