Welcome to a weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home, I'm Brian McCullough.

Thank you all for indulging my quick vacation, as it were last weekend weekend but let's get right back into it.

While I talk about big round raises and startups and venture all the time we haven't

really done a deep dive into where venture is at. all the in this case, CrunchBays, Jason Rowley. Today, the state of venture in 2019, and we especially

get into the modern phenomenon of mega rounds, even hyper-jiant rounds, raises of $250 million or more.

Those never used to happen, and they happen all the time now.

We just talked about one of those just this week.

Soft Bank contributes to them all the time.

How has that changed the landscape?

And how has that created or influenced the unicorn ecosystem that is currently being harvested as it were.

My thanks to Jason Rally for a great conversation.

So let's just start with where venture is at the moment I think like 2018 broke like all time records in terms of I guess

maybe dollar figures and things like that. But I don't know.

But, sorry?

And deal volume and dollar figures.

But because I get your guys' newsletter every morning,

I believe that at least in Q1 for 2019 we're down a little bit.

Yeah, it kind of depends on which end of the market you're looking at.

If I had some numbers, I would love to show you.

But, so like, at the end of, so Q4, 2018,

you know, we saw about 92.5 billion dollars or thereabouts invested globally in

private technology enabled companies with high growth potential.

...