Lisa Del Ben

Director of Ops @floodgatefund | Ex-Cercano & Vulcan Capital | Former EA @SummitPartners | BA Business Management, Menlo College

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

🎉 Steve Blank (@sgblank), the founder of the Lean Startup movement, is joining @m2jr on Clubhouse this Thurs, 2/25 @ 6pm PT. Mark your calendars!

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@mashadrokova yeah, the hardest bets always look unreasonable before they look inevitable

[Adam Weigand @adamweigand]

Personal update: after 6 incredible years growing @coinbase, I'm joining @tempo as Head of Marketing.

Stablecoins aren't just a future use case anymore. They're becoming core financial infrastructure.

In 2025 alone, stablecoins settled more than $33T in onchain volume, growing 72% YoY. That's a clear signal the way money moves is changing in real-time.

Tempo is building for that future, and I couldn't be more excited to help tell this story with @matthuang, @dwr, @gakonst, and the rest of the recently assembled all-star team.

Onward!

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@singhabhinav yeah, once every bank has one the edge moves up the stack

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

This is the year when the game of two halves became the game of four quarters. And the greatest sport and event was damaged for fistfuls of dollars. Hydration breaks ruin the game’s flow and frustrates fans and viewers. If hydration breaks were solely about player welfare then they would be linked to the temperature in the stadia. It’s a nonsense having a three-minute break in an air-conditioned arena.

Fifa should long ago have established a working party of coaches, sports scientists, national team doctors and Fifpro to agree a set temperature at kickoff, say 25C, which triggers the breaks. That would prove the breaks were for player welfare. At the moment, and to nobody’s surprise, it is widely accepted that these breaks are for US TV to accommodate commercials. Big bucks for the small screen.

Fifa should have thought more about the effect on games and to fan (and viewer) experience when negotiating. Coaches’ desire for a mid-half tactical time-out masquerading as a drinks stop should be resisted anyway. Games have been played for 150 years without needing such intervention. Coaches can shout instructions. And who says that 22 mins and 67 mins is when a coach needs to intervene anyway. It’s nonsense. It’s about money.

Respected and sane footballing voices from Virgil van Dijk to Mauricio Pochettino have spoken out against the breaks. Fifa should listen to them not appear only to listen to the rustle of dollar bills. It’s important that there is resistance to this from all over. Because if we tolerate this, our TV games could be next. BBC can’t do ads, ITV says it won’t follow its US counterparts. But it has been discussed by TV people. It’ll come one day. #FIFAWorldCup.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@MikeBotkin_ yeah, a lot of the loudest advice comes from people selling picks and shovels

[Jason Malefakis @wayojason]

Coworking in NYC before:

- $300/mo membership
- Get a desk, wifi, and thats it
- Pay extra for lunch
- Cowork only 2-3 times a week
- Finds it hard to network with others.

Coworking in NYC now (@WayoWork):

- $102/mo membership
- Lunch comes included
- Makes business connections from 1-1 intro sessions
- Gets extra monitors, a place to work, good wifi, and everything
- Get access to multiple locations with just one membership.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@EndresenHeather love this, the best AI learnings are still getting shared peer to peer

[Erica Wenger @Erica_Wenger]

When labor stops being the source of identity, people will organize around belief instead... the founders who can give people something to belong to are about to become the scarcest asset in the economy

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@mhdempsey lmao this would make venture way more entertaining

[Bruce Booth @LifeSciVC]

With these huge IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI… I'm thinking about a couple possible implications for biotech investing:

1/ Many of the large AUM long-only asset management firms (Fidelity, Wellington, T Rowe, Cap Re, etc) are likely participating in a big way in these IPOs.  Given the size of these offerings, these large funds will likely be investing billions into each of these. Every large investor only has so much capital (from a risk management perspective) allocatable to primary offerings of IPOs in a given period… so will these three suck all the oxygen out of the room for long-only firms' ability to play in biotech IPOs in 2H 2026?  Will the sector be even more dependent on specialist healthcare investors for IPOs for the next few quarters?  Seems likely to me.

2/ Right now these three positions are very large private marks on many big investor’s books.  Most of these firms have limits as to what percentage of their AUM can be invested in private deals… when these three move over to the public side, it immediately changes the “ratio”  in a big way… creating significant “space” for private investing in their portfolios.  Will that bode well for their participation in late stage private deals in biotech?  Maybe... hopefully.

So for the next few quarters... while biotech IPOs may be more reliant on specialists, we might see renewed interest from long-only firms in later stage private biotech deals - helping companies stay private for longer.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@brentlsaunders yeah, speed usually dies in committee

[Dirt Cheap Banks @dirtcheapbanks]

If you go to the South Carolina coast and drive from Myrtle Beach down to Hilton Head, you cover 330 miles of fast-growing, retiree-heavy, tourism-saturated, high-net-worth real estate.

The kind of corridor where second homes go for cash, where the median family income in the Hilton Head MSA is $94,600

and where South Carolina was the fastest-growing state in the country in 2023 and again in 2024-25 (the only state to rank #1 in two of the last three census periods).

Horry County, the heart of the Grand Strand, has been one of the fastest-growing counties in South Carolina for years running.

There are roughly twelve community banks operating along that 330-mile strip.

Most of them you’ve never heard of (unless you live there or are a freak like me)

One of them is the largest community bank by deposit market share in Pawleys Island, the largest in Murrells Inlet, and is top-three in three of the four markets it operates in.

The bank is publicly-traded and valued at a bit less than $200 million

And it's illiquid

Only 200 shares have traded so far today

2,000 trade on an average day

That's only $50k a day

It's one of the newest picks in my community bank portfolio

And just getting a position is its own challenge that most investors don't want to bother with (let alone actually analyzing the stock)

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@kenashley yeah, a lot of firms are quietly underwriting a very different org chart now

[Grant Hesser @GrantHesser]

Here's my assessment of what's going on inside Goldman and Morgan Stanley right about now around the $SPCX IPO.

1) The math isn't mathing for institutional investors to participate at $135/sh in the size they need them to. Research is being heavily pressured by banking to get more aggressive on their estimates/teach-in materials to try to make valuation make sense. It's not working. The biggest brass across the firms are now getting involved - Jamie Dimon & David Solomon are taking meetings - it's all hands on deck.

2) Accordingly, the bookrunners are increasing the % of the deal allocated to retail to 30%. Remember, it's the banks buying the shares from the company and if their largest institutional relationships aren't biting in the size they need them to - they have to find demand somewhere else they're going to be on the hook for the delta between $135/sh and wherever the stock trades multiplied by the number of shares left in inventory. Find the demand - whoever and whatever it takes.

3) Banks are also pressuring the index providers to create forced buying as well across a ton of indices and their associated products. This has worked in some places and hasn't in others (credit to S&P for their backbone here). This will create a large amount of demand but I don't know the math here relative to the float coming public - if anyone has seen smart math here please share.

All and all, this is going to be a fascinating IPO to watch but I have next to zero interest in participating - I suspect I'm in the majority here.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@choffstein @MebFaber @alphaarchitect @michael_venuto love seeing real AUM scale show up for people who kept building

[Mike Annunziata @nunzi46]

Two kinds of early stage rounds today:

Turn A Card (“TAC”) — here’s what we plan to learn with this money that will materially reduce risk

Bet The Farm (“BTF”) — if we’re right this is huge, but if we’re wrong we’re dead

Any raise that’s not one of these is DOA.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@datarade tbh manufacturing burn plus venture pacing is a brutal combo

[Veeraj Chugh @veeraj]

last year we closed an investment round from friends at openai, samsung, and founders fund.

a glimpse of what we're up to below.
more soon.

[Lisa Del Ben @lisadelben]

@edwardlando yeah, they often feel like fake helpfulness layered on simple logistics

[Arfur Rock @ArfurRock]

Mach is really flying.

They've ~$200M of booked YTD, tracking to ~$550M+ for '26, up from effectively $0 '25.

Wouldn't be surprised if there's another large round before EOY.

Congrats to @Mach_Industries!