Gm. AMC, GameStop, and Bed, Bath & Beyond are all outperforming S&P 500 year-to-date.

Memes are back.

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

FUNDING

Resurrection of Adam

By now, you’ve surely heard the news: Adam Neumann is back. On Monday a16z wrote the WeWork founder a $350 million check, its largest ever, to support Neumann’s residential housing company, Flow.

• The backlash was swift: Tech Twitter lit up a16z for plowing more money into the famously reckless founder, especially as minority and women founders battle for a tiny share of the VC pie.

It was disappointing for many to see the hard-partying Neumann granted a second chance. It was also the biggest sign yet that the “cult of the founder” is back in style.

A brief history of the cult

Ahead of its IPO in August 2004, Google set up a two-tier share structure that helped protect founders from being ousted by investors or boards.

The system gave rise to founders like Neumann at WeWork and Travis Kalanick at Uber who both exerted a huge amount of control over their companies before eventually flaming out.

Since their falls, multiple founders of Silicon Valley success stories—including Pinterest, Airbnb, and Medium—have also stepped back from the companies they started. The cult seemed to be losing power…

Until Adam popped back up

“Neumann's comeback shows that the people who direct tech capital still believe the industry's most precious resources are entrepreneurial experience and epic-scale chutzpah,” Axios’s Scott Rosenberg writes.

Optics of the funding aside, Neumann’s Flow has an interesting thesis. It aims to disrupt the rental housing market by buying apartment units and turning them into community-centered living environments.

• In other words, imagine the vibes of WeWork, but in apartment complexes rather than office spaces.

Neumann has already purchased more than 3,000 units in Miami, Atlanta, and Nashville to put the concept into practice.

Bottom line: Between the HBO series and promises to “elevate the world’s consciousness,” it's easy to forget that Neumann founded what is now a $5 billion company. Now, a16z is wagering its largest check ever on the prospect that Neumann can do it again.

REGULATION

TikTok has a new babysitter

Oracle will begin monitoring TikTok’s most prize possessions—its algorithm and content moderation models—to help the app put to rest fears that it feeds US user data to the Chinese government, according to a report from Axios yesterday.

The backstory: US Government officials have been giving TikTok the side eye ever since President Trump was in office, and not without reason.

• In 2020 the Intercept reported that TikTok moderators were suppressing certain political messages while a more recent BuzzFeed report found that Chinese personnel had access to the internal meetings of US TikTok employees.

The agreement with Oracle is part of a larger operation called “Project Texas,”—named after Oracle’s Texas HQ—that hopes to smooth over some of TikTok’s past transgressions by separating its US operations from China.

Zoom out: Having Oracle audit its algorithm is a good PR win for TikTok, but it's less clear how Oracle benefits. While the new agreement does boost the significance of Oracle in the eyes of the US government, it doesn’t necessarily make it a more powerful player in the cloud infrastructure game.

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: If bear markets are good for one thing, it’s discouraging illicit activity—total scam revenue in crypto fell roughly 65% year-over-year in July according to a new report. Plummeting crypto prices naturally make scamming a less profitable endeavor. But as scams are dropping off, hacks and exploits—defined by bad actors exploiting faulty code—are up 58% from the same time last year, highlighting the vulnerability of many protocols.

Story we’re watching: Crypto may not be going to the moon…but NASA is. NASA engineers successfully completed the final tests for its mega-rocket, Space Launch System, clearing the way for it to launch moonward on August 29th. The mission, dubbed Artemis 1, is the first in a series of launches intended to return humans to the moon. The final launch, Artemis III, will send the first woman and person of color to the moon around the middle of the decade.

Rabbit hole: How future generations will remember us (The Atlantic).

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Unity confirmed its merger with ironSource after rejecting AppLovin’s $20 billion takeover bid.

• TikTok introduced its own text-to-image software feature called “AI greenscreen.”

• Apple told employees they’ll have to be back in the office three times a week starting in September.

• The CDC reported that polio has been circulating in NYC for months and poses a threat to the unvaccinated.

THREE LIES AND A HEADLINE

Three of these headlines come from the satirical news outlet The Onion, while one is from a legit news source. Can you separate the BS from real life?

A. “Department of transportation allocates $2 billion to finally make nation look all futuristic and shit.”

B. “Study finds you should talk more, people want to hear what you think.”

C. “Camp counselor selling signed baseball card of former camper Mark Zuckerberg.”

D. “Mar-A-Lago assistant manager wondering if anyone coming to collect nuclear briefcase from lost and found.”

LAYOFFS TRACKER

Notable layoffs this week:

HBO: 70 people (14%)

Sema4: 250 people (13%)

Apple: 100 people

FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we came across that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

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🤖 The highest-rated books on artificial intelligence

🧠 How smart people use second-order thinking to outperform

THREE HEADLINES ANSWER

C. Wonder what Zuck's batting average was.