Dear Term Sheet readers,
What an immense pleasure it’s been. After five incredible years, today is my last day at Fortune. I’m leaving to build my weekly newsletter The Profile into a standalone business. Right now, it features a compilation of longform profiles on interesting people and companies, but I believe it can grow to be much more.
I was barely 23 years old when I stepped into Fortune’s offices for the first time in 2014. One of my goals for that first year was to read Term Sheet (then authored by Dan Primack) and understand 10% of its contents. I’m not joking when I tell you I barely knew what a venture capitalist did, how deals were structured, or even what a term sheet was.
At that point in time, I had only written a few general news stories and worked on Fortune’s social media strategy. There was no fire in me to learn about the crazy, complex world that is Silicon Valley. Until 2017.
That was the year I grew beyond what I thought possible. I had been helping my predecessor Erin Griffith compile the deals in Term Sheet, but when she left Fortune, I was presented with a fork in the road: Do I raise my hand to take over this beast of a newsletter or do I lay low and continue life as a person who never had to wake up before 7 a.m.?
I decided to go for it. And I’m lucky to have worked in a place with colleagues who not only encouraged me to do it, but cheered me on every step of the way.
In the early days of Term Sheet, I would wake up at 4:30 a.m. with the crippling daily anxiety of not knowing what to write about. I would look up the definitions of more VC jargon than I care to admit. “WTF is ‘dry powder?’” was a memorable one.
I’m a highly anxious person, but perhaps my greatest strength is that I’m even more stubborn. And if I feel insecure about a certain topic, I research, obsess, and ask dumb questions until I gain a basic understanding of it. Maybe that’s why working on Term Sheet was a good fit for me … and maybe that’s why I’ve decided to start from zero yet again.
Fortune has been my home for the last five years. It’s the place where I grew up, both personally and professionally. I owe a massive thank you to the people who helped me reach this point: Heather Muse and Alan Murray for hiring me and seeing potential in my work, Pattie Sellers for giving me the chance to write an article when that wasn’t my job, Adam Lashinsky for patiently editing my first magazine feature, and Andrew Nusca for encouraging me to always aim higher. And of course, this newsletter wouldn’t be possible without Lucinda Shen and Karen Yuan, who meticulously make sure that Term Sheet arrives in your inbox every morning.
I’m proud of the work I’ve done here — from the Kleiner Perkins feature to the profile on investor Jeff Jordan to the dozens of interviews conducted with dealmakers in the tech world. All in all, I’ve written a total of 1,300 articles in my five years at Fortune.
But I’m most proud of the amazing community that Term Sheet has built. This newsletter has never felt like a one-way channel of communication because none of you were shy about hitting the “reply” button on a daily basis, letting me know your opinions, criticisms, and constructive feedback (including when I committed “an egregious written abuse” of the English language). I’ll miss this.
Who will take over this newsletter? My colleague Lucinda, whose voice you already know from the numerous times she’s written Term Sheet. Lucinda’s smart, curious, enthusiastic, and a relentlessly hard worker. I hope you’ll extend her a warm and kind welcome because I’m certain she’ll do an excellent job. You can reach her at lucinda.shen@fortune.com.
I’ve had some of the most thought-provoking, memorable conversations with you all, and I hope they continue. You can sign up for The Profile and reach me at polina@readtheprofile.com. Thank you again, and I’ll talk to you soon :)
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Ada, a Canada-based developer of a chatbot platform, raised $44 million in Series B funding. Accel led the round, and was joined by investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark, Version One, Leaders Fund and Burst Capital.
- Mya Systems, a San Francisco-based conversational AI platform for hiring teams, raised $18.75 million in Series C funding. Notion Capital led the round, and was joined by investors including Emergence Capital, Foundation Capital, Cisco Investments and Workday Ventures.
- Quantum Machines, an Israel-based developer of hardware and software for the operation of quantum computers, raised $17.5 million in funding. Avigdor Willenz and Harel co-led the round, and were joined by investors including TLV Partners and Battery Ventures.
- Honorlock, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based online proctoring service, raised $11.5 million in Series A funding. Defy Partners led the round.
- Mainframe Industries, a Finland-based developer of cloud-native games, raised €7.6 million ($8.1 million) in Series A funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, and was joined by investors including Riot Games. Existing investors Maki.vc, Play Ventures, Sisu Game Ventures, and Crowberry Capital.
- Spectro Cloud, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based enterprise cloud-native infrastructure company, raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Sierra Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including Boldstart Ventures.
- Novi, a San Francisco-based third party clearinghouse that helps brands and suppliers share information, raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Defy Partners.
IPOs
- Thai Life Insurance, the country’s third largest insurer by assets, is seeking bankers for a potential IPO raising $700 million by the end of 2020, Bloomberg reports citing sources. Read more.
