General Partner

“A GP can get fired for missing out, you know, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Uber, right? Like, that is error of omission, and like, that's fireable. But LPs on the flip side only get fired if you invest into a mentor. So in some respects, like, the in…”

“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”

“Intro, you know, 10, a hundred drones swarming together and going and hitting a target. It's all happening on ranges with GPS, which is not a real thing in the battlefield. And a lot of companies are demoing stuff that just does not actually hold up in realist…”

“Starlink is, is generally really, ah, robust against jamming. It's kind of unique, though, because often space-based comms, like, your satellite is so far away that your signal strength is relatively low, and it's actually very easy to jam. This is why GPS is …”

“The dirty secret to the relationship is that very few, some do, very few limited partners are actually Compensated on the returns that the general partner makes.”

“The thing about AI, we're no longer going to rely on the GPs or our money managers to tell us how the J-curve is operating. I can now look through our own portfolio and see where that J-curve is.”

“Provided you've got a big enough check size to play in any round as a GP, you actually, quote unquote, have higher risk adjusted return if you have smaller funds because then you have less cross deal aggregation. In other words, two separate one billion dollar…”

“We operate much more like a GP in that way. And frankly, look to hire people that come from GPs or operators rather than just a traditional LP background.”

“I just think the space thing is, is likely the path that's gonna replace all RTK and all GPS in the next decade.”

“If the product is not worth raising money for, no matter how good you are, you can't raise money. In other words, if you have no differentiation, your track record's bad, it's a really complicated story, you're out of business. The general partners in that sit…”

“GPs tend to put in that position the person they want other people to think they are before they meet them.”

“So what's kind of interesting is that the younger you are in their career, actually the more money you make relative to your peers because the younger professional gets to do some of the selling. Occasionally actually gets to advise the GP because you're trave…”

“The whole idea of ego deprivation, of walking around being a second-class citizen in a job, that creates a dystopia. That creates a victimhood for a lot of people in the industry. If I actually think about the A thing that people complain about most in the job…”

“So, GPs, and I think we saw this at the beginning of COVID as well, GPs may self-censor especially with those Gulf LPs in a time when it feels a little bit awkward, to say the least to be going around You know, with your hand out for money even if it was alrea…”

“Satellite control network that is a common resource for US government where you know, every launch runs through satellite control network. It tracks missions across a really wide set of US government use cases ranging from, you know, GPS to NASA missions you k…”

“And I often think about from the GP's perspective, the person underwriting the SPV, the one trying to talk you into investing in it, I think they got a free roll. Cause if it works, they make money. If it doesn't work and they got fees, they still make money. …”

“The vibe is a lot of GPs and not very many LPs.”

“We also try to have a core venture portfolio exposure through some of our more established and broader mandated GPs, and then look to have some satellite opportunities around that, that we also put into that category, like Sean, they're a little higher risk, h…”

“It's hard to distinguish luck from skill when everything is up and to the right. But now you can look back and say, okay, what did you do in 20 and 21 and 22? How sensitive were you to these really high valuations? How disciplined were you in deploying the cap…”

“Some LPs won't give them a second chance. We have done that where we have said to a GP, okay, we all know this is what went wrong here, and we can do the autopsy. And then we still supported them when they came back to the market because we think they're going…”

“You have 30 positions in the VC fund, and only a couple are going to outperform the entire fund. I know the GP isn't good enough to identify what those companies are at the point of first check.”

“It's gotten so prevalent to where we almost never trust the hard cap, and that's almost perverting the word at this point.”

“Look, especially in the larger funds the compensation that the V, that the GP gets from the management fee, especially if you account for time value of money is typically greater than the than the upside.”

“When times are a little bit tough, you lean in and you understand things, but you also show up with a real check. You have to be a meaningful investor. If you're a five million dollar investor, it's hard to be meaningful.”

“If a co-invest comes to us, and the GP's putting in a small check and looking for us to put in a bigger check than them, that's not happening.”

“With GPs who rationalize raising more money without being intellectually honest about it, Is a first indication that you should be thinking about heading for the exit.”

“What you want is a capacity constrained environment for investing. I want it with my GPs. I want it for us, where you're having to make hard decisions about what GPs you're backing in the equity long short space, private space, co-investment space. The only wa…”

“Sourcing to me, whether you're a GP or an LP, too few LPs, Take the GP mindset. As an LP, you better have a GP mindset, and you better source. You better be out there finding opportunities.”

“The sign of a good partnership is you help drive a change in your partner's portfolio that you don't get paid for.”

“You could say that private equity is frozen because of fear. It's fear on the GP side of, you If they sell, returns aren't what their LPs would have thought. They're afraid they're not going to be able to raise their next fund. So rather than say, we'll just t…”

“And then from then on, every time a GP would come on board, we're like, okay, what do you want to invest in? Therefore, we're going to write about these things because that, that is, becomes the magnet for the entrepreneurs in that corner of the internet or AI…”

“Unfortunately, we compete against 19,000 GPs.”

“We don't pay carry. We don't have the same pay structure as a general partner. We don't pay promote, so we don't have the same pay structure as a hedge fund.”

“In a normal deal, it's fees first to the general partners, then preferred return. And then you split the profits and the normal way to do that is 70% of the profits to The money people and 30% of the profits to the general partners.”

“Every deal is different. You can do it any way you want to do it, but there is a rule of thumb and that rule of thumb is that the general partners really must have 10% of their own money in it.”

“That promotion, developing people, yes, for your organization, of course, but also seeing the people who are on your team grow to such a point where they're hired away. To a bigger opportunity. That's like a badge of honor versus on the GP side viewed as a sca…”

“I mean, look at all the things that came out of the government, integrated circuits, the internet, GPS you know, it goes on and on and on. Those came from government programs. All of Silicon Valley is built on top of it, right?”

“It is not the big brand name funds, you know, their GPs are not sitting in that room, nor would you be able to get them there, right? You're gonna be, they're gonna be sending their analysts, their lower tier associate, you know just people who their job is to…”

“But if you're trying to crush it, I think the only people that will really make money in venture capital are the GPs. Building a fee generating business around it.”

“As you make more and more investments, your portfolio starts looking like a general index fund, right? Again, it kind of goes back to, you know, you need to know exactly what those Holding companies are in a private market, you know, in particular, also in the…”

“I don't think it'll replace GPs, but what I think it helps people do is become, have more agency in their journey a little bit more control over their, you know, the process of managing care.”

“These business models, these GPs are creating are some of the best high margin businesses Ever created, right?”

“I'll never blame you for doing that, and I'll never blame a GP for, I'll never bash a GP saying, oh, how dare you, right? It's the market, like, and you're, you've obviously done something well enough that's allowing you to raise that capital. It's our choice …”

“We think that being founder friendly is being LP friendly and being LP friendly is being founder friendly. The only way that that, you know, equilibrium ever gets messed up is when GPs put themselves first.”

“And then what a lot of GPs do or a lot of managers do is they actually expense these planes or the operating costs from their fund. Which is, I feel like a complete scam, but you can basically deduct The cost of operating an aircraft from the actual fund, whic…”

“Where people get into trouble as they raise larger and larger funds in a strategy that maybe it's the right time to raise a larger fund, but maybe it's not. It just, it, what's the opportunity set? So they kept raising larger and larger funds”

“And by the way, I think for some of the traditional sovereign wealth funds in, in, in pension funds, you know, they've had sort of unfettered access to GPs. And I think that they've got more competition coming in from the wealth channel and insurance channel.”

“The venture business has its bust every 10 or 15 or 20 years, and it's when times are bad that you really learn, are people good partners? It's easy to be a good partner when everybody is making lots of money.”

“I think institutions don't do a good job of asking GPs about sell decisions in general.”

“What winds up happening is the good businesses get sold in three or four years. The bad businesses hang around for 10 or 12 years. The GPs just think, well, I can fix this, and two years from now it'll be better, and a lot of times when an asset isn't performi…”

“One problem a lot of institutions fall into is thinking, I'm just as smart as these guys. Why are they so much richer than I am? I'm on this side of the table, but I could easily be on that side of the table, and they make things confrontational, especially if…”

“If the LP is asking for co-investment and the GP providing it and saying, I've just got this deal. Here's co-investment for you. I need an answer in a week. And you're an LP and you say, my investment committee meets once a month. It's next three weeks. That's…”

“Depending upon the GP, there are some GPs whose Dollar of fees per dollar of AUM have gone down by 50% over the last decade because of co-invest.”

“We're starting to see for the first time things being sold at numbers that are probably below the targets where the GPs wanted to sell the asset at because they know at some point in time they're going to be back out on the road raising their flagship buyout f…”

“What we know is that the average GP has twice as many businesses in their portfolio than they had 10 years ago.”

“Typically many GPs, they sell something when the MD that led the deal said, we're ready to sell.”

“We've had transactions where we've had to partner up with other GPs in order to have the capital necessary to pursue the opportunity. I'd rather not partner up with other GPs and have my own capital.”

“In a multi-asset GP-led transaction, we afford the availability and we push GPs to get rid of those Weaker performing assets. Because all of the assets are getting reset at a price, and all of the economics are getting reset, if the GP sells their underperform…”

“Then the second idea that we had was to kind of only founders or CEOs were allowed to be general partners.”

“If you're a general partner at YC, you know, you pretty much can fund what you want”