Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2029
Chirls: 75% of 2020-2021 vintage VC funds won't return principal
“If you think about the twenty-twenty-one vintage, I think a one X fund will be top quartile. I think returning your money is, I think returning your LP's money on almost any timeframe will be top quartile. So in that sense, probably 70, I would guess 75% of th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chirls: Junior partners at big VCs are compensated on deployment speed
“Your junior partner at these big firms, sort of like a VP at Goldman, they are compensated and promoted based on money velocity, not money returns.”
Opinion
Chirls: Large VC firms operate like transactional Wall Street banks
“Basically all the same people from Lehman showed up. Highly transactional, all about the money. There was no real art or creativity to it. It was very private equity, like finding the company, dressing it up a little bit, handing it off to the next guy. And I …”
Assertion Partly supported
Chirls: VC is a Ponzi scheme guaranteeing 20% fees regardless of performance
“The venture Ponzi is you raise a fund, you take two percent management fees for 10 years guaranteed, it does not matter how well that fund does, and you've taken 20% of that fund and put it in your pocket.”
Insight
Chirls: Common and preferred shares yield identical returns in outlier startup wins
“There's a few in every fund that really matter, at least matter from a financial performance perspective. And when they really matter, the common is, is exactly the same as the preferred, is exactly the same as the preferred two, the series A, they're all wort…”
Insight
Chirls: Legal agreements cannot prevent VCs and founders from screwing each other
“My experience over the last 10 years, there's the legal agreements don't matter. There are always ways for an investor to quote unquote screw over a founder or for a founder to screw over an investor. It goes both ways. And the legal, the illegal agreements do…”
Disclosure
Chirls: Asylum Ventures Blacklists Untrustworthy VCs Permanently
“Now there's many folks that I will never work with again. And maybe that doesn't matter to them, but like I think it will. There will be a company, there will be an opportunity where someone wants to work with a company that we work with we'll never work with …”
Opinion
Chirls: Defense tech is popular among mega VCs due to capital inefficiency
“I believe that the big venture firms, defense tech is great, right? Defense tech, those companies are going to be insanely capital inefficient. They're going to require insane amounts of money. My view is like American dynamism and defense tech as a theme. It'…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chirls: VCs can raise new funds by matching NASDAQ returns
“The returns need to just look like about the NASDAQ. It just needs to be, it just needs to be roughly in line with the NASDAQ for them to continue to raise. And by the way, that's true for all of venture. That's true for all of venture, which again is why, lik…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Chirls: No VC firm has ever determined a startup's success or failure
“I have never found that any investment we've made ever, or really any, I've never seen any VC Be truly the difference between success and failure of a company. Period.”
What-if
Chirls: Coinbase would have succeeded without Andreessen Horowitz and USV
“Would Coinbase not have been successful? If they hadn't take money from Andreessen Horowitz and USV. No, I think they would have been just as successful.”
Insight
Chirls: VCs push founders to raise money for markups and promotions
“VCs are obviously incentivized for founders to think that or to be scared of that. Some ways it's a threat and there's all sorts of weird incentives in the middle, right? It's I'm raising my fund. I need to show some markups or I'm a trying to get a promotion …”
Insight
Chirls: Building a startup will ruin your life whether it succeeds or fails
“Building a startup is truly awful. It's like a truly, truly bad experience. And it will ruin your life basically in various different ways. And by the way, that's if it goes well or if it doesn't go well.”
Opinion
Thrive, Lerer Hippeau, and First Round have abandoned true seed investing
“Many of the best VCs in New York have moved up the stack. And what that means is they've raised dramatically larger funds in the last two years. And so, Folks like Thrive Capital, and Lyra Ventures, and First Ground, and folks that you might consider as tradit…”
Opinion
Accelerator demo days are a terrible way to evaluate startup founders
“I personally, I don't go to demo days. I'm just kind of, I'm, you know, I'm kind of burnt out by them. I think it's a, it's actually it's kind of a shitty way to get to know a founder, you know, is to listen to them pitch on a stage amongst hundreds of other f…”
Opinion
Chirls: Foundation model startups align with mega-VC deployment goals
“Like the foundation models are like a big, big VC firm's dream. They literally require billions and billions of dollars to go buy effectively NVIDIA GPUs.”
Opinion
Chirls: Private equity allows managers to profit even if portfolio companies fail
“The private equity scam is like, we probably all know this is like, you can invest in a company. It doesn't actually matter how well that company does. You can take a lot of money out of that company, and if it goes bankrupt, it doesn't matter.”
Disclosure
Chirls takes zero salary at Asylum Ventures to reinvest fees into hiring
“I don't pay myself at a silo. I'm putting every single dollar into the, into hiring people and building the firm.”
Insight
Chirls: Stage, sector, and geo-focus are not sustainable VC advantages
“I think for the most part, stage, sector, geo-focuses these things get arbitraged away. They are not sustainable positions in venture, in my view. The only sustainable position is actually standing for something meaningful.”
Insight
Chirls: Early-stage venture returns require investing in ignored sectors
“If I've learned, I don't know, one thing over the last 12 years or 13 years investing is that the only way that I personally have ever made money, and I think this is probably true for most of early stage investing, is to invest in something that no one cares …”
Assertion Contradicted
Chirls: Top-quartile 2015 vintage VC funds haven't returned capital
“The top quartile, the best 25% of venture firms from the twenty-fifteen vintage have not returned their investors all their money. We're nine years in. The top quartile has not given their investors their money back.”
Disclosure
Chirls: Founders restructured an acquihire to cut out early investors entirely
“There's one that comes to mind around Aquihire that we that you kind of talked about many years ago where we actually introduced the portfolio company to the acquirer. It was understood that the cap table would sort of get Taken care of. Like not, again, not m…”
Opinion
Chirls: Wealthy venture capitalists rarely reinvest personal money into their own firms
“I would argue that over time, even wealthy folks that have made a lot of money in this business or venture don't put any money into their firms.”
Insight
Chirls: Mega-VCs Create Market Opportunities for Boutique Seed Funds
“I'm actually grateful for the big banks in venture. I actually don't want them to go away because that they actually provide our opportunity. They provide us an opportunity to provide an alternative to founders to that system.”
