Another FKA Friday ● 12 April 2024#12

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12 April 2024 #12 856+363  Our April Pitch Night will be next Tuesday, as usual on the 3rd Tuesday of the month. It will be VIRTUAL ONLY, kicking off at 19:00.  Clinton from OneReg #25  Justin Flitter runs regular NewZealand.ai/events that are informative and helpful in this rapidly changing space. Check it out for yourself! Ben Reid is a futurist from Christchurch. He has his 10 digits on the pulse of AI and tech trends like few others and he examines in his 600-page book how these can be leveraged for Aotearoa. Grab a $10 digital copy before you put $10k into your next AI startup! Generative AI darling Stability AI had to pay $99M on compute to generate just $11M in revenues. Not sustainable! MORE-1. MORE-2. Blended across all the Blackbird funds that participated in the sale, Canva made it a 31x return on the cost base of these investments. For Blackbird’s 2012 fund, which participated in Canva’s earliest funding round, the sale represented a return of just more than 2,600 times the cost base of its original investment. MORE! Investors in an early post-money AUD$1.5m round would see that kind of return when selling at an enterprise value of USD$2.6B. Such returns are outliers, with a lot of luck in the equation, notwithstanding that it requires a stellar team which Canva definitely has. Let's not forget that many unicorns expire before returning anything to investors. AUD$1.5m pre/post rounds, you ask. Yep, in 2012 those were the levels!  The flip side. Sunfed’s chief executive and founder Sukul Lee says the business had not been able to move to a position where it had a positive cashflow. Venture capital investors who had backed the business through its growth and development had started to pull back. MORE! A big shout-out to our sponsors! Potentia is a finalist in 3 award categories of the Recruitment, Consulting & Staffing Association (RCSA). That is a good reason for Julian to be starry-eyed.  As in sales, now it is all about conversion! Also, on LinkedIn and over 2,000 FKA GIFs on GIPHY.