Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker's Guide to Newsletters

Much of the really interesting thinking in tech has moved to email newsletters. (A16Z has funded Substack as further evidence of this trend).

Here are the eleven email newsletters we love:

• **Benedict Evans** - Weekly email, summarising the top stories in tech. Benedict Evans also pulls together the best slide decks in tech. Check out his latest, Tech in 2020.
• Axios Pro Rata - This is a daily email newsletter which collates all the venture deals getting done around the world each day.
• **Leanluxe** - If you have any interest in direct to consumer brands, Leanluxe is the go-to. The Grab-Bag section is consistently good.
• **Why Is This Interesting (WITI)** - A daily email on a single interesting topic, written by two friends in New York - Noah Brier and Colin Nagy - and a community of contributors. WITI is good because it’s so broad. Great for seeing trends, and niches as they emerge.
• Alex Danco - Exceptional weekly analysis of tech trends. His recent piece on debt funding was incredibly smart.
• **SITAL Week** - Brad Slingerlend is a fund manager in the US and his Stuff I Thought About Last Week summary is a weekly deep dive into everything from microchips, and complexity theory, to the benefits of of the IPO process.
• **Thomas Rice’s Innovation Wrap** - Thomas is a Sydney-based Blackbird investor, but he also has his own fund at Perpetual - the Global Innovation Fund. He’s into e-sports, genomics, China, and wraps up the week in innovation really succinctly.
• Collaborative Fund - One of my investors at Sessions, Collaborative Fund hired Morgan Housel, arguably the best writer in tech and finance to create content for them full-time. This is his fortnightly wrap.
• **Drinking From The Firehose** - Like Alex Danco, Alex Taussig writes brilliant weekly essays on tech, often with a D2C focus. His firm, Lightspeed, was an early investor in Snapchat, and regarded as one of the best D2C firms in the world.
• **Matt’s Thoughts In Between** - Entrepreneur First is a London-based fund that invests in smart people before they have a company. It’s one of the most innovative funding models in the world right now (LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is an investor). EF’s founder writes weekly about his take on macro-issues like crypto, sovereignty, AI, and global politics.
• The Sunday Long Read -The best longform essays from around the world each week. If you haven't installed Instapaper or Pocket for saving long articles to read later, The Sunday Long Read will give you a reason to download them.

Just like you should read every Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, every Amazon letter to shareholders, and every Howard Marks memo, there is gold to be found in the archives of three of the best VC investors of the past two decades:

• Bill Gurley - Benchmark GP, Series A investor in Uber, Ebay, and many more.
• Fred Wilson - Fred's MBA Monday series from a few years back was amazing.
• Paul Graham - One of Nick's favourites.