Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, September 19

• Why did Postmates hire Silicon Valley’s most famous bankers only to raise cash from its existing investors? Back in March, Recode reported that delivery startup Postmates had hired Qatalyst, the famed Silicon Valley investment bank known for helping internet companies find acquirers. But six months later, Postmates still hasn’t been sold. Instead, Postmates will likely raise an investment of at least $100 million, TechCrunch first reported and Recode has confirmed. What is weird, however, is where Postmates’ new money is coming from: Its existing investors, led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, instead of a new investor Qatalyst was hired to find (if it was going to be an investment and not a sale). Huh? Let’s back up and replay this sequence of events to see if we can find the logic. First, Postmates hires Qatalyst to help it explore selling the company or raising money from new investors. Qatalyst bankers go out and talk to a bunch of would-be acquirers and would-be investors but don’t find a deal. So Postmates’ current investors decide to pony up a bunch of new money instead because, really, what is the alternative when you’re backing a fast-growing but money-losing company that you think may still have home-run potential? This means one of the following scenarios is true. Either A) Postmates thinks its business is more attractive than would-be acquirers or new investors do, or B) Qatalyst didn’t do its job well, or C) both of the above. 

• Rise, Fall, Redemption in Alibaba’s Two Years Since IPO:  Two years ago this month, the listing of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. set off a 36 percent surge that lifted the Chinese Internet company past Facebook Inc. by market value. The gains didn’t last and the stock went on to tumble through 2015 as sales growth slowed along with China’s economy. Revenue growth has accelerated this year, and so too have the shares, sending Alibaba ahead of Tencent Holdings by value.

• AngelList Braces for Rainy Days as Startup Seed Funding Falls: AngelList is preparing for winter. The company, which runs an online portal connecting entrepreneurs with private investors, is assembling a “rainy day” fund and exploring new businesses as the market for investing in young startups slows. Naval Ravikant, the chief executive officer and co-founder of the San Francisco startup, said he’s looking outside Silicon Valley to keep the money flowing in a downturn. He aims to secure commitments from sovereign-wealth funds, endowments and other investors around the world to invest $1 billion through AngelList in the coming years. Last year, China’s CSC Venture Capital, the U.S. arm of private-equity firm China Science & Merchants Investment Management Group, committed $400 million, he said. “If there’s a cash crunch and valuations come down drastically, then that’s when you want to be investing,” said Ravikant, a prolific seed investor who made early bets on Uber Technologies Inc. and Twitter Inc. “That’s what raising this institutional money is about. It’s our rainy day money.”  The rapid rise of AngelList coincided with a startup boom. The website has facilitated seed investments by mainly wealthy Americans in more than 1,000 startups, as well as funding for some later-stage companies, including Cruise Automation and Dollar Shave Club, which were each acquired this year. AngelList typically takes a 5 percent cut of the profit from each investment made through its platform, which it collects once a startup gets bought or goes public. It also plays the role of investor—through a $20 million fund, which it recently exhausted, and a newer $35 million fund.

• Want to Find Fulfillment at Last? Think Like a Designer: You’re going to learn how to find a fulfilling career. You’re going to learn how to better navigate life’s big-moment decisions and kill your “wicked problems” dead. How? By training yourself to think like a designer. That, anyway, is the premise of “Designing Your Life,” a class taught at Stanford University (the school’s “most popular class,” according to Fast Company magazine) as well as the just-published book that grew out of it, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life” (Knopf). The two men who created the class and wrote the book are Silicon Valley veterans, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. They believe they have hit upon a system to help you deal with almost any challenge. But everything else? The two professors claim that you can design an amazing life in the same way that Jonathan Ive designed the iPhone. They say the practices taught in the class and the book can help you (in designing-your-life-speak) “reframe” dysfunctional beliefs that surround life and career decisions and help you “wayfind” in a chaotic world through the adoption of such design tenets as bias-for-action, prototyping and team-building. After nine years of teaching their secrets to future Google product managers and start-up wunderkinds, Mr. Burnett and Mr. Evans are opening up the curriculum to everyone. “What do I want to be when I grow up?” and “Am I living a meaningful life?” aren’t only subjects for late-night pot-fueled dorm hangouts, the men said.The book includes things that are not in the class, like what Mr. Burnett and Mr. Evans call “anchor problems” — overcommitted life choices that keep people stuck and unhappy. A common mistake that people make, they said, is to assume that there’s only one right solution or optimal version of your life, and that if you choose wrong, you’ve blown it.