Welcome to Newsletter #4. It’s been fun receiving feedback from friends and new colleagues. For the foreseeable future, I will switch to publishing the newsletter on Tuesdays and the Podcasts on Thursdays.

The two biggest news stories this week are Apple’s announcement to include OpenAI in Apple products and the Consumer Inflation Report.

Apple’s use of OpenAI is a very big deal. For the past five years, consumers have had little incentive to upgrade their hardware. I am not alone in this sentiment. Apple has long been sitting on cash but has had fairly anemic growth in its hardware sales. This is a shot in the arm for Apple, which has managed to optimize rather than innovate under Tim Cook.

The second piece of big news this week is interest rates. Consumer inflation remained stable at 3.3%, slowing from 3.4% a year earlier. Persistently high interest rates have significantly dampened housing values and new home construction, which has meant less money for American households to spend. Given that we are going into an election year and that JPow doesn’t want another Trump presidency, he may feel compelled to lower rates and boost the economy in the short term to help Biden eke out a win. JPow even hinted at such in late May.

As everyone knows, VC fundraising has been weak. But an interest rate cut could bring venture funding back. VC thrives in low-interest-rate environments when Alpha is hard to generate in other markets. This might mean the end of the VC funding winter.

As always, I am starting my VC syndicate if you are interested in angel investing. We have a current deal that keeps with our legal tech emphasis, so if you are an accredited investor, you can look at the Angellist listing here. You can also contact me if you want to join my exclusive Angel Investment opportunity list.

Finally, you can share updates with the channel you want to highlight to the community using this form.

News I Have Been Reading

Tech News

• See my interview with Horace Wu on what is and what isn’t hype in legal tech.

• Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI's Future Why its important: billionaires are putting their dollars to work to affect public opinion towards their image of AI.

• Battery Ventures makes its mark too, staking the future on the legal market. Since legal work is such high-value work and LLMs are so applicable to it, I think there will be a lot of alpha for the companies that can capture it.

• Agents in an Agentic world. Read NFX hot take on the future of AI agents as it relates to work.

• Big shout out to Nate Schorr at the Legal Tech Fund for the most comprehensive market map in legal tech.

• This is a really interesting insight from Carta. It shows that it's much better to take more capital to cross the chasm than not.

Raises and Exits

Big news for my friend Ihar with Scalestack when they invested in a SAFE for over $300K. (I happen to be an investor there too)

Data / AI / Machine Learning • Seed • New York, New York

Big news as KKR acquires a majority stake in Agiloft, a contract lifecycle platform.

Data / Contracts / Legal Tech• Late Stage • San Francisco, CA

Mistral secures €600mn funding as valuation soars to almost €6bn

Data / AI / Machine Learning • Late Stage • Paris, France

Stay tuned for next week. I will have some great guests coming up on the pod, talking about AI, regulation, and the economy's future.