fundraising wordsmithery
and anecdotal observations on software developer sentiment
Welcome back to The Angle ✍️ I spent this morning cheering on London marathon runners in rather dreich conditions and then this afternoon trying to write this newsletter and not watch The Diplomat on Netflix all at once (It’s so good, it’s hard not to).
Fundraising wordsmithery
Amongst a rather hectic news cycle this week, I think one really interesting raise got slightly lost amongst the noise, which was a Series B raise from bitcoin financial services platform Unchained.
The startup, which was founded in 2016, is raising a $60 million Series B round led by Valor Equity Partners and with backing from investors such as NYDIG, Ecliptic Capital and Highland Capital Partners.
Crunchbase reports that Series B funding has fallen sharply this year. It’s “on track to come in at the lowest quarterly level in more than three years,” Crunchbase said. The report also said that Series B investors appear to be avoiding fintech and web3, which makes the Unchained raise all the more intriguing.
However beware of the fundraising wordsmithery: Unchained is only announcing the $60 million round. Both The Block and Coindesk placed the initial close at $30 million with The Block reporting that another $20 million has also been committed. Gotta be careful with the wording in fundraising press releases especially in the bear market!
Speaking of bears, I thought I hopped in a time machine and went back to the peak of the crypto bull market when I read about Layer 1 blockchain Berachain’s $42 million raise at a $420.69 million valuation this week.
Really? Didn’t we learn anything from collapsed crypto exchange FTX and its playful valuations? This raise announcement just seemed slightly crass in the face of the crypto collapses of 2022 and heightened regulatory scrutiny 🤷♀️
💵 Berachain is backed by investors including Polychain Capital, Dao5 and Robot Ventures. The project’s origins trace back to a non-fungible token (NFT) collection, Bong Bears, Coindesk reported.
Wall Street tells high schoolers to pick tech over finance
Sticking with Wall Street, Bloomberg reported that more than half of the 678 respondents in its market pulse survey think the technology sector offers the best career opportunities for high school graduates compared to the 17.8% that said finance. The weekly Bloomberg survey takes a look at what investors are thinking on a variety of topics.
On the surface this response makes sense. Technology skills are in-demand and are well-paid. It’s also a career that typically offers a better work-life balance and that doesn’t pigeon-hole, with the skills being needed across a range of industries.
“ ‘The highest paying jobs were so clearly in the finance sector for two or three decades, and now tech is really competitive with that — they’re kind of neck and neck,’ said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president of human-resources consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc, . Even with the rise of AI he expects tech and finance to remain among the most lucrative careers for the next 20 or 30 years. ‘I don’t see that going away,’ he said.” - Bloomberg
While Wall Street investors might think it’s a great career choice, anecdotally I’ve noticed a more negative sentiment about the career choice from actual technologists and I am not convinced the lucrative pay will be enough to counter it.
I worked as a programmer at an investment bank for over four years and I never really liked it. The pay was great but I thought it was a career that was monotonous, had too many meetings that never resulted in any action and I couldn’t get excited about trying out new tech tools and languages like my peers. At the time, this viewpoint seemed contrarian.
Now I am seeing that change. Last week, I ended up in a conversation amongst three software developers who were sharing with one and other the same gripes I once had about the industry from too many meetings to boredom from not having enough work. They appeared to be extremely dissatisfied. Kyla Scanlon shared a similar tale about a 23-year-old dissatisfied software developer in her Substack this week on storytelling.
A blog post from software developer Emmanuel Maggiori titled “I’ve been employed in tech for years, but I’ve almost never worked” perfectly encapsulates this odd feeling of dissatisfaction. It struck a chord with many on LinkedIn and the following paragraphs reads like an excerpt from my former life:
Five months ago, I was hired as a software developer by one of the world’s most prestigious investment banks. While I prefer to do freelance work because it involves real work, I was looking to have a bit more stability for a while, so I gave a chance to a normal corporate technology job. Since the beginning of my employment, five months ago, I’ve worked for around three hours in total (not counting non-focused Zoom meetings which I attended without paying much attention).
When I first joined the company, I was excited. However, since I joined they’ve only given me tasks that were exceedingly easy to complete, in just a few minutes, but allocating days or even weeks to them. At first, I wanted to speed things along. I genuinely wanted to build a cool product, so I connected with people across the organization to ask questions about our intended users, their needs and how our product would satisfy them. But it was soon made clear to me, a few times, that I shouldn’t do that. One person told me, “I don’t want to tell you not to ask too many questions, but…” and she basically told me not to ask too many questions.
I will be curious to see if this sentiment of dissatisfaction continues to keep bubbling up in software development. The industry seems to be at an inflection point. It has more talent than ever before, thanks to retraining programs, apprenticeships and more graduates from STEM programs, but this also means hot competition to work on interesting greenfield software projects as the industry matures. It’s also grappling with layoffs at scale and the emergence of AI. I will be interested to see if the lucrative pay will remain as lucrative amid these headwinds and will it also be lucrative enough to offset the dissatisfaction?
A unique media model
On Thursday I did a hell of a lot of doomscrolling as announcements were made about Buzzfeed News closing down and Insider laying off staff. It was a grim media news day and while I could write 1000s of words on digital media models and the future of the industry, I won’t.
I instead want to flag this wild, depressing but also in some ways touching story about a newsroom in Oklahoma that bravely covered recordings of government officials talking about hiring hitmen for two of the reporters from the paper.
“The newspaper, which publishes three times a week, also ran a story about the recording under the headline: ‘County officials discuss killing, burying Gazette reporters.’” - The New York Times
The newspaper doesn’t have a website, so it placed a QR code on its front page so readers could download and listen to the recording of officials discussing the hanging of Black people and hiring hitmen.
The New York Times reported that as a result of the news “dozens of residents protested outside the office of the board of county commissioners holding signs that deplored racism and demanding the resignation of the sheriff, Kevin Clardy, and other county officials.”
So maybe the key to a good local business media model is not having a website at all? It seems to be working for The McCurtain Gazette-News. It’s no mean feat to publish a print paper three times a week in this day and age.
Please note this post has been updated from when it was originally posted. See this introductory post for why.
And thank you for reading The Angle! A personal newsletter unpacking freelance journalism and the topics I write about including crypto, technology and startups.