Brad Gerstner reveals that Altimeter Capital concentrated over 30% of its initial fund into cloud data company Snowflake when consensus was pessimistic.
Insight
Gerstner: LPs should mark down 2020-2022 late-stage venture portfolios by 50%
“I said, I would take everything in your portfolio that received a valuation over the last two years, over five hundred million dollars, and I'd mark it down by 50%. What do you mean? And I said, well, if I look at the average gross stock in the NASDAQ, it's do…”
Insight
Gerstner: Venture capital funds of $10B or more cannot generate alpha
“Deploying a ten billion dollar fund or, God forbid, a fifty billion or a hundred billion dollar fund like Masa tried to do, right? You already know you will not generate alpha in that. You are getting the beta of the global tech industry when you're investing …”
Insight
Gerstner: Portfolio diversification is a myth that fails to mitigate risk
“I think diversification in many ways is the greatest myth perpetrated on the investing public. The idea that risk mitigation is the equivalent of diversification.”
Insight
Gerstner: The bottom 20-40% of tech and VC workforces dilute results
“I would say the vast majority of organizations, ok, and I'm talking from Facebook and Twitter, all the way down to, ah, GPs. They would be well served, right, to be much smaller, to be essentialists in the people that they have. Because it's very likely that y…”
Assertion Partly supported
Gerstner: Average VC returns over 10-20 years underperform public market indexes
“And the fact of the matter is, I mean, if you look back 1020 years, average VC returns are not that compelling. In fact, they're worse than the indexes.”
Assertion Partly supported
Gerstner: Sequoia's early Figma investment yielded 100x while late-stage yielded 2x
“If you look at the difference between the Sequoia round in Figma or the durable round in Figma, right? It's the difference between, you know, having a hundred plus X outcome and a two X outcome.”