The pandemic is headed in different directions in different parts of the world.
Here in the US, things are looking up, as they have for a few weeks. 55% of adults in the US have gotten at least one shot. And the CDC recently outlined the impact that getting immunized can have on everyone s lives, including less mask-wearing outdoors.
In fact, things have gotten so cheery that there s a whole movement brewing around this summer in the US. The sextech market has never been hotter, according to startup founders and investors who spoke with Insider s Melia Russell and April Joyner.
It s the free market s natural reaction to calls for a Hot Vax Summer, I suppose.
From Margaux MacColl, Melia Russell, Candy Cheng, and Michael Haley:
The venture capitalists who write the earliest checks known as seed investors take the biggest risks. But when they choose well, they also reap the biggest rewards. With huge profits at stake, thousands of institutions and individuals are active seed investors.
But seed investing is more an art than a science and only a few succeed regularly. Tribe Capital, a seed venture-capital firm and an investor in other funds, set out to find the top investors by analyzing data on about 1,000 of them. The result is this list of the top 100 as well as the Seed 25, a list of the top female seed investors.
Compass; Melia Russell and Samantha Lee/Insider This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.
Ori Allon is the technical cofounder of Compass, which just went public at an $8.2 billion market cap.
It s his third startup, after selling one company to Google and another to Twitter.
Allon s role changed ahead of the public offering. He recently resigned from the board.
There s a saying in tech that behind every visionary founder is a brilliant operator. At Compass, that was Ori Allon.
The superstar engineer now has three exits to his name, after the residential brokerage he started nine years ago with Robert Reffkin started trading on the public markets on Thursday. The two rang the bell and bumped fists.
Clubhouse has hired Maya Watson as its global head of marketing.
She s a social-media veteran who comes from Netflix and Oprah Winfrey s television network.
Her hiring comes at a pivotal moment for the audio-only chat app.
Clubhouse has hired away Netflix s director of editorial and publishing to spearhead its marketing efforts.
On Sunday, Maya Watson was named the company s first global head of marketing in a town-hall-like discussion on the app between the company s founding team. She is expected to work closely with creators on the app to curate content.
In a post on Instagram, Watson said she was humbled and honored to be chosen in this moment.
Science This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.
Peter Pham says investors need to stop talking about backing female-founded companies and start writing checks.
In 2020, companies with all-female founder teams nabbed only 2.4% of all venture capital invested.
Pham says it s not that hard. One-third of founders backed by his VC firm, Science, are women.
Peter Pham is known as a gifted hype man for talking up startups he s invested in when they need to raise funding.
He s used to doing it on the dance floor at conferences and over dinner. But in the last year, Pham, a founding partner of VC firm Science, has more often shared upcoming deals with his network of investors over email.