Climate negotiators try to solve a math problem at COP26. As the U.N. climate summit enters its second week, government officials are trying to find new ways to achieve emissions cuts, The Wall Street Journal reports. The problem: Commitments made during COP26 so far don’t come close to helping avoid the worst effects of global warming.
Rivian raises the stakes for its market debut. The electric vehicle maker raised price expectations for its I.P.O., which could value the company at more than $65 billion. That would make Rivian worth nearly as much as Ford — which outfought G.M. to invest in the start-up — when it goes public as soon as this week.
The concert industry reckons with a deadly festival. After eight people died at the Astroworld music event in Houston amid a crowd surge, questions emerged about legal liability, including for the organizer, Live Nation. City officials had expressed concerns about crowd control and the exuberance of fans after the pandemic hiatus.
Exclusive: Early Vision Fund exec is leaving for General Catalyst
Deep Nishar, one of the top investors at SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund, is joining the venture capital firm General Catalyst in January, The Times’s Maureen Farrell reports. His departure follows several other senior Vision Fund partners over the past two years, including Jeff Housenbold, Michael Ronen, Colin Fan and Ervin Tu. (Nishar said in September that he would leave SoftBank at the end of the year.)
Nishar was one of the first executives Masa Son hired to rebuild SoftBank in Silicon Valley after scaling back in the U.S. following the dot-com bust. Nishar, one of the Vision Fund’s most senior leaders, stood out as one of the few whose bets paid off as the fund reeled from underperforming investments in WeWork and others. Big hits include his investments in the health care companies Guardant Health and 10x Genomics. Despite announcing his departure, “Masa and I continue to talk every day,†Nishar said in an interview.
At General Catalyst, Nishar will go after big multidisciplinary ideas, including those at the intersection of technology, health care and life sciences, said Hemant Taneja, General Catalyst’s managing partner. Taneja’s attempts to recruit Nishar came over years of long walks around Silicon Valley, even before he joined SoftBank in 2015. Now, he’s got his man.
