V1 is hosting our first Clubhouse room & Neo Apps are Open! SPAC Boom
and we dive into the SPAC Boom!
If you have any suggestions on what we should cover or general feedback, let us know at team@v1michigan.com. But for now, let's go! 🚀
Updates:
V1 is hosting its first ever Clubhouse Room 🎮
This week join the club because Maker Monday will be on Clubhouse! (ask for an invite in #🛠building if you aren’t on Clubhouse, we have a bunch)
V1 Members Chris Okumra and Adris Jautakas will be sharing their experience developing games and machine learning applications. You aren’t gonna want to miss this special event so make sure you accept the calendar invite and download Clubhouse. See you Monday at 9pm EST, pull through here.
Neo is now open for 2021 applications! 🎊 Are you a CS student excited about the start-up path? Make sure to apply by June 30th to become a Neo Scholar! Neo is mentorship community and VC fund that hopes to generates the leaders of the tomorrow's start-ups. By joining them, you can:
Join Neo’s diverse mentorship community. Meet top CS students, engineering leaders, & tech icons. Get lifelong support and help others.
Work at an awesome startup. Meet 1:1 with leaders of top startups curated just for you. Attend a personalized career fair and get fast-tracked in job interviews.
Start your own company. Neo will support you unconditionally. Count on Neo for funding, mentorship, connections, and recruiting support.
They're also paving the way to a more inclusive tech interview, where you can choose how you're assessed. If this sounds interesting to you, def attend an information session to learn more!⚡️
Get excited for V1 X Secureframe Q&A + Recruiting!🤩
We’re hosting Secureframe, a security compliance start-up, w/ U〽️ich Alumnus Anant Akash for a Fireside chat! Secureframe is trailblazing security streamlining in the entrepreneurial world, with hundreds of companies including Instabase, CloudApp, and Hasura partnering with them.
Want to learn more on how they grew their start-up (founded in just January 2020) to raising $22.5 million from VC investors like Kleiner Perkins & Gradient Ventures? Make sure to check out this event to hear from early employees, get a chance to chat with them, and connect 1:1 for new opportunities! More details coming soon, but in the meanwhile check out this fire article 🔥
SPACs: You’ve heard of ‘em, but don’t get ‘em
It’s the middle of 2021 and if you pay even the slightest bit of attention to the business world, chances are you’ve heard of SPACs… but maybe don’t quite understand what they are. Today we’re going to break down what a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, long for SPAC, is and dive into a recent case study.
Quite fittingly SPACs are exactly what they stand for - companies that don’t have any commercial business operations, yet are formed specially for the purpose of raising money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to acquire an existing company. They have existed for a long time, but recently gained popularity and even outnumbered traditional IPO’s!
SPACs have become popular vehicles for financial technology startups such as eToro, SoFi (led by the King of SPACs Chamath Palihapitiya), and more recently Acorns, a savings and investing app. Acorns, a private company, is set to go public via a SPAC merger at a valuation of a whopping $2.2 billion. Here, the key players are Acorns (the private company set to IPO), Pioneer Merger Corp (the Special Purpose Acquisition Company) and Wellington Management among a few other institutional investors who trust the SPAC (Pioneer) to acquire a company (Acorns) that will provide returns on their investment.
Here’s a visual of the insane growth of SPACs in the last decade:
Check out this amazing visualization by the Wall Street Journal that illustrates how quickly the SPAC craze has grown!
Top Tweets of the Week 🐥
Looking to get that summer internship? This might help.
A short, captivating story.
For all of you folks who're interested in building in crypto, but don't know how to get started.
Opportunities 🔍
No Code Club Chapter Founder: as a student-led organization aiming to help students transform their ideas into products, No Code Club is looking to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit nationwide 🤯. Check out this exciting opportunity to learn how to build with new tools from their Sponsor Bubble and learn more about how members in the UCLA chapter are earning $200+/hour freelancing with their new skills.
Make sure to reach out to @jonah on Discord if this sounds interesting to you & NoCode for more info!
Wander Software Engineer, Content Curator, Social Media Coordinator, Head of Growth, and Business Development Associate: the mission of the platform is to make it easier to recommend and discuss intellectual content in order to combat much of the toxic, divisive, and inaccurate content found on social media today. Founded by UM students Justin Gainsley & Yash Ramchandani, these are great opportunities to learn new skills and gain valuable experience!👩💻
If you're interested in any of the positions (or know of anyone who might be), make sure to email jegainsl@umich.edu!
What We're Reading 🧠
Catch the latest scoops from other V1 members
Google's LaMDA: Breakthrough Conversation Technology
The FBI Secretly Ran the Anom Messaging Platform, Yielding Hundreds of Arrests in Global Sting
Jack Dorsey Says Square May Build a Bitcoin Hardware Wallet
That’s all for today’s newsletter. If you have any specific requests of what you’d like to see in future editions, any ideas for the V1 Community, want to contribute to the newsletter, or any thoughts at all please reach out to us via email or DM us on Twitter!
And if you’ve read all this and still aren’t in the Discord community, what’s holding you back? Join here!
Contributors:
Saanika Kulkarni, Divya Reddy , Advait Iyer, Dheera Vuppala, Varun Jindal, Drew Levine Samay Shamdasani