Accolade Partners

“We've backed some terrific firms that we've stayed with, Excel since 2000, Andreessen since fund two.”

“And I think founders will tell you that while they do pick firms, they really pick the individual partner. So if you're a marketplace consumer facing company, your number one draft pick is Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horwitz, and you get a lot of ancillary servi…”

“We struggled mightily to raise capital to address that opportunity, and we're fortunate to have a separately managed account with a handful of large institutions, but it wasn't easy.”

“We think on a risk reward basis, and our data shows this in our funds over the past five funds, that investing in growth equity on a risk return basis is a far more compelling Opportunity and attractive opportunity, particularly given its liquidity profile tha…”

“It's usually that the fund size over time evolves to be Too large relative to what we think the opportunity is or what we think the team's capability are. So sometimes a team that's going to have a great fund at five hundred million is not going to have a grea…”

“There's been no data on that, and so it is very much of an early days in terms of trying to prove that out, and so I think people are separating out a small pool of capital to sort of run an experiment and see what happens with it, but it's not core to their p…”

“When we invest in an early stage seed focused venture fund, we would like them to do better than five X. For an established venture fund, occasionally you'll get an outlier, but three to four X is still on a consistent basis, not easy to do.”

“For us, we don't need a referenceable track record and attributable track record, which I know is very important to certain institutions, but We can sort of gauge how good is this person in terms of being a deal partner, in terms of sourcing, in terms of reall…”

“We saw people who were extraordinarily talented who were struggling to raise institutional capital and still struggle today to raise sizable funds, and so recognize that that's really an inefficiency in the market, and we all know that that's where one should …”

“And then when the internet bubble burst, and it became clear that continuing to fund early stage venture capital in the face of a nuclear winter was probably not a great idea, we slowly migrated to funding some firms like Golden Gate that were investing in cas…”

“Started raising the fund in the end of 99 and closed on one hundred and fourteen million dollars in March of 2000. Right when the NASDAQ hit the peak of 5000.”

“Just meeting with the top people doesn't really necessarily tell you what's going on underneath at the firm, and so we really encourage broad participation by our team with those people who, you know, associates should know associates, and the VPs should know …”

“We think of it over three years instead of over one fund cycle, and we sort of divide by three knowing they're going to be back sooner. So you create your own time diversification that way.”

“Carry is going up. Fees are staying the same regardless of fund size.”

“Until you have a fully liquidated portfolio, you really don't have returns.”

“We had the opportunity to invest in Emergence too, and I think because we knew so much about software when they said that they were a SaaS-focused fund and they had put two million dollars into Salesforce, we were like, well, that's not that unique, partially …”

“Obviously right now we're experiencing a pretty dramatic correction in the public market where I think the public market companies are much cheaper than what we're seeing done in the private market”

“We don't like investing in later stage venture. We believe in venture, you need to be early, or you need to be a series A brand name manager and early, whereby you secure your ownership and knowledge of the businesses very early.”

“One, we thought about it offensively in the sense that we thought this was a sector where our limited partners could make a lot of money, but we also thought about it defensively, that if this was in fact a fundamental technology, which we think it is, that it…”

“In that fund, we articulated that 50% of what we did was going to be early stage venture And 50% was going to be growth equity, which is not what we hear about in the growth stage today, but more firms which we backed, like Toma Bravo in their first software-f…”

“I would want them to distribute a fair amount in my mind. I would like them to distribute more than one or two X. Would like them to distribute five X or six X. That way the investor has locked in a historically amazing return and then has the option for much …”

“You're seeing the blue chip guys sailing away from the early stages with the fund sizes. So we've been focused on finding the new seed managers, pre-seed managers, etc.”

“It is my general belief that you truly understand people in two situations. In crisis and when things are really good, you see the sides of the people. In crisis, you see, you know, whether they have the grit and the persistence and the stamina... Now with big…”

“We don't tend to like larger funds, and we don't like later stage investing, largely because we think that is an area that is sort of more correlated to the public markets, you know, and an arbitrage opportunity, and so at a period of Massive, great inflation.…”

“You're going to see a lot of turnover in the LP base for managers broadly, as people see who really performed well, and what was a very promiscuous environment, and those people who stayed at the party too long”

“We skew very heavily towards enterprise versus consumer because we think it's easier to predict success when someone's writing a check versus how individuals respond to a product or to a new social media engagement, etc.”