Disclosure certainty 5/5 debate potential 1/5

Larry Page convinced David Lawee to launch CapitalG internally at Alphabet

David Lawee · 20VC: CapitalG Founder David Lawee on Why People Overvalue Diversification in Venture, Why Investment Clubs Are More Successful Than Investment Partnerships & How Growth Funds Think About Portfolio Construction, Loss Ratio & Reserves · Oct 8, 2020 · at 4:04

David Lawee details how he founded CapitalG (Alphabet's growth fund) in 2013 after discussing an independent fund proposal with Google co-founder Larry Page.

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“At that point, I was in the mindset of leaving Google, and I talked to Larry Page, and the idea was, for me, in that conversation, was to see if he wanted to invest his own capital in my firm, and he said, why don't you do this within Alphabet? And I thought about that for a little bit, and kind of came to the conclusion that we could do something in a super differentiated way inside of Alphabet, and so I decided to start Capital G with Alphabet as the sole LP, and we got going from there.”

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Insight
Lawee: Venture diversification yields diminishing returns beyond six investments
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Opinion
Lawee: Venture capital is overly clubby and white male-oriented
“It's incredibly clubby. And white male oriented. And I don't think that's helping the entrepreneurial world. It's kind of not helping the venture world decision making. So that's the biggest thing. It's also the hardest thing, but it's kind of the biggest thin…”
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Disclosure
CapitalG operates as an investment club where partners make individual decisions
“At the core of it is kind of the decision process, and for us, which is extremely unusual for a growth equity fund, we make the investments individually. The group can and does hopefully help inform that, but it's more of an investment club than kind of an inv…”
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Assertion Not checkable as stated
Investment clubs generate better returns than traditional venture partnerships
“And I was born from kind of looking at a whole bunch of different investment firms and comparing their returns to that of clubs and coming to the conclusion that clubs were actually doing better.”
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Insight
Lawee: Experience with market cycles causes risk aversion disadvantage in bull markets
“I do feel that there's a little bit of a disadvantage in protracted bull markets of having lived through these cycles, because your experience has taught you to be more risk-averse, and as you're kind of living through a bull market, that's kind of a negative.”
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Prediction Not checkable as stated
Lawee: Conservative venture investing will ultimately prove correct despite missed gains
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