Farewell, dunks? Threads launches quote controls for all users

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto / Getty Images

Threads users can now exert more control over who can quote their posts.

This builds on a feature that already allows Threads users to limit who can reply to their posts (competing services like X and Bluesky offer similar reply controls). Threads outlined its plans for quote controls last month, and last night Adam Mosseri — who leads both Threads and Instagram for parent company Meta — announced that the feature is available to all users.

“I hope this will help keep Threads a more positive place and give people more control over their experience,” Mosseri wrote.

As of Saturday morning, the ability to limit quotes isn’t showing up when I log into Threads on my desktop web browser, but it is available in the Threads mobile app. Quote and reply controls appear to be bundled together in a single dropdown menu, where users can open the conversation to “Anyone,” or limit it to “Profiles you follow” or “Mentioned only.” These controls should make it harder to “dunk” on others, where users quote someone else’s post in order to make them look dumb.

Image credit: Threads

“But dunking is good!” you say. “I need to be able to tell my followers when someone on X/Threads/Bluesky/Mastodon has posted something dumb, offensive, or stupid.”

Fair enough: When I’m not the one being destroyed, I enjoy a good dunk as much as anyone. Luckily, the ability to screenshot and share someone’s post while explaining why it’s dumb/offensive/otherwise objectionable still exists. This just makes it less likely that a succession of dunks will make the original post go viral.

And it means that in theory, the original poster can scroll on, blissfully unaware that someone on the internet might be saying mean things about them.

Alexandre Mars, founder of Blisce and the Epic Foundation

Paris-based VC firm Blisce launches climate tech fund with a target of $160M

by with No Comment Tech

Alexandre Mars, founder of Blisce and the Epic Foundation

Image Credits: Chris Goodney / Bloomberg / Getty Images

Blisce has become the latest VC firm to launch a fund dedicated to climate tech, for which it plans to raise as much as €150 million (about $162 million). The firm is hiring investor Pierre-Edouard Berion to lead the fund, and Lucie Basch, the co-founder of Too Good To Go, is going to support the fund as a venture partner.

If you aren’t familiar with Blisce, the VC firm is based in Paris, has an office in New York and is better known as the investment vehicle of Alexandre Mars (pictured above). Mars is an entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist who created a handful of tech companies during the early 2000s and sold them to big names like Publicis and BlackBerry. Blisce raised $240 million (about €225 million) for its last fund.

More recently, Mars launched Blisce, a classic, for-profit VC firm, though it carries a B Corp label. He also started Epic, a nonprofit foundation that finances organizations that reduce childhood inequality when it comes to education or health, and supports organizations that fight climate change.

It’s hard to talk about Blisce without mentioning Epic, because a portion of Blisce’s profits are reinvested in Epic to cover the foundation’s operational costs. Similarly, the Blisce team is committing 20% of its carried interest to Epic.

It appears to have been working well, especially because Blisce has invested in several unicorns such as Spotify, Pinterest and Headspace. More recently, the firm invested in Brut, Sorare and Welcome to the Jungle. As you can see, the company’s portfolio is a mix of consumer tech companies, and it hasn’t yet focused on climate tech.

With the firm’s new fund, Blisce wants to invest in tech startups that have a positive impact on climate change, especially in polluting industries like materials, food, construction, mobility and energy. The firm is going to put together a dedicated team for this fund, and as mentioned above, has hired Pierre-Edouard Berion to head it.

Berion is a familiar face in Paris’ VC circles. After working for a few years as investment director at Eurazeo (he invested in Zenly, Withings and Vestiaire Collective), he joined Raise Ventures as a partner.

As for Lucie Basch, she already knows the Blisce team quite well, as the firm is an investor in her company, Too Good To Go. She will become a venture partner for the new climate fund — in VC lingo, that means she’ll remain at Too Good To Go and help the fund on the side. Blisce is still raising money for its new fund, so it’s going to be interesting to see how much they manage to raise.

Portuguese VC firm Shilling launches €50M opportunity fund to back growth-stage startups

by with No Comment Tech

Shilling team

Image Credits: Shilling

It seems like it was only yesterday (well, seven years ago!) that I was honing in on the rapid development of Portugal’s growing startup and investment scene. I updated my article in 2021, only to find an explosion of new companies and investors.

Today comes further proof that Portugal is stretching its wings as one of Europe’s freshest and hungriest tech ecosystems: Venture firm Shilling has launched a €50 million fund to support growth-stage startups in its own portfolio and also — crucially — to invest in startups everywhere else. 

The VC arm of Portuguese private equity firm Draycott SCR, Shilling is best known for being an early-stage investor in startups like Talka, Unbabel, Bizay, Uniplaces and Best Tables (acquired by TripAdvisor in 2015).

Shilling’s newest fund, labeled “Opportunity Fund,” will give it extra firepower to support early-stage startups for longer, with investments of up to €5 million for Series A and beyond. According to the firm, over 90% of the fund target was raised at the first close, and the fund has already invested in Shilling portfolio company Coverflex.

Despite having a vibrant startup ecosystem, Portugal has one of the lowest VC investment-to-GDP ratios in Europe — five times lower than the European average, according to Atomico.

This has created a gap in funding for growth-stage startups. Shilling’s Opportunity Fund will be a welcome bridge in that gap.

“We want to be one of the players following our startups over their entire journey, hence this new fund,” Ricardo Jacinto, managing partner at Shilling, told me. “Obviously, we want to keep an eye on new opportunities. That’s the thesis of this fund. […] We don’t want to limit ourselves to only portfolio companies.”

“As the market recovers from post-pandemic stabilization, our new fund will support growth-stage companies as they scale,” Hugo Gonçalves Pereira, a founding partner at Shilling, said in a statement.

Norberto Guimarães, co-founder and CEO at Talka, added, “Shilling is unavoidable in the Portuguese early-stage startup scene. They quickly supported Talka, plugging me into the community after my journey of 12 years in the Bay Area.”

Backing tech founders early has been key to Shilling’s growth as a firm. In 2021, it launched a €55 million ($35.6 million) early-stage fund called Shilling Founders Fund that was backed by just over 35 successful tech founders, as well as European VC, Atomico.

Shilling was founded in 2011 by Pereira, a real estate investor and proptech founder; António Casanova, CEO of Unilever FIMA; Diogo da Silveira, chair & NED in listed and fund-backed European companies; João Coelho Borges, a top PE investor and founding partner at Draycott; and executives Juan Alvarez and Pedro Rutkowski.

Later, the team was joined by entrepreneurs and founders including Miguel Santo Amaro (co-founder of Uniplaces and Coverflex), Ricardo Jacinto, Pedro Ramalho Carlos and Maria Villas-Boas.

Shilling isn’t the only Portuguese venture firm to scale up in recent years. In 2022, Lisbon-based venture firm Indico Capital Partners launched a €50 million climate tech fund, dubbed the Indico Blue Fund. Other leading VC firms in the country include Faber, Armilar Venture Partners, Tocha and Portugal Ventures.

a16z's American Dynamism team launches program to introduce technical minds to VC

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Blake Callahan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund has established a new fellowship program aimed at introducing top engineers and technologists to venture investing, a move that could help the firm identify less obvious sources for VC talent. 

The American Dynamism fund launched in 2023 with the broad aim of supporting companies building in the nation’s interest across hard tech sectors, including manufacturing, robotics, space and defense. From a16z’s new $7.2 billion fund, around $600 million is earmarked for American Dynamism.

The 12-month American Dynamism Engineering Fellows Program will take around three technologists on an investment crash course, with the fellows spending the year learning about venture investing, working alongside the partners to evaluate potential investments, and engaging with the fund’s portfolio of industrial companies. At the end of the program, fellows could potentially join the firm, join a portico, or even decide to start their own company, which is “a win in every scenario,” fund partner David Ulevitch said in a recent interview. 

“We’ve always had a lot of technologists in this firm, but over the last few years, the people that really aggressively try to get jobs at Andreessen Horowitz tend to be more of the finance, banking people,” he said. “But we really like to have strong technologists, and people that think about product and think about the future.”

But this type of person may not think at the outset that investing, or being a startup founder, is necessarily for them. Ulevitch said the program was established as a structured way for technically minded people to explore a career transition. 

“The issue of how do we attract technical people, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time,” he said. “The inbound is not always the people that we are really trying to find, and so this is a way of trying to open and cast a wider net.”

“In investing, you often want the people that seem the least obvious candidates,” he added. 

It’s fairly important that candidates have some level of commercial work experience, like spending a few years at a startup, but standouts who have been pursuing advanced degrees alongside stellar commercial or personal projects could also be suitable, Ulevitch said. The selected fellows should have expertise that intersects hardware and software, and they should be excited about scaling the American Dynamism mission more broadly. 

The American Dynamism team aims to run the fellowship on an annual basis, with the selected fellows based in either San Francisco or New York. Details about the program and a link to apply can be found here.