Page 2 - Eric Eldon News Today

Extra Crunch roundup: How Duolingo became an edtech leader The pandemic has just pushed edtech mainstream, but language-learning startup Duolingo had already spent the past decade figuring out how to build a successful edtech app. In our latest installment of the EC-1 series, Natasha Mascarenhas goes deep with the company to understand how it found product-market fit, then figured out how to grow like a consumer tech startup and monetize like a SaaS startup. After a record 2020, the Pittsburgh-...

Tech companies in Silicon Valley, the geography, have had an incredible year. But one indicator points to longer-term changes. The internal rate of return (IRR) for companies in other startup hub cities has been even better. A big new analysis by AngelList showed aggregate IRR of 19.4% per year on syndicated deals elsewhere versus 17.5% […]

Managing Editor Danny Crichton filed a column about Softbank’s Vision Fund that tried to answer a question he asked in 2017: “What does a return profile look like at such a late stage of investment?” Softbank’s recent earnings report shows that its $680 million bet on DoorDash paid off handsomely, bringing back $9 billion. Compared to its competition, “the fund is actually doing quite decent right now,” he wrote. But Softbank has invested $66 billion in 74 unexited 74 companies that...