I wouldn’t consider myself a denim head by any stretch of the imagination, but I do appreciate a well-constructed pair of jeans. It’s been gratifying to see the heritage movement in men’s apparel birthing (or re-birthing) brands across the U.S. and also bringing small-batch clothing manufacturing back into the spotlight. Brands like Levi’s has found a renewed popularity, and other labels such as 3sixteen, Tellason, Imogene + Willie and many others have made it big on the denim scene.

Going back to the basics has been a huge part of what has made these brands successful, but it’s nice to also see innovation happening in the space. Levi’s, for example, has introduced “Water<Less” denim, which uses 96% less water in the finishing process, saving a total of 172 million liters thus far. Dawn Ellams, a textiles PhD, has taken this one step further with her introduction of “wooden” denim made from the pulp of eucalyptus trees. As Springwise explains, “the traditional method for making one pair of jeans out of cotton requires around 42 liters of water and uses a number of harmful dying chemicals,” whereas Ellams’ new denim can be created with roughly one-fifth of the resources required for a cotton pair and can be colored or given different watches via digital printing. The process is new and still too expensive for mass production, but it should be very interesting to follow as the technology is further developed and refined!

From where I’m sitting, FirstCrush (launched just last week by my friend Melody) seems to fit the profile of successful subscription e-commerce perfectly. They focus on helping you find bottles of wine you’ll enjoy and delivering them to your doorstep once a month! For many folks, a couple bottles of wine every month (whether for personal consumption or for bringing along to parties to share) follows a pretty regular purchase cycle. Furthermore, because the incredible variety of potential purchase options out there and the barriers to understanding what is what, a curated selection of wines seems to be a pretty great idea that can help people figure out what they enjoy and reduce wasted time and money.

If you’re located in New York state and love wine, you should sign up for FirstCrush today! If you want to find out more and meet the founders, you can go to FirstCrush’s beta launch tasting party this Friday the 29th in NYC. Enjoy!

What if there were a way to get cab / black car speed and reliability at a cost much closer to that of public transportation, though? That’s what my friend Winston is doing with Shairporter, a ride-sharing service for cabs and limos, focusing on trips to and from airports in the NYC area. I can’t disclose too much beyond that right now, but stay tuned for the big launch in a few months! You can sign up for the private invite list here.

To read more, check out Gothamist’s coverage and check out pictures from today’s announcements on Citi Bikes’ Facebook page. To suggest a bike share station close to your office or apartment, click here and you can help determine the location of the first 600 bike share stations!

Edit: It looks like the first batch of bike share stations may be close to finalization already. Check out Transportation Nation’s coverage of the Community Board meetings.

Unfortunately, all of the work for me in managing the program’s day-to-day logistics has only just begun. The next twelve weeks will include a Leadership Program with various panels and dinners, face-to-face meetings with VCs and bank CTOs, as well as newly-launched office hours with our all-star group of Entrepreneurs Network mentors. Lots to do, so apologies in advance if the rate of blogging decreases somewhat.

In any case, we have six amazing companies selected for the program this summer, and while I unfortunately can’t tell you their names just yet, keep your eyes peeled! The Investor Day / Demo Day, which will conclude this year’s FinTech Innovation Lab, will take place on July 18th, so stay tuned for the big reveal.

“I am a huge fan of allowing every person, not the just super wealthy and institutions, to participate in the funding of startups. Frankly its a shame that the average Facebook user has not been able to own shares in Facebook during its increase in value from zero to $100bn. The same kind of thing can be said about Twitter and many other of our portfolio companies. The changes to securities regulations in the JOBS bill are fundamental and important and very much needed.“

So if the “accredited investor” requirement was so unfair, why was it even implemented in the first place?  The general idea was to protect the public (who aren’t necessarily sophisticated investors) from being taken advantage of. As it currently stands, though, the JOBS Act has incorporated protections “to help insure that equity crowdfunding of startups doesn’t become a fraud infested sector of the capital markets.”

Now, “regular folks” like you and me can invest in startups, even if we don’t make $200,000+ a year or have over 1 million dollars in assets. Traditionally, startup investors would have to fill out an “Accredited Investor Questionnaire” like the one below, which is an excerpt of the type that my fund fills out for investments I work on. Scroll down to bullets (e) and (f) to see what the restrictions were like for individual investors. Scary, right? Aren’t you glad that the JOBS Act was passed?

Well, with the crazy amount of coverage since Instagram announced it was being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, even people with the very barest amount of interest in the startup / venture world have asked what the big hubbub is about. If the $1 billion price tag were not enough, the media also revealed that just last week a group of investors led by Sequoia also invested in Instagram at a valuation of $500 million, only to exit a week later with a 2x cash-on-cash return! I won’t try and dissect and analyze the deal itself, since that’s already been done ad nauseam, but I’ll take a stab of breaking down IRR, which is one of the primary ways that VCs like Sequoia calculate returns on their investments. Hopefully this will provide some color to those friends asking IRR questions.

The IRR, or “internal rate of return,” is the rate of return / discount rate that makes the NPV of a stream of cash flows equal to zero. You can read in more detail here. In the case of Instagram’s Series B financing from last week, the cash flows would be a $50,000,000 cash outflow (invested amount) and a $100,000,000 inflow (sale proceeds) from the Series B investors’ perspective. Now, a 50% IRR is pretty good. A 100% IRR is fantastic. How does ~500 quadrillion % sound? (That would be 500 plus another 15 zeros). Well, that’s the IRR that the Series B investors received on their investment, assuming April 5th as the day they wired their money to Instagram and  April 12th as the day they get their cash back.

But does a 497,237,713,464,852,000% IRR (to be exact) make any sense at ALL? Yesterday, I was chatting with Edlyn Yuen, an associate at StarVest Partners, and she got the same absurd-sounding number in Excel, too. Hmm. Let’s dig in a little deeper then… As you can tell below, the IRR decreases exponentially as time passes (the graph below in blue looks almost meaningless given the extreme drop). What was a 500 quadrillion % IRR (over a one week span) decreases to a measly 450,000% IRR once you get to a 1 month investment horizon.

By the time your length of investment increases to 3 months, you’re down to a “tiny” 1,500% IRR.

If we then zoom in a little closer and graph the expected IRR assuming a length of investment ranging from 3 months to 1 year, the graph below is what you get. As you can see, the IRR approaches 100% and hits 100% exactly on the 1-year anniversary. That much makes sense to me at the very least — on an annual basis, a 100% return equals a doubling of value (e.g., $50mm to $100mm).

So as you can see, while the 500 quadrillion % IRR seems completely absurd, once you examine how an IRR is calculated, it begins to makes sense, at least mathematically. Practically speaking, though, a quadrillion % still doesn’t make much sense in my head, much less 500. In any case, congrats to the Instagram team, as well as Sequoia, Thrive, Greylock, and Benchmark on a great exit!

So I mentioned last week that I’d be giving a bit of insight into the day-to-day happenings in the life of a young VC, or as my business card would say “Associate.” Now, making an investment is pretty exciting, right? You’re putting money into a company, hoping that all of your analysis (whether in your gut or in Excel) turns ultimately into an exit of some sort, either through an acquisition or IPO. Well, what exactly happens when an exit occurs?

I got my first glimpse of that yesterday, when TxVia, one of New York  City Investment Fund’s portfolio companies, announced that it had been acquired by none other than Google! Congrats to Anil and the rest of the team. Now, I can’t divulge too much in the way of the financial details, which remain closed off to the general public, but hopefully I can shed a little bit of light into the other REALLY EXCITING DETAILS for you!

…it’s funny, though. At least on my end, there wasn’t really anything too different about my day. Sure, I saw a few extra emails in my inbox yesterday morning and had a few discussions with my CEO and General Counsel about the deal, but business pretty much just proceeded as normal. At the end of the day, I calculated our IRR based on the closing docs I received from our General Counsel (sorry, I cannot disclose that number!) and… that’s about it. I went on to finish the summary of an investment memo that was due, prepared some materials for the FinTech Innovation Lab and, well, went about my business as usual. What’ll happen next? Well, I’m sure I’ll have a bit more work to do in the coming days, and the funds will be wired to our account sometime this week, but that will pretty much be that.

Kind of a letdown? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, it’s essentially just a transfer of ownership, right? The real excitement, at least for me, is really in those initial meetings with the entrepreneurs, talking with company management about how their product or service is going to disrupt an industry or change the world. Maybe being removed from direct financial benefit of an exit as a junior investment professional changes the perspective some, but getting the opportunity (in whatever capacity) to help an entrepreneur as they build something out of nothing — now that I can get excited about every day, exit or not!

Now, without further ado, congratulations again to TxVia and here’s to many more successful New York startups in the future!

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Note: I work at a bit of a non-traditional venture firm as you may have noticed, so YMMV. If you’re a junior VC at another firm and get million dollar bonuses at each exit, please comment below with your name and number, and I’ll be sure to contact you ASAP. Also, the above describes a strategic acquisition. If you’re looking for deets on what happens in an IPO, you gotta look for another blog.

I guess it makes some sense, given that junior guys have less experience and insight to offer (on average) compared to someone who’s been in the industry for awhile. Blogs from venture veterans like Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, and Bijan Sabet were very eye-opening for me when I first started exploring the VC world, as were blogs of “rising stars” like Rob Go. But what about the perspective of venture life from someone who’s 25 years old?

It’s kind of funny that I blogged more here prior to making the move to venture capital and post only once every few months now, but hey — now that I’m a bit more acclimated to the new job now, why not pick it up again and provide some perspectives into venture capital from an associate’s point of view?

Now, I’m not claiming by any means that I’ll have thoughts that are as smart or insightful as the folks I mentioned above, but I’m going to shoot for a post a week about the associate life / perspective that will hopefully be entertaining to you all! Apologies to all my readers and subscribers who’ve been left hanging over the past 6-12 months, but I’m going to try and make it up to you. Cheers.

P.S. If there are any topics you’d be interested in knowing about from a junior VC’s point of view, please feel free to post in the comments or contact me.