LPs

“I think a very few percentage of these micro firms are going to produce the type of returns expected. And I think it's going to hit sort of the normal distribution of which, you know, 10 to 20%, you know, have a nice return model. The rest are going to, you kn…”

“Now, listen, we think of, you know, our LPs are, you know, our investors are very important to us, obviously, but I think of them as our shareholders. And if I make my customers very happy and have the best product out there, Then my shareholders are going to …”

“I actually think that there's a lower threshold because people like Jeff, Steve Anderson, Chris Saka, and others showed that you could take a small amount of capital. And actually turn it into meaningful returns. I think the fact that they proved that those ea…”

“LPs are like snowflakes, and everyone's a bit different”

“So many people are deathly afraid of being wrong and alone because that box is the career risk box so that they'll slide over and try to do more things with the crowd. But what happens is when you move towards the crowd, then you take the right and alone box o…”

“What I think most people are doing to deal with lengthening horizons. They're trying to shorten the duration of their portfolios by going to later stage.”

“Time and time again, we've seen funds kind of get attention and get, you know, kind of wildly oversubscribed only because LPs are demonstrating lemming-like behavior. And, you know, there's a favorite bell cow like, you know, Yale or Harvard or Stanford that t…”

“And I think, you know, sitting here 10 years from now, most things that we think of as fund programs today will look more like hybrid programs with, you know, kind of closer ties, partnering more closely with GPs to look at companies rather than being, you kno…”

“The way investors treat LPs gives us a lot of insight into how they treat entrepreneurs. And if they're being heavy handed and arrogant with us, their shareholders, how are they with their customers?”

“I think most LPs are social proof investors. I think that there's a substantial dynamic of you don't get fired for buying IBM. And venture funds are hard to kill. A lot of them should have been killed, but they're 10 to 12 year vehicles.”

“At the high level, I do think that there are substantial issues with LPs investing directly. First and foremost is adverse selection. If an opportunity is available to the LP, why are they being shown this? Is something wrong with the company? Does the fund ma…”

“If there is, at the earliest stages, a company that is High quality with high quality investors coming in. LPs are probably the last in line in terms of getting access to that. So imagine a seed funded company by one of our fund managers, a high quality firm l…”

“I would say that there are definitely some exceptions, but by and large that is still true.”

“I think that some LPs who over time are uncomfortable with Perhaps a 15 year, or some of my VC colleagues have quietly mentioned, maybe the equivalent of a 20 year long bond in venture. You know, those LPs may not be the right ones to go forward in the early s…”

“There isn't good alignment, whether people like it or not, between the entrepreneur, their VC, and the VC, and their GPs, and sorry, and their LPs in many instances.”

“The fund has been oversubscribed very quickly. We were able to select the VC, sorry, the LPs who really understood the model and wanted to get behind it. I'm happy to tell you that, you know, that's well over forty billion dollars worth of capital in the found…”

“Many LPs are not comfortable giving feedback to GPs, and so fund managers may not have a clue how they're being perceived or why they're not a fit with a, you know, institutional manager's portfolio.”

“When GPs come in, I think the mistake they make generally is putting too much in a pitch deck and not limiting and not taking their own advice. They'll tell a company to have a pitch deck with 10 slides in it, And yet they'll show up with a 45 page deck and ex…”

“This has now trained a generation of LPs to be scared to death to cut off funds that aren't performing well, because they could be just around the corner from Facebook. And as a result, a lot of that money that should be going to new and innovative funds gets …”

“It's probably five percent of LPs even want to do smaller funds.”

“The whole industry watched allocations shrink after the liquidity crisis of 2008. If LPs had had a defined exercisable secondary option in their funds. In many cases, they would have pulled it at that point, and it could have been a smoother period for everybo…”

“I think the important thing is you should only do it if it matches your skills and it matches your The relationship and the way you want to work with your founders, right? You shouldn't do it because the industry is doing it. You shouldn't do it because LPs, y…”

“Everyone wins with recycling. It's so good for your LPs. It's additional investment dollars that they're not paying management fees on, and so over the course of a fund, if you take gains and you reinvest it, that's more money that you're investing that lowers…”

“I think consolidation is, is the future. I don't see a lot of first time or second time funds raising their next fund. And it may not be a function of who they are, but rather a very different macro environment and a general understanding by LPs that we just d…”

“I think the majority of LPs have taken the history of how VCs, institutional VCs, A, B, and C reserve and bolted that on to seed, whereas I think seed is a completely different asset class.”

“I know I had written six months in the post that I wrote. I'd probably say even longer. So the pre-marketing is just the casual, like reminder, the casual, Hey, here's what I'm doing. The casual, Hey, what do you think about this? Do you have any feedback? It'…”

“I think many, many partnerships are much more dysfunctional Then you would see from the outside, and there is a lot of, often, tensions between, you would think that partners need to be, you know, you would expect that partners are best friends, and really thi…”

“Because LPs, more than anything else, are suckers for longevity, and they like stability, right? LPs. LPs don't like changes.”

“I think we certainly never give them as a contractual right because once again, back to the founder, they know me, right? They know my partner. They know my Austin, our associate who works with us. You know, they want us around for a reason. They don't necessa…”

“And so, in fact, our cap was one 50. And so it's actually a great story. And I think it was a really good example of How much we care about our entrepreneurs, but there was an entrepreneur who had been an incredible, it is an incredible reference for us. We've…”

“Right now, many, not all, but many of the LPs, their compensation is almost entirely salary. The bonus based on performance doesn't really move the needle for them that much.”

“I think the diversity of fun types. I think we've been artificially constrained by a perception that it's hard to raise a new structure of fun because LPs just kind of, like, amorphously won't like it. I think that's really cut down on the value to be created …”

“It will increasingly become harder to raise subsequent iterations or to scale, and I think you've started to see that with even some groups that have a track record now and have done a pretty decent job struggling to find new LPs on the institutional side to c…”

“We don't track individual partner IRR of individual track partner Performance, and nor do we share it with our LPs when they ask us during diligence.”

“If they're perpetually on the fence, it's probably going to be a no anyway. And so I would rather just Force the answer.”

“And in my experience and several other people I know, we found an inverse relationship between the LPs who are very public about funding diverse managers and those who do so”

“We met 412 LPs in our fundraise, and everyone was as joyful as the first.”

“In terms of stats, I ended up meeting with or contacting 279 potential LPs.”

“My LPs tend to prefer a concentrated portfolio, and so most of my LPs are kind of pushing me in the other direction, which is like, go ahead and take a, take as much ownership as you can in a company, do fewer companies, and if you win with fewer companies, yo…”

“Especially if you're an emerging manager and you're a first time fund, are you going to go sue one of your LPs because they don't pay? The reality is like, you kind of have no leverage. You're just a sitting duck. And if people decide not to pay you, then they…”

“So I don't think that's going to be a major problem. What'll be a major problem is people coming into your next fund, because if they find themselves in a bad economic situation, what they end up doing is cutting commitments to managers that they've had for a …”

“I think that LPs should have mandates where especially those who are endowments and pensions should have mandates that say that since so many underrepresented people are paying into those funds, the funds that are paid out to managers, our percentage has to go…”

“I have a goal for myself to return at least a billion dollars in capital in the different ways that I do. It's not just out of one fund here or one thing there, but a total of a billion dollars returned to LPs and to myself and to our employees over the next 1…”

“Actually, I don't say any of them because I'm concerned about how LPs perceive it and how other VCs perceive it.”

“When I've seen sort of bad behavior or weird behavior, I think it often comes down to the fact that VCs are money managers for other people, and it's a bit the same as you get in kind of middle management in companies, that you get people that are under pressu…”

“I don't think it's just a game of the .one percent. I think if people have been successful as operators or as investors, and they want to go on their own, they can be solo capitalists, and they can raise funds from the outside, because there's a lot of LPs out…”

“Like, I haven't returned a dollar to my LPs.”

“Venture as a venture business is an incredibly long-term business and that your LPs, you're effectively married to them, right? These funds are often 10, 12, 15 year funds. You know, you end up raising multiple funds, and so it's just very important to do busi…”

“Where we all met with our LPs. We said, you know, we're probably not going to deploy any capital. Valuations are going to go down dramatically. Get ready for probably our worst performance in a really long time. And of course, none of that came true.”

“And I swore to myself and to his widow, Elaine, that I would talk about this whenever I had the chance. So whenever I get in front of LPs, whenever I get in front of my portfolio companies, whenever I have the chance to talk about this, I want to just bring it…”

“I've had quite a few LPs signed up to be LPs without ever talking to me.”

“LPs have to continuously buy in the quarters to make sure they get allocation to the companies you invest in. So if you're not an LP in the specific quarter and that's the quarter I make my best investment in, but you're an LP in the quarter before the quarter…”

“There's a lot of nuance here, and I think we're still very early. So I wouldn't FOMO in. I wouldn't worry about missing it. I would be very deliberate about sort of cost averaging in over a couple of cycles. I don't think people need to freak out about it beca…”

“And actually, I think the lockup periods, ten-year lockups, despite the liquidity, I think is actually better for LPs because it is a venture asset class. The returns are extremely asymmetric. And you can generate many multiples on your fund if you're patient.”

“We had a tough fundraise. The market was off. We didn't have a lot of liquidity. And we went to our LPs and said, hey, things aren't great right now. We're really, like, feel like we underperformed the market over the last couple of years. But, and they all sa…”

“That, you know, that it's all about being the best alternative for the founders. The founders are the customers, not the LPs. And the customer's always right. And we work for the founders.”

“If I raise a fund every year and they just are in every fund, they do get the you know, even if one fund is not what he called vintage diversified, they would be vintage diversified if they care about it. I don't care about it, but if they do, you know, they c…”

“Do you know what I think the biggest, most broken thing about LP worlds today is? It's the incentive structures for LPs. I'm speaking to a lot of them who are investing in the biggest brand names, and we don't need to name them, and they have the most egregiou…”

“That's why I always advise managers to like put in place deadlines that are not like tomorrow or next week, but like two to three weeks out, because if they're not going to make a three week out deadline, they're not going to do it.”

“I think that it's an extremely non-competitive space. I'm talking about the LPs now, because generally speaking, like, When you're a VC, you're competing for a deal. If you don't move fast enough, if you're not attracted enough to the, for the founders, they'l…”

“We didn't construct a board with all the LPs that were just like in our favor and just kept telling us we're doing a good job. We put the most skeptical ones on our board, the toughest ones”

“Then I realized that our responsibility to our LPs is not managing their public stock is to be in great companies. And that's why we like to give them the stock, because listen, maybe for some, the right context is to sell the stock right then and there.”

“I think it's a bad idea for venture capitalists typically for a variety of reasons. One is skill set. Second thing is most LPs do not in fact want that. They're hiring Venture as an alternative asset class.”

“I think we produced the most liquidity for LPs or one of the two most liquid, most distributions over the last two years of any fund on the planet.”

“Like I'm not raising now, but I meet five LPs a week.”

“I push back on LPs like you're looking for these check the boxes and like all GPS aren't going to fit into these perfect boxes of working in venture and, you know, doing a spin out, whatever it may be, or having a great angel track record, because they were al…”

“When you ask LP for their introductions, they may give you one or two if they're really nice. Most of them are going to be like, okay, cool. And they'll never get back to you because they don't have the time. It's not my job to find the people in my network fo…”

“I think the biggest thing that managers miss is they say that I need more LPs. And I say, well, go to your existing LP base and say, can you give me three names that you think would be really well aligned that you will vouch for me to. And people don't leverag…”

“When people send cash back, they feel obligated to then return cash back for the next funds. It's very difficult for the LP to be fair on them. To get three X funds returned, and then go, thanks Kyle, not coming back for the new one. It's very hard to do.”

“When we've made money for people, you have a lot of more latitude on how you can invest money. So you've got. The freedom to do whatever you want without people breathing down your neck.”

“I think on the LP side, the sin was going along with fund size escalation and allowing and enabling those firms to allocate within those funds. So I believe like In having separate vehicles for separate separate activities, because that's the best governor. An…”

“Managers are going to get dropped. Don't get me wrong. Like it's going to be brutal. Right. But they're not going to not remain committed to the asset class.”

“With regards to track record, in the past, TVPI or paper markups, they were enough. Now, there is a much greater focus on DPI, which is returned capital to investors.”

“Given they've already invested in your fund, they already believe, and so, 90% of them will come back with three names and make those intros.”

“This does not prove you are a good seed investor, but it merely shows you have access to series B and series C investments. These are very different things, and actually can only serve to discredit you often, as it shows a little bit of naivety.”

“If you have not worked together as a team, the LPs that you are raising from will inherently view this as a massive red flag and label it team risk.”

“LPs invest in lines, not dots. Especially for institutional LPs, it is so rare that an institution will meet you and invest in you without an existing relationship, and without having followed your work before.”

“Many VCs do not like to introduce other managers to their LPs. They view it as competition. This is moronic.”

“In terms of how I think about relationship building with LPs, I always meet two new LPs every week. Two new LPs every week. I then ensure with every quarter, I have a check-in with them, and ensure that they each have a quarterly update. I email them personall…”

“I made two crypto investments in the Q four and my LPs were like, what are you doing?”

“I think if you've got the right LPs, they've seen enough in this business to understand that generating DPI through pressure isn't the best long-term outcome for the, for them and for the GPs. And then existing LPs have more data to evaluate progress and under…”

“The LPs we ended up with were all LPs who were excited about equal partnerships. The ones who passed on us were ones that wanted a single key mat, like this notion of, well, it's great to have multiple GPs, but at funds under a hundred million dollars, we real…”

“Unfortunately, I think that is gonna be the comeuppance that a bunch of funds suffer. LPs are gonna say no.”

“Everyone in the ecosystem is incentivized and able to maintain sort of pretend valuations. Meaning the investors want to keep their marks where they are. Their LPs actually want them to keep their marks where they are because they don't want to look bad. The c…”

“I think what you'll see is smaller investment sizes in the managers that they like. In the ones they really like, they'll just stay the same instead of growing. And in the ones that are on the fringe or in their, you know, respective penalty boxes, as you may …”

“Showing DPI is going to become more and more important. Mostly because LPs will struggle to evaluate what true TVPI is”

“If it truly is on invested capital for some of these growth funds, then I think LPs are fine being patient and respecting the discipline of the manager. If it's on committed, that becomes a more problematic scenario”

“I think if you wait around and have four or five funds and have returned no capital, you're actually introducing organizational risk from an LP standpoint.”

“That they get rampant adverse selection and oftentimes pushed into fee bearing SPVs that even further dilute their end of day return.”

“The denominator effect is effectively when you have both a public and a private book, the public side has gone down more significantly. The private side has come down, but not at the degree or the speed that you've seen the public side go down. And what you're…”

“I think that it will be a hard time for subscale seed stage funds without a differentiated strategy to persist. I think like it was not hard to raise 10 to fifty million dollars for a couple years and it just will become more because LPs are going to become mo…”

“But like, really, I think most LPs, they spend like 90% of the time on the deck. And the track record, and that's all there is.”

“All of our LPs were basically investing two to one from the seed fund to the opportunity fund.”

“Just close as soon as possible, like, then they, then LPs can take you seriously because you have a fund and you're investing.”

“And this close that we were supposed to do in March, everyone who had already committed, including people who had signed, backed out.”

“I don't think so. I know that that's happened in the past. I don't just, I just don't see it happening this cycle. And probably if it were to happen, it would have already happened.”

“All the emerging managers that have come to the game over the last couple of years, like we were all fighting for so much capital with each other. Like a lot of those doors are now closed.”

“A lot of LPs Big, at the bigger LPs, they're compensated based on paper markups too. This is less well understood. They're compensated. This drove crazy. Where did all this unicorn explosion come from? People don't understand that the cash had to come from som…”

“Yeah, look, I think that there's, especially in a first fund, there's a handful of LPs around the world, at least that I know of and have met, who are truly independent thinking, who will truly raise their hand and say, we're willing to do a first time fund, a…”

“We had LPs who did, I don't know, 30, 40 references that we heard about on, on us each.”

“Sometimes other folks forget that LPs are not in the same business of risk taking the way that GPs are.”

“There is a very long history of looking at venture returns, which says if you're not in the market, you just don't know how to call the exit, so you have to be consistent about committing.”

“I think there's been many conversations with LPs suggesting GPs slow their roll.”

“Somebody who, when you call them and you say, why'd you invest in this fund, and they say, oh, I'm only here for the direct deals, I don't care about the return as much. It's not that it doesn't matter, it's just, they're not doing it for the fund return, they…”

“If you skip a year and you skip a year on the best managers, they're not going to take you back.”

“Well, I know a lot of LPs that will ask their managers, and then go back home and take another 20 to 25% off the top, because there's things that nobody knows.”

“If you have a fund that's, I don't know, many billions, you're going to have a number of GPs that are making significant dollars, assuming it's spent Not spent on platform and other things. But if you can make that kind of money without even returning the fund…”

“So I think those institutional fund ones from day one will have a much easier time raising fund two, because most LPs have been in the venture business for a while, know that there is only so much you can show in two to three years of work. So barring somethin…”

“There is a class of LPs that need to write very large checks. Those are vehicles that work for that fund size. We also have to understand, I mean, I know you get this, but it's, I think sometimes other folks forget that LPs are not in the same business of risk…”

“The other thing we're seeing in this market is people are unstapling their funds because a number of LPs felt dragged into it”

“I think the numbers will tell you if you ask different LPs, if you can get three or four funds in a row with strong DPI, that is world class.”

“LPs are moving away from the sub hundred million dollar funds with little track record and little data. In a lot of cases, given the size of their check, it's not worth their time for the risk profile attached. At the same time, LPs are moving away from the bi…”

“First and most importantly, despite what you read on Twitter, LPs do remain open for business.”

“We've seen discounts from our data, either in full or as a strip sale, at as much as 70 to 80% off.”

“I don't think many crypto funds are getting raised. And I think LPs are going to get a little smarter and do more diligence and not just you know, deploy You know, like crazy into you know, fund managers that don't really have any unique insights or defined st…”

“Well, I do think there were a lot of VCs with subpar returns that were still raising their third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh funds. That is very unlikely going to happen in the future. So I think you're the, sorry, VCs that were doing that from LPs. And so …”

“It is actually, they're generally not happy when someone in the fund is like also a CEO, but they should be because that fund's going to end up doing so much better. You're going to get into better deals, et cetera.”

“One of the things that changed the last four or five years is LPs wanted to put more and more money into angels and micro funds that performed.”

“Some seed funds won't be able to raise another fund given the vintage we just left. We're hearing that from LPs”

“I don't think it's like there's going to be a massive retreat also because innovation is exciting and it will always be, and this is at the heart of it. And Long-term such a believer in it, but I think you're gonna see at least a little bit of a reshuffling an…”

“They've been over allocated to venture. The liquidity cycle isn't really there. They're nervous about these vintages.”

“If you're asking me, you're raising a fund, I think you don't want to have too many LPs, but you also want to have diversity. So I think probably max out ideally at least at scale at call it like 20% would be a lot.”

“Emerging managers for the last four years thought it was so much easier. Every emerging manager promised their LPs eight X net.”

“And I would say picking vintages from the LP side is, is really hard. The, you know, the, in my opinion, right? Like the right approach is pick a manager and pick managers and manager selection right now is more important than ever and invest across those kind…”

“We try to stay independently minded, right, and I think the more you talk to other LPs, the harder that is to do.”

“Two years ago everyone wanted to do lots of late stage and solo capitalists and crypto, and then, you know, a year later they all think it's dead and don't want to do that ever again. I think most of those things will come back.”

“The tension there, right, is the top VCs have scarce capacity relative to, You know, their fund size relative to the universe of LPs who might like to invest there's a big mismatch there, right? And so I think LPs often feel reticent to criticize people too ha…”

“Realize that fundraising, especially fun ones, can take time, and you have to be patient. 12 to 18 months is fine. People not meeting with you for a couple months is fine. People taking, you know, months if not sometimes a half a year to reach a decision is fi…”

“I think to your point, though, that the 10, 12% being good enough, I think that's exactly why Andreessen respectfully will continue to thrive and raise billions and billions of more dollars, because compared to the six or seven percent net that they're getting…”

“There's a lot of demand for unadulterated early stage venture capital, you know, being practiced by experienced people with a track record. And a lot of the very best people with those track records, you know, are within aircraft carriers now, and the LPs are …”

“As a VC, I constantly pander to founders and to LPs.”

“Most LPs probably aren't going to be in the same job when that feedback comes. So they're more worried about deploying than they are about what happens 15 years down the line when, you know, when the performance data is, is actually in.”

“I'm not all the way there yet to say that, that actually it's a good thing, but I do think there are situations in which there are different ways to optimize for those top one percent companies. One is to do it through the best primary managers. One is to do i…”

“A lot of issues are so-called principal agent problems. Meaning the individual is not aligned with the kind of the, ultimately with the, you know, with the financial interests of the LPs, because like you're a junior person, you're afraid and you're, you know,…”

“All investors are sheep. End of story. Like, I don't want to pick on LPs, like LPs are no different than VCs. They're no different than retail investors.”

“Everyone's getting a mulligan. Everyone is getting, the LPs have decided they just, there's no point in being a critic for your, A hundred X deals in 20, 21. We're gonna more be a critic for your hundred X AI deals in 20, 24, but the 20, 21 deals are behind us…”

“No, because your fiduciary responsibility legally is to your investors who gave you money. Is the guy who manage money for a fire track, you know, fire, you know, fighters, or who manage money for the teachers, You're, they give their pension money to you. You…”

“I think it's a permanent loss of capital issue, actually, and that they actually have significantly impaired books that they just don't know yet.”

“I think for entrepreneurs and for LPs, right, size of fund, check in company versus size of fund tells you everything. Everything.”

“Worst question LPs ask, and I get in trouble for this, is, What themes do you like?”

“One of the best piece of advice we got was build a diverse set of LPs and not in terms of the institutions you just described Fund to fund family office you know endowments and foundations, but people that, you know, think differently and think independently.”

“Even when I started fundraising, I thought the duration of a fund was 10 years, and I was surprised to learn that many of the LPs said, we rarely see closed funds before 15 years.”

“We had some LPs say exactly the same advice, which was one of our more surprising moments from our fundraise where some of the LP said, you know, listen, it's that important that you're in some of these brand deals to be able to establish yourselves and don't …”

“Once the stock is public, we felt that we have lost our entire edge in trying to Manage that investment. And I think as early stage investors, our job is to then leave that decision to our LPs.”

“Venture is not sitting in a nice office with borrowed power of LPs and playing like in old Caesar's times, thumbs up, thumbs down.”

“No, I think most, you know this cycle, because the cycle in VC evolution is like horribly, horribly slow, because it also loops back to LPs. They don't get to act on their own.”

“If we had sold them all at lockup, we would have returned two billion dollars less to our LPs.”

“What's interesting, and this just is like totally coincidental, if we had sold all of our shares at peak price of whatever, whenever the peak price proposed for that stock, we would have made two billion dollars more for our LPs.”

“By the way, without good performance, you can have none of it, but I can tell you that people, here's the thing though, people want the nice guy, the good guy, the person who communicates to win. So like, if you have a bad vintage or two bad vintage funds, the…”

“There's just a lot of, like, I think a lot of people in this industry are very complacent. All of us as GPs, Need to do a better job getting money back to LPs and figuring out how to do it.”

“Well I would tell you that we have two customers. Founders, but more importantly, LPs, because if you do not have LPs, you do not have a business.”

“I also think like LPs should spend more time talking to companies of portfolios that failed, like actually talk to the ones that didn't go well, or like were the one X's to find out what is the person really like to work with. Like the ones that work really we…”

“I believe a great question that people don't ask, that they should ask. Any manager who is around, who's been around 10 plus years, hey, in September of 21, September 30th of 21, how much unlocked stock did you have in your portfolio? And let's say September, …”

“So like, we run our business trying to figure out how do we have 97%, how do we keep up 97% gross dollar retention, not net, gross, With LPs.”

“One of the things I admire about Sequoia is that their meeting rooms, I think, are named after their LPs.”

“I don't think someone's going to say, you know, Tomo Bravo, one of these guys, you're an idiot forevermore. Because you did that dumb thing, right? They're probably not. They're going to say, Ooh, that funds up. Now you put two funds back for our conversation.…”

“An LP saying I'll do founders fund because they got these returns and 10 other funds, they'll be just like founders fund. That sentence doesn't make sense. They won't be just like founders' funds because They're not the same people with the same approach.”

“It won't stop because the venture guys will be mature. It won't stop because the founders will kind of be more careful. It won't even stop because the LPs will stop. It will stop because the LP's bosses, the overall CIOs will stop allocating capital to venture…”

“The world you really suffered is if you don't perform. And if you do perform, no one gives a damn if you're small, medium, and large, you know, right.”

“One, everyone got their distribution planning wrong, their cash planning wrong. That's what happened in the industry. This is even pre Trump, pre everything. This is conversations I had late last year with LPs is we just, we, we're cool with our paper returns.…”

“I think there is one thing if you're a rich investor and you play with only other people's money, there's a different thing if you're a rich investor and you're investing your own money. So I think it's a question of alignment and hopefully we'll talk more abo…”

“Sophisticated LPs invest with any manager for at least three to four funds, and they know that is the optimal way for them to capture that alpha because it's really hard to be timing the market, as we all know.”

“Yeah, it's a big win, but hey, we also lost. Four hundred million dollars of their money over here.”

“We stopped distributing shares because LPs blame you if they hold it.”

“Rules of thumb, our heuristics are in place because across cycles, they've been proven to be correct. And my guess is some part of this trend makes total sense. And some part of it, you look back after next down and turn and say, oh yeah, that's why we had tha…”

“It'll still be the idiosyncratic headwinds of there's just no capital coming back from venture, right? That's the headwind to the asset class for LPs re-upping today.”

“I think certain LPs choose to just not even think about it, frankly.”

“Because a lot of the LPs will have their public sleeve and their private sleeve. You give them stock, they'll sell it. And it's like programmatic for them.”

“The frothiest sign is now LinkedIn LPs are bragging about their returns on LinkedIn LPs. When LPs are start bragging about their returns to me that that's the most, 20, 21 moment I've seen when LPs are LPs who are usually hide behind the wizard of Oz curtain a…”

“My LPs have no rights to sell at all. Like literally nothing. There's no exceptions for, you If you're struggling or if you're, or, it's just, I'm shocked because a lot of the stuff is LP friend. This one is absolute. You have no rights to sell.”

“For the first three funds, you know, there's no DPI. And then you return a shitload of DPI, and then LPs go, mm, but are they really hungry anymore? Cause they've made a lot of money.”

“We're like, let's constrain our fund sizes. Let's be careful about what we do. So we don't get too over our skis, where we can easily weather a crash, and LPs aren't going to go fleeing once there's a crash, because we've been very careful with our capital, an…”

“I don't think Ravi or Hamant or even Ben and Mark at this point, I don't think that they can go to LPs and say, hey, we're going to get you five X net on that.”

“I'm going to do my thing, and if it works for them, fine, and if not, they can opt themselves out, and some of them have, and it's fine. Good people opted out, and it's fine. I'm not going to do things differently.”

“By the way, from the LP perspective, diversification at the level of the GP makes no sense, because they have multiple GPs, so, so the diversification gives nothing to LPs.”

“But right now, there's been a drought of liquidity for most LPs for a long time, five, four, five years.”

“Because of that, I think there is, I would say too much focus even, but understandably on DPI, and where, you know, people hardly talked about it three years ago, and now some LPs, oh, it's just DPI. It's just DPI. We don't believe anything.”

“And that's exactly why I don't tell LPs anything in terms of what I'm going to do, because I feel that if I tell LPs something, I would feel too committed to that specific strategy, which I may have thought it was the right strategy, but then there's a situati…”

“I told my LPs and COVID I'm not doing this. I'm not doing any more AGMs. I'm not standing up there with like, here's the numbers. I'll go talk to you. Like I'll drop by your office, but I'm done with this performative. All day circus of an AGM. It's not that I…”

“At some point, investors are going to see the same company 20 times a month, and LPs is, is, is not going to pour a lot of money, and I get it.”

“LPs want money back, and the people that stay in, they're gonna be in business 1015, 20 years from now, are people that will continue to give money back to their investors.”

“When LPs go to the biggest venture funds in the world, and private equity funds, and say, we're not investing in your next fund until you get liquidity in these names.”

“If you go forward IRR at every liquidity opportunity is lower Then what you are basically promising your LPs or what you think your fund should have. I think you should sell. I think you have an obligation to LPs to at least sell.”

“Most VC pitches look the same. What you want to do is dig one level deeper and talk to the founders themselves and understand for each of the last five companies that they're invested in, why did this founder pick this firm?”

“If the safe part of the business takes some significant hits, it, you know, it's definitely going to reduce the appetite for risk.”

“I speak to a lot of LPs now, and do you know what, honestly, we can say what we want. They've gone back to wanting TVPI. They've gone back to wanting big numbers. And yes, they want DPI, of course, they always want DPI. But they are still very impressed by TVP…”

“A lot of them, like, have minimum size checks now, so we're too small for quite a few of them. It's like, if I can't put fifty million dollars to it, and I think there's, it just reflects the inflation of the entire environment, and there are a bunch that real…”