Walter Frick

Since 2005, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have acquired 385 other US companies, according to PitchBook. Alphabet alone has acquired 185.

For the past several decades, Silicon Valley has undisputedly been the epicenter of technology innovation. An area of about 50 square miles is responsible for generating some of the world’s most prominent companies, including Google and Apple. But the rest of the world is catching up; the share of global venture capital funding going to US companies is declining as new tech hubs are emerging. Companies like Beijing’s Didi Chuxing, Jakarta’s Gojek, and India’s Paytm are prominent examples. Cities outside the US are attracting more funding, generating more unicorns, and creating thriving startup ecosystems.

Venture capital, once a niche asset class, has boomed over the past decade: From 2010 through the end of 2019, the annual number of VC deals nearly tripled. The increase was driven by solid returns over the past 25 years, as well as by rapid technological progress in areas like cloud computing and smartphones.

Jeffrey Bussgang, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, thinks of the startups in his portfolio on a 2×3 matrix. On the vertical axis, he asks, “Do they have cash to last at least 18 months?” He divides the horizontal access by how the pandemic has affected their business: positive, neutral, and negative.

In 2005, an entrepreneur named Steve Blank published a book in which he argued that most startups fail because they don’t understand their customers. He was speaking from experience. Blank had co-founded four startups and advised or worked at several others.

Why do startups fail? On one level, the answer is pretty simple. “Most startups fail because they run out of cash and can’t raise more,” says Tom Eisenmann, a professor at Harvard Business School.

For a Silicon Valley accelerator focused on funding digital technology, Y Combinator has always been stubbornly committed to doing things in person.

It’s strange to imagine it now, but decades before Facebook or Uber came along, Apple was Silicon Valley’s wild child.

The world needs to limit economic activity to allow for social distancing, which will slow the spread of Covid-19. This should be something a prosperous society can do. “Right now we still have plenty of stuff,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote on Twitter. “And if we were to take a one- or two-month pause on building homes or cars, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

Back in January, Quartz asked the forecasters at Good Judgment Inc. to estimate the chance of a United States recession this year. The average estimate was 18%. Last week we posed the same question, to see what effect coronavirus has had on the answer. The forecasters’ average estimate doubled, to 36%.

Quartz’s Walter Frick and Michael Rapoport, author of this week’s field guide, discuss accounting at a crossroads. They talk about the state of the audit industry and how it’s changing, including:

If you had to describe the state of the economy in an emoji, it’d be: 🤷

It was February 2008, and the economic forecasters surveyed each quarter by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia were starting to worry. “The outlook for growth in the first half of 2008 looks much weaker now than it did three months ago,” the Fed wrote, summarizing the survey results. “However, the forecasters are not predicting a contraction.” Year-over-year GDP growth would be a modest 1.8% in 2008, they predicted, rising to 2.8% in 2009. Unemployment would average 5.1%.

Have you ever finished a nonfiction tome that took so long to read you forgot how it started? Or worse, what you were meant to have learned? Reading and retaining dense nonfiction is a skill, especially when it comes to what UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong calls “big, difficult, flawed, incredibly insightful, genius books.”

More than anything, Silicon Valley believes in startups. But that belief may be wavering.

Water scarcity is becoming a chief concern for businesses around the world, but some industries and economies are more exposed to water risk than others. Here are six charts that explain the water economy, and how industry fits into it.

Tens of millions of viewers are tuning in to watch other people play video games competitively, and it’s becoming big business. Global esports revenue is expected to reach $1.1 billion for 2019, according to a report by Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm—mostly from advertising and sponsorships. As esports becomes more popular, it is creating a new kind of sports star, and both the gaming industry and professional sports franchises have taken notice.