Chris Douvos
29 statements across 3 episodes · 9 bullish · 7 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 3, 2017 by Chris Douvos · said 1 times in 1 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
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2024 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Chris Douvos, oldest first
Jul 3, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 negative
Making Small Exploratory LP Commitments Is De-Worsification, Not True Diversification
“We shouldn't pick and choose among our managers. Once we decide to hire them, the bar is so high that we should hit them hard. We shouldn't take these, like, little, you know, hesitation marks, right? Like, I know a lot of people are like, oh, I'll throw a mil…”
Jul 3, 2017 positive
True Outperformance Requires Taking Career Risk to Be Right and Alone
“They're so afraid of being wrong and alone and taking that career risk that they migrate from being alone and having conviction to being with the crowd. But when you migrate towards the crowd side, you take the right and alone box out of play. And that's where…”
Jul 3, 2017 neutral
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…”
Jul 3, 2017 neutral
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 …”
Jul 3, 2017 bearish
Jul 3, 2017
Jul 3, 2017 positive
Venture Platforms Scale Best by Treating Portfolios as Founder Communities
“Rather than the venture capitalist being the hub in the middle of this kind of hub and spoke network, could you push, you know, he called it the Napster of venture, right? Could you push the interactions out to the frontier where entrepreneurs are interacting …”
Jul 3, 2017
Jan 10, 2022 positive
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…”
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
Multi-stage venture firms investing at seed are essentially buying option portfolios
“In venture, what we're doing is we're already buying long dated way out of the money options. And by investing in the seed stage, a lot of these guys, whether they admit it or not, are basically buying option portfolios”
Jan 10, 2022 bearish
Subscale solo GPs face severe cram-down risks in a market downturn
“I've always worried that the solo GPs with subscale funds would run up against this constraint if the market ever turned and the later stage guys started getting more aggressive. They'd get crammed down and kicked to common and all that stuff. And so I've stay…”
Jan 10, 2022 positive
Formal venture training carries far more weight than an AngelList track record
“Everybody's got an angel-less track record today, but I'm talking like formal investor training. So I love introducing people like, I mentioned, you know, Ross Fabini, who spent, you know, years with Canaan Ventures, or Sunil Nagaraj, who launched Ubiquity aft…”
Jan 10, 2022 positive
Frontier tech startups attract passionate talent more effectively than enterprise SaaS
“So in my own personal investing, It's caused me to double down on people who are working on really interesting and challenging projects, because I think it's better to find great talent for people who are working on something on the frontier, where you've got …”
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
Partner time and engagement are the true scarce resources in seed investing
“One thing that we heard constantly from entrepreneurs in those days is it turns out that the Capital's not the scarce resource. It's the time and the engagement. And so surmounting that engagement hurdle, I think, is one thing that's really challenging, and I …”
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
The best late-stage venture investors are stock pickers, not operational helpers
“Where historically a lot of people, because I think somebody told them at some point LPs love it when you say, you know, your value add, but the reality of it is the best late stage investors have always been good stock pickers.”
Jan 10, 2022 positive
Jan 10, 2022 negative
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…”
Jan 10, 2022 bullish
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
First Round Capital compressed its deal decision time to 50 hours
“And when they came into the venture business in 2005, They started tracking time from when they saw a deal to when that deal was done, whether or not they actually did that deal. And I think in 2005, it was a hundred days. In 2016 or 17, when they said, man, t…”
Jan 10, 2022 bearish
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…”
Jan 10, 2022
Allocators must test managers' competitive advantages and their own evaluation abilities
“You're always testing a joint hypothesis. Is this manager an outstanding manager with a sustainable competitive advantage is hypothesis one. The second is, am I sufficiently aware and educated that I can ascertain that?”
Jan 10, 2022 negative
Touting $25K angel checks in consensus hot companies shows zero value proposition
“The thing that kills me dead, and this is a work one, is when I meet with folks, and they tell me about what a good investor they're in, because they're in companies A, B, and C, and the number of times that I hear, literally in the course of a week, the same …”
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
Jan 10, 2022 bullish
Jan 10, 2022 positive
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…”
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
Jan 10, 2022 negative
LPs cannot build real conviction picking emerging managers at showcase conferences
“I don't understand, by the way, how people who are building new programs today, and they fly out from Ottumwa, Iowa, and go to the Raise Conference, which is one of the big showcases of emerging managers, and make bets. I don't understand how you can do that w…”
Feb 27, 2023 neutral
Douvos: Seed valuation resilience is an artifact of unfunded marginal deals
“One thing that's interesting is I actually just saw some data that I think said that seed valuations were up year over year. And anecdotally, that's what I'm hearing as well. And I think that's actually just a data composition issue because the marginal ideas …”