What We’re Reading
A few good articles the Collab team came across this week …
Shifts
The VC market is concentrating:
Since 2014, the number of VC rounds in technology companies worldwide has nearly halved, from 19,000 to 10,000, according to PitchBook. During that time, the drop in VC funding amount has been nowhere near as dramatic, highlighting that VCs are concentrating investment into fewer later-stage companies.
Economics
Good news for electric cars:
Lithium-ion battery packs are selling at an average price of $209 a kilowatt-hour, down 24 percent from a year ago and about a fifth of what it was in 2010, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance survey shows. The rate has further to fall – reaching below $100 a kilowatt-hour by 2025, according to a report by BNEF analyst James Frith.
That’s a magic number for the electric car business. According to Frith, $100 is widely seen as “a tipping point in the adoption of EVs.”
Progress
Where life is (and isn’t) getting better:
Market share
Imagine a world in which two asset managers call the shots, in which their wealth exceeds current U.S. GDP and where almost every hedge fund, government and retiree is a customer.
It’s closer than you think. BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group — already the world’s largest money managers — are less than a decade from managing a total of $20 trillion, according to Bloomberg News calculations.
Pricing power
Tolls in the high-occupancy toll lanes hit $34.50 — or close to $3.50 a mile — to drive the 10-mile stretch from the Beltway to Washington during the height of the morning commute. The toll reached $40 on Tuesday morning.
Reliability
This is amazing. 13 billion miles from earth:
A set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use.
Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth.
Have a good weekend.