Chris Douvos
Founder & Managing Director, Ahoy Capital. On 2 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderauthor@cdouvos ↗LinkedIn ↗superlp.com ↗
Chris Douvos is a limited partner who founded Ahoy Capital in 2018 to back emerging venture managers and co-invest in startups. He is also known for writing on venture fund architecture and LP-GP alignment through his blog Super LP.
2shows
5appearances
85statements
10resolved
6supported
2contradicted
60%fully supported
18said about them ↓ Everything Chris Douvos said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Douvos: Opportunity funds are a sneaky workaround to LP fund-size limits
“Now we've just started calling them opportunity funds, which by the way is just a sneaky way around the issue of my LPs don't want me to get too big. So I'll leave my core fund the same size, but I'll raise this opportunity fund.”
Douvos: Long venture horizons make lucky investors think they are smart
“That's the thing that's crazy about venture. It's like, you have a whole community of people who've been lucky who think they're really smart and the evaluation horizons are so long. There's like no feedback.”
AngelList's high-volume seed indexing strategy functions like buying lottery tickets
“Portfolio construction is an underappreciated yet important art, but a lot of the new entrants just want to buy lottery tickets, and then you, everybody bows at the altar of power law, and you've got AngelList putting out reports saying the secret is to invest…”
Douvos Would Short Stanford University Due to Overhyped Entrepreneur Perceptions
“By the way, if I could short Stanford, I would. It's a fantastic place, but talk about perception, you know, kind of all those entrepreneurs coming out of there that are so have very full perceptions themselves.”
Large Venture Capital Funds Benefit Their Partners More Than Their Investors
“So, like I said, those funds will continue to do well, but some of the venture funds that we've seen grow quite large end up doing much better for their partners than they do for their investors.”
Douvos: Core and opportunity fund conflicts will anger LPs during downturns
“What we saw in 2002 1001, 2002 is all of a sudden you find these companies that have like these distressed fundraisers and you actually find the same fund owning two different securities, which may be in conflict with each other. And maybe one fund has capital…”
Douvos: Mega-funds must deploy dry powder to unlock raising next funds
“Like they have whole business models that are predicated on raising, you know, kind of spinning that black circle over and over and over. Other people's money, OPM, it's a hell of a drug. And so I think they've got to deploy that capital because it's a gating …”
Seed investors should price rounds rather than using small-discount SAFEs
“It used to be 20%. Now we're hearing about a lot of 15% discount saves, and it's like, holy smokes, you're putting the riskiest dollars that are ever going to go into that company in for a very modest return. Now you're on the cap table, and you can put more m…”
Tiger Global's 48-hour checks stem from deep prepared-mind diligence, not recklessness
“As you kind of go into the later stage, it's interesting because one thing that we've seen with Tiger, for example, Tiger doesn't take board seats. They don't care about operations. They're just extremely good at diligence. They're extremely good at prepared m…”
The belief that $400M+ funds cannot generate venture returns is disproven
“Put me in this like very rigid mindset that fund size really matters and that size is the enemy of performance and there was no way you could generate venture multiples with funds that were over 304 hundred million dollars and that has been completely disprove…”
Time Horizon Is the Only Durable Risk Premium Left in Investing
“He said that all of the risk premia have been arbitraged away, except for one. He said, horizon. People just need cash sooner. And by being a long-term liquidity provider, you know, if we can be, he, I think his phrase is BLT investor, if we can be a beyond th…”
Elite VC Mega-Funds Trigger Copycat Fund Bloat Across the Industry
“So Sequoia goes out and raises four billion dollars, and then, you know, Billy Bob Joe's venture firm thinks they can raise four billion dollars, and by the way, there's a lot of money coming to the asset class that, that they can. So, you know, this kind of v…”
Cambridge Associates Study: Over Half of Top Venture Funds Are Funds I-III
“Hambridge Associates did a study, and they looked at post-two thousand venture funds. The cohort of top 10 funds in each vintage year, typically more than half were funds with a Roman numeral lower than Roman numeral three.”
Private Startups Are Valued Higher Than They Would Be in Public Markets
“End buyers, i.e. The acquirers or public markets, haven't, you know, been as forceful with enforcing price discipline, and so you have this inversion where, like, public, private companies are worth much more than they'd be worth in the public markets.”
Taking Venture Capital Makes the VC's Business Model Your Business Model
“Once you take venture capital, the venture capitalist business model is your business model. You've got to get liquid at a number that makes sense for them.”
Excessively High Valuations Limit Startup Exit Options and Cause Self-Inflicted Downfalls
“When you have a high valuation, it starts to limit your options. And I think we're starting to see companies that were highly valued, that had a moment where they could have been acquired or gone public if they were, you know, less richly valued, but that mome…”
30% Carried Interest Above a 3x Hurdle Has Become Standard in VC
“In fact, what you're seeing is a lot of people are now kind of going to higher carries after hurdles. So there'll be a 20 carry up to a two and a half or three X, and then it'll kick up to a 30 carry. And I fought that for a while, and it, you know, it's sort …”
Sequoia Rejected Princeton's Endowment Lawyers' Document Comments in 2003 Fund Raise
“When I was at Princeton, Sequoia raised a fund in 2003, and they sent, Docs around, and we were very diligent. We sent our docs out to our law firm, and they came back with, like, three pages of comments, and we sent them to Sequoia, and we got a call from the…”
Douvos: Oversubscribed funds often result from LPs' lemming-like herd mentality
“Time and time again, we've seen funds kind of get attention and get, you know, kind of wildly oversubscribed only because LPs are demonstrating lemming-like behavior. And, you know, there's a favorite bell cow like, you know, Yale or Harvard or Stanford that t…”
Douvos: Outsized returns in LP investing require being right and alone
“So many people are deathly afraid of being wrong and alone because that box is the career risk box so that they'll slide over and try to do more things with the crowd. But what happens is when you move towards the crowd, then you take the right and alone box o…”
Douvos: Most LP programs will evolve into hybrid direct-partnering models within 10 years
“And I think, you know, sitting here 10 years from now, most things that we think of as fund programs today will look more like hybrid programs with, you know, kind of closer ties, partnering more closely with GPs to look at companies rather than being, you kno…”
Douvos: Venture risk premium may just be a horizon premium
“Maybe the risk premia all arises from the horizon premium, which is just like being able to take a longer term bet than the next guy.”
Douvos: Venture works best when capital is expensive and time is cheap
“Venture works really well when capital is expensive and time is cheap. When time gets dear and capital gets cheap, watch out.”
The other half of the tape: Chris Douvos's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 18 times in 11 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 12Beezer Clarkson 3Ted Seides 1Semil Shah 1Matt Ocko 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 17
Capital Allocators 1
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Inside The Mind of A Leading LP: How LPs Evaluate New Fund Managers on Everything from First Meeting to Portfolio Construction To Fees and Carry with Lisa Edgar, Managing Director @ Top Tier Capital Partners
- 20VC: Haystack's Semil Shah on Whether Founders Are Bypassing Seed Funds in Favour Of Less Dilutive Multi-Stage Funds, How Fund Strategy Changes With Fund Scaling & Why The Hardest Challenge is Price Discipline
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Explosion of First Time Funds, Only 1 Mega Fund Raised: What The Heck Happened in Q1 Venture Markets with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
- 20VC: What Does It Take To Raise A Venture Fund Today, An Analysis of The Explosion of Seed Financing & Why IRR No Longer Takes Centre Stage with Samir Kaji, Senior Managing Director @ First Republic Bank
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: What It Takes To Raise A VC Fund & Investing in First Time Fund Managers with Michael Kim @ Cendana Capital
- 20VC: Data Collective's Matt Ocko on Why "All Fund Size Models Are Wrong" and The Lifecycle of Current Venture Funds Is Inefficient?
- 20VC: What LP's Want In VCs with Beezer Clarkson, Managing Director @ Sapphire Ventures
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chris's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Founder & Managing Director, Ahoy Capital | 4 | 74 | 60% 6/10 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Managing Director, Ahoy Capital | 1 | 11 | — | full record on 20VC → |