In 2021, it feels like everyone has an online community — from newsletter writers and Twitter thread guys to enterprise startups. But many of these are “zombie communities”: Slack or Discord groups with hundreds or thousands of people and no meaningful engagement. …

One of the “OG” direct-to-consumer brands, Warby Parker, filed for a direct listing yesterday. As someone who spends a lot of time with D2C brands, I’m here to share the things that surprised me in Warby’s filing. This listing will be closely followed by brand operators — there haven’t been…

How a private beta can skew your metrics — and how to respond to investors’ questions about it! — We’re officially living in the Golden Age of TestFlight. It happens like clockwork — a buzzy new social app emerges in closed beta, and early users post screenshots on Twitter to generate FOMO. VCs clamor to score invites, and may even send in term sheets before the product publicly launches. …

A deep dive into the next wave in consumer fintech — P2P marketplaces for previously private assets — The past decade has been a transformational one in financial services. The days of visiting a physical bank to open an account or apply for a loan are behind us — we now expect to do everything via website or app. …

This week, we had the opportunity to talk with Deevy Bhimani, a senior at UC Berkeley. Deevy spent this summer interning at Roblox, and last summer he worked at Loom (before the company raised its Series B from Sequoia). During his time at Berkeley, Deevy has interned for several other…

It’s been hard for new consumer social companies to get traction in the last five years, and even harder to hold on to early hype. The existing “giants” (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter) eat up most users’ screen time and cell data, and their network effects make it tough to justify…

Data from 130 young investors shows many are doubling down — For Gen Z and young millennial investors, the past few months have been a whole new world. Most were teens or pre-teens during the last recession, and are now facing volatility that’s challenging even for professional investors. The Dow Jones had its largest single-day drop in history in mid-March, and…

Believe it or not, Casper will be the first IPO of the VC-backed D2C brand era — prior exits in the space (e.g. Harry’s, Bonobos, Dollar Shave Club) have been acquisitions. …

This post was originally published in our weekly newsletter, Accelerated. Check it out if you are interested in more content from us! We both read a lot this year — Olivia read 125 books and Justine read 96 — and we’re excited to share our favorites. There’s already great lists with the top tech & VC books, so we won’t rehash those (shoutout to Bad Blood and Super Pumped, which we loved!). Instead, we’re featuring books you may not have heard of, on topics ranging from the opioid epidemic to hostage negotiations. Most of them were published post-2017, so they’re still relatively new.