Venture

“Exits in venture now way exceed private equity.”

“Now the holding period of venture is longer than the technology platform chain cycle.”

“There's a foundation model bets themselves, which are an order of magnitude actually two orders of magnitude, more capital intense than anything venture has done before.”

“The LP dollars that are going into venture are concentrated into fewer and fewer funds. Those fund sizes have basically nine acts on average. If you just look at the top 20 funds”

“The dirty little secret adventure I get is how much of your money you make in that one year in 10 when everybody buys the dream.”

“Timing is number, like, in venture, it's the only thing that's correlated to success.”

“Venture is the biggest dispersion of all the asset classes, like compared to private equity, credit, or hedge funds or whatever.”

“The lesson that punches you in the stomach in venture is you can't make a company succeed.”

“The next five year period, if we just looked at the history of venture, the next five years are going to change venture more than any five year period in the history of venture.”

“I always tell the great operators who talk about coming into venture, don't be crazy. Your highest and best use is operating.”

“But bottom line, I would say, is it's a different asset class than venture. You got to treat it differently. You've got to have many more shots on goal, and you have to be very vigilant about the basis, the cost at which you get in.”

“Venture is very volatile as an asset class because it's the tail end of the whip. It's the last asset class allocators allocate to. So they start with bonds, then they go to public equities, then they'll go to real estate, you know, then they'll go to credit, …”

“My expectation, my hope is in three to five years, how Carta is sort of synonymous with infrastructure for venture in three to five years, it'll be synonymous with infrastructure for PE.”

“It's going to be very difficult for private equity, broadly defined venture and buyout and related stuff to be the single defining alpha creating strategy for institutional investors the way that it's been over the last 3540 years.”

“One of the depressing facts about venture is we make an embarrassingly large percentage of our money once every seven years when you're in the white heat of must acquire, must own high growth venture assets.”

“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…”

“In venture, it's so beholden, I think, at least to individuals and individuals can walk out the door and they can go raise a 102 103 104 hundred million dollars. And like, effectively compete with you in some way, shape or form.”

“Venture is 10 X in terms of dollars deployed in the last 10 years.”

“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.”

“After 2700 shows, I've learned that one of the biggest mistakes people make is they try and copy someone's style that's not authentically theirs, and think that's the right one. And actually, it's about finding where you are uniquely great in the three pillars…”

“When prices are high in venture, you know, you don't just stop doing venture. Right? But you do less. And you wait for the really great stuff. And when prices are high in the public markets, you don't necessarily step out of the markets altogether, but you jus…”

“In venture, we're all pretending. You know, early-stage folks have never worried about liquidity, and the late-stage guys gotta deploy money. The time's ticking on these funds, so you gotta deploy them. We're praying, we're hoping liquidity comes back. We're i…”

“No, it's a frigging, it's a sales business and a hustle business for almost everybody. And the only folks that don't have to hustle like that, have massive inbound. And there's only a handful of folks where the founders pick them. It's only, it's very rare.”

“And so I think I have like. 25 or thirty million dollars of venture.”

“That's going to happen with fusion too. It's got better characteristics. It's baseload. We could put it all over but it's going to take a long time to make that cost effective. That's a 20 to 50 year benefit that we should be focused on now, investing research…”

“I think for the math to pencil out in venture, we do need a rebound. The math. And this is, forget about the unicorn rounds and the crazy. We just, we do need some, we do need a 30 to 40% multiple reflation, or we just can't make any money on any round north o…”

“I think the impact that will have is that the concentration of returns in venture is going to be even smaller as they're going to be fewer companies that ultimately account for that, that performance.”

“If the IPO market starts to open and the M&A market gets going, I think you're going to see a huge wave of interest in venture, and especially in those funds that I think were very smart and didn't go crazy when things were at a peak and are now taking advanta…”

“I don't think, I think founders have lost all perspective on the risk they're taking in the next round. Venture has been so gamified the last five years, and everyone's to blame.”

“Everyone that's been doing venture for a while that is elite has at least one ten billion dollar outcome.”

“But I think it's splintering off of professionalization of turning into asset management is really going to happen in venture in the next couple of years.”

“Venture is 0.3% penetrated. So in that market, our estimation, we've done some analysis, 50 to a hundred billion, just In what we're doing.”

“I tend to agree. I think that markets are significantly more markets are huge, huge, huge input into outcomes, particularly in venture.”

“Fundamentally, you know, some of the largest pension funds in Europe don't invest in venture. I mean, that's like, unthinkable in the US. You know, I think when you look at a lot of educational facilities in Europe, we don't have any allocation to venture.”

“The average discount to venture ticked up as high as just 12% in 2021, so quite low overall, but if you were to fast forward that forward to 2022, it's back down at an industry level to 34%”

“If you have a top brand, you're going to get into one or two good deals a year by hook or by crook. If you play the game and it's enough, that's the beauty in venture.”

“Buyouts, by the way, have consistently been a little bit better than private equity have been a little bit better than venture. They're much less episodic or dramatic, and they tend to chug along a little bit over one PME.”

“There are no good investments in venture. It's either investments where you said no, you should have said yes, or it's investments where you said yes, but you should have put in a lot more money. There's just no good venture investments.”

“And I include private equity and venture as part of just variations of the market.”

“This is an area that has opportunity because not many people are doing it. Thinking about it or want to spend time on it. It's like super sexy to invest in venture, growth, crypto, whatever. So returns get squeezed. Zig when other people zag and like do the th…”

“This wave that might be cresting now in venture was really just starting back then in 2012.”

“Because in venture, it's missing the upside, not protecting the downside that's going to lead to not have a successful fund. The most important thing is being in those right companies and owning enough of them.”

“This is a business of outliers. Nothing that is an outlier is normal. So if you try to bring normalcy or strings attached or boxes into venture, you're not going to succeed, or at best, you're going to be mediocre. So if you want outliers, you need to have an …”

“The number of firms that have failed in generational transition outnumbers by orders of magnitude the numbers of firms that have had successful generational transitions.”

“It's so gossipy. For all this talk about being focused on the future, I feel like half the industry is wondering what are the other people working on or thinking about at this very moment.”

“Private equity is much easier than venture.”

“In venture, there's so much money today where you need to move so fast that by the time you make the investment, actually, you don't know them very well at all because we're all just throwing money so fast around because there's just too much money.”

“The reality of venture is that at every subsequent financing, about half the deals fall off. And so to become a unicorn is a one in a thousand proposition.”

“That said, probably the biggest bang for the buck is in alternatives. It's probably in illiquid asset classes. It's in people who think differently about venture or private equity and Even probably real estate on some level.”

“You think about those vintage years from a fund perspective, that's 2010, 11, 12. Those are the best years of venture and it'll be tough to replicate going forward.”

“In most of my working experience, I've been a leader and a manager and someone who had not just the leverage of a team around her, but also the leverage of the software that we were building, and so in venture, you have to be incredibly choosy with how you spe…”

“I think social media in general, like, you know, the amount of information, the amount of opinions, the amount of knowledge out there has a lot of positives, but it also has some negatives, and we talk a lot here about being in a bubble, and kind of the echo c…”

“We are about 24 to 25% in the ground invested in net asset value and private equity, including venture, which puts us about in the middle of the larger endowments.”

“As a limited partner, I mean, it's not always a blind pool, but the majority of time it's a blind pool, and you're saying, here's money for the next 15 years, and that's just one fund cycle. And the other thing as an LP is that you invest with the belief that …”

“If you study venture, and you say, oh, well, blogging became super important, and then tweeting, and then podcasting, the LP voice isn't there.”

“My historical view has always been, you do as much venture as you can get good access to.”

“Some of our local peers here in superannuation who have to compete for members have decided to go down a road of setting a fee budget for the whole fund, and then reporting those fees as a competitive advantage in their marketing, and we think that risks cutti…”

“I do think, though, that we've got too much money coming in, and so I do think returns are going to suffer a bit. For these vintages, and that we probably need some kind of a correction to decrease the amount of capital that's coming into venture.”

“2002 to 2009, it was about two hundred and five billion invested in venture and about two hundred and twenty billion returned”

“You can decide you want to do venture, but that's like deciding you want to get married. You know, these are like, you know, it does depend who the girl is or the guy”