venture capital
also referred to as: vc · vcs · venture capital industry
258 statements across 134 episodes · 66 bullish · 76 bearish · 121 people on the record · first statement Jul 3, 2017 by Chris Douvos · across every show →
Everything said about venture capital, oldest first
Jul 3, 2017
Venture Bubbles Occur When Time Is Scarce and Capital Is Cheap
“When venture's working really well, time is really cheap and capital is really expensive. He says what happens in bubbles is that time becomes really scarce and expensive. People don't have any time. And as a result, their capital becomes cheap.”
Jul 3, 2017 positive
Jul 3, 2017
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 neutral
Average Venture Capital Partnerships Last Twice as Long as American Marriages
“It takes a lot of patience to invest in venture capital funds because the average venture partnership lasts twice as long as the average American marriage. Isn't that crazy? Average venture fund goes 10 years plus, you know, kind of three, four, five, one-year…”
Jul 3, 2017 negative
Volatility Is a Misspecified Measure of Venture Capital Risk
“There's a whole riff I can go on about how that completely is a misspecified measure of risk, even in public stuff, but especially in private stuff, not only with stale prices, but like, when I think about the startups that I invest in, not only do we have, li…”
Jul 3, 2017 neutral
Sep 18, 2017 neutral
Only two or three truly transformational companies emerge in every VC cycle
“But if you really look at What are the companies that really become big and sustainable? Every cycle, there's only two or three. You know, the Googles, you know, the Facebooks. There's only a couple, and those tend to be funded by the same people.”
Oct 23, 2017 bullish
Monk: Universities can build top VC portfolios by aggregating pro-rata rights
“If I was going to do it My way, I might have designed it like this, where we were creating all these little seed funds on each campus. Those seed funds would then collect rights to deals, and at the same time, we would collect rights to deals out of the IP off…”
Jan 22, 2018 positive
Spitz: Vanderbilt Endowment Held VC and International Equities in 1985
“So when I got there in 1985, you know, we had a couple percent in venture capital. We had some real estate exposure, traditional stocks and bonds. We had a large international exposure, which wasn't all that common at that point. So we were actually, you know,…”
Jan 22, 2018 bearish
Feb 19, 2018
Hamed: Target small frontier funds for 5x returns, mega-funds for 2x
“And if all I need is a two X on the portfolio, you should go to an established firm that's been around for a long time and has billions of dollars under management because they have the highest certainty of getting you there. If you're sitting there and thinki…”
Feb 19, 2018 neutral
Feb 19, 2018 positive
Hamed: Top VC firms will win deals by accepting lower net returns
“But I do think in 10 to 15 to 20 years, that's where the market will evolve. And if you're one of these firms with a really established LP base, you've produced strong returns consistently for a long time, you will be able to produce less good returns than oth…”
Apr 30, 2018 positive
May 14, 2018
Carnegie initially commits $5M to $10M to new venture capital managers
“The first time we invest in the venture manager, we make a five million dollar investment, we make a ten million dollar investment. It takes a while to feel comfortable giving somebody a 15 or twenty million dollar investment, but they invest over time, and so…”
May 14, 2018
Ford Foundation barred buyout investing due to board anti-takeover bias
“The board in prior iterations had been a lot of captains of industry who had been the victims of hostile takeovers, and so they felt that the LBO market was unsavory, so they did not allow the Ford Foundation to invest in buyouts.
But they would let them inves…”
May 14, 2018 neutral
Lew: Scaling venture funds alters their role in an institutional portfolio
“In order to feed the beast, they've got to get bigger, and bigger. To the point where what you invested in originally is very different than what they are now, which doesn't mean they won't be highly successful, but the role in portfolio is different.”
May 28, 2018 bearish
Jul 2, 2018 bullish
Revenue-Based Venture Lending Generates Nearly 30% IRR Over Two Years
“And what we're finding now out in the venture capital world is they will take a million dollars, let's call it 2,000,002 million dollars, and give you one and a half times your money, three million, back in two years, paying you monthly off of revenue stream. …”
Jul 30, 2018 neutral
The real competition in private markets is among allocators, not fund managers
“The real competition today is not by the investment managers to get your investment money. It's by the people who've got money to get access to the best investment managers. And that's been true for the last decade in venture capital. It's now clearly true in …”
Aug 20, 2018 bearish
Wolfe predicts a massive pullback in institutional LP allocations to venture capital
“Private equity generally, of which venture capital is like, you know, the tiny bit that's generally clustered into that ass glass, I think is going to see a huge pullback in at least new allocations, if not the pace of allocations.”
Aug 20, 2018 positive
Wolfe: VCs must be cynical and distrustful to spot carny charlatans
“You've got all kinds of carny charlatans that basically sculpt you into a somewhat cynical, squinty eyed, distrustful person of, you know, somebody trying to scheme over you, which I think in my business where you never really know if somebody is going to be l…”
Aug 20, 2018 negative
Wolfe: Venture capitalists have shifted to funding irrelevant 'fufu' mobile apps
“And I think that that guard has given way to people that are funding, you know, what I consider fufu apps and You know, mobile stuff that I think has very little relevance, but like real hard technology. It's provable. It's real. It's verifiable. It's not, you…”
Sep 24, 2018 negative
Future Fund Avoids Large-Cap Buyouts Entirely in Private Equity Portfolio
“Our portfolio has no large buyout at all, because we think that, well, that makes the capacity so much harder, by the way, but we think that large buyout is really just levered equities, typically. And if there's skill added on top, and there might be, then mo…”
Sep 24, 2018 positive
Sep 24, 2018 positive
Oct 29, 2018 negative
Oct 29, 2018 neutral
Nov 26, 2018
Nov 26, 2018 positive
Baumgartner: Top PE and VC firms possess structural franchise power
“And the ones with persistent good performance and venture as well, they're incredibly powerful businesses. They're franchises. They have access to deals. They have all sorts of levers of power. They control their suppliers and they control their customers, rig…”
Dec 17, 2018 neutral
Mid-sized endowments drive venture capital demand over large public funds
“The large public funds aren't doing much in venture. So it's, We definitely think it's worth it. I'd say there's more of an appetite for venture from our smaller and medium sized endowment clients. A 500 or billion dollar endowment can make a five or ten milli…”
Jan 28, 2019 bearish
Jan 28, 2019
Apr 15, 2019 positive
Rabil: Premier Lacrosse League Raised Seed VC to Secure Media Rights
“We shifted quickly from private equity to venture because this was certainly a venture investment. So we raised a small seed round, and the goal of that was to allow us to anchor a network deal Secure venues, get first leads in on sponsors, sign up players, hi…”
May 20, 2019 bullish
May 20, 2019 bullish
Jul 1, 2019 bullish
Sep 2, 2019 bearish
Venture Economics Breakdown at $100 Billion in Annual LP Commitments
“You know, if we go back to 60, 70, a hundred billion, which is where we got to at the peak of 2000, then I think you get to the point where the economics of the business unfortunately probably just can't support that little activity.”
Sep 2, 2019 positive
As Capital Democratizes, VCs Must Differentiate Beyond Money
“It's likely to be the case that entrepreneurs will now have more choices of which VCs to work with because there will be capital in lots of different places, and therefore something other than capital will have to be what differentiates one VC from another.”
Sep 2, 2019 positive
Founders Should Pitch 'Conquer-The-World' Ambition Over Downside Risk Mitigation
“The reality is, we achieve diversification through our portfolio. I don't need an individual entrepreneur to achieve diversification for us. It's great to know that there's somebody out there who might buy it, but, like, none of us is playing for that outcome,…”
Sep 2, 2019 negative
Deal Experience Asymmetry Breeds Distrust Between Founders and VCs
“So what I find now having been in this business for 10 years and then in tech for another 15 is there's this unspoken asymmetric information between VCs and entrepreneurs. It's probably not surprising, obviously, because look, we do this thing hundreds of time…”
Sep 2, 2019 positive
VCs Should Let Compelling Founders Drag Them Into New Technology Trends
“It's our job to be in front of all the interesting people who think they know what it is, and then for us to meet with them and hopefully be smart enough to allow them to drag us into places that we might not have gone because they've got some really killer id…”
Sep 2, 2019 bearish
Sep 30, 2019
The most important venture question is what became possible recently
“I think the most important question in venture capital is what's possible now that wasn't possible five years ago, right? Because if you want to invest in ride sharing, we did before the mobile phone. It doesn't make sense. If you did it now, you're like, 1213…”
Sep 30, 2019 positive
Lonsdale: Venture capital has high autocorrelation where winning firms keep winning
“Venture capital is a very interesting asset class is very high auto correlation for a lot of these different reasons. And so, so it's just a very big unfair advantage. Once you're winning, you kind of can keep winning if you do it right.”
Oct 21, 2019 negative
Oct 28, 2019
Fontana: Founder Empathy Outlasts Tactical Knowledge in Venture Investing
“The one thing that you take away from that, or I took away from that, that I apply to venture is not like, this is how you hire your first salesperson, or this is how you like integrate with this platform, because all that knowledge changes, best practice is a…”
Nov 18, 2019 negative
Dec 2, 2019 neutral
Dec 2, 2019 neutral
Martin: Allocators are three funds deep before knowing if emerging VC succeeds
“Because venture has such a long feedback loop, that you're going to be on the third fund before you really even know, and that gets back to, like, how are you going to size if you do decide to do some emerging manager? How do you size it so that you're not, wh…”
Feb 24, 2020 neutral
Venture returns depend entirely on access to a handful of elite firms
“That's all that matters. If you don't have access to the best firms, Either create a roster of sort of up and coming firms and hope that a bunch of them do well, but our view in the office is that there are probably only a handful of firms that can operate ven…”
Mar 9, 2020 neutral
Mar 23, 2020
Mauboussin: Venture capital and buyout returns lack reliable, standardized performance data
“The challenge in these things are things like venture capital is a good example where there just aren't really reliable data. You and I can look at the S&P. 500 returns or the Russell 3000 returns. We can agree pretty much that the numbers are right. Venture c…”
Apr 13, 2020 neutral
Jun 1, 2020 neutral
Jun 11, 2020 negative
Ma: Clean Tech 1.0 failed because VCs misjudged capital intensity and commodities
“Just to distill it down, I think what happened there was there was certainly a lot of overhype, capital flowing in, especially by firms who May not have really developed the deep expertise on the sector. They may have developed expertise in semiconductors or s…”
Jul 6, 2020
Applying value investing's loss-avoidance mindset guarantees failure in venture capital
“Where finding the thing that could be amazing is the opposite of making sure you don't lose money, right? Sort of venture capital portfolios and value investing portfolios have the opposite skews. I grew up learning that you'll do well if you never lose any mo…”
Aug 3, 2020 positive
Granade: Thesis-driven domain expert venture investing produces better returns
“They have strong theses and views about how companies are going to get built and how money is going to get made, and that really drives our process, and I think it produces a better approach to investing, meaning like I think it produces better returns.”
Oct 19, 2020 negative
Nov 9, 2020 neutral
Dec 7, 2020 bearish
Chamath: Venture Capital Now Yields Worse Beta Than S&P 500
“That as the number of entrepreneurs have gone up, the amount of capital has gone up, and the returns have come down, where now you're signing up for 10 to 12 years of illiquidity, and a market beta that's worse than owning an S&P index fund.”
Jan 11, 2021 negative
Dixon: Liquidity is a bug, not a feature in venture capital
“I believe that in my business, at least liquidity is a bug and not a feature. And what I mean by that is the ability to sell something is a very, very dangerous thing and can mess with you. And I bet you that if most venture capitalists could sell their stock …”
Jan 11, 2021 negative
Dixon: Investors mistakenly impute logic onto noisy, random market moves
“Imputing logic onto things that are probably noisy and random. My impression of a lot of investing is everything from, if you could watch CNBC and they say the market moved today because of X, Y, and Z, and in fact, it was probably moved because whatever some …”
Jan 18, 2021 positive
Vanguard observes return persistence at the individual manager level in PE
“Most of the studies say, In LBO or in VC, what type of quartile regime switching do you have from first, second, third, fourth quartile, as opposed to just at the manager level? And at the individual manager level, we do see persistence.”
Jan 25, 2021 positive
Jan 25, 2021 neutral
Mar 22, 2021 positive
Mar 29, 2021
Housenbold: Entry valuation is the greatest determinant of PE and VC returns
“If you look at all of the academic research and it doesn't matter if it's a private equity or venture capital, the greatest determinant of your returns With the highest R square is your entry valuation. Some people call that vintage, but it is your entry valua…”
Jun 7, 2021
Rodriguez: Real estate cash flows hedge downside risks in venture investments
“On the venture side, because of who we are and what we've built and the brand we've built, we feel like we can invest in companies at favorable terms, With some downside protection that has an opportunity to be a home run or grand slam in real estate. We never…”
Jul 8, 2021 neutral
Jul 8, 2021 bullish
Grantham: Diversified venture capital has stock-market-level risk with higher returns
“Venture capital, not surprisingly, has a higher return than the stock market because of the riskiness of each individual unit. But if you have a diversified portfolio, you have no more risk than the stock market, but you have a higher return.”
Jul 12, 2021 neutral
Jul 15, 2021 positive
Casdin: Scaling check sizes over time de-risks capital-intensive life sciences investing
“What typical venture investors try to get as much money in, in their first slug, and then they fight dilution on the way down. What we're doing is scaling up over time because these companies are burning a hundred to a hundred and fifty million dollars every 1…”
Aug 30, 2021 neutral
Manager advantages vary significantly across venture, buyout, and hedge funds
“So in venture, the advantages might be around personal brand, firm brand. On the buyout side, it might be really around their ability to add value post-close. And on the long only or hedge fund side, it might look, it might be much more around their approach t…”
Aug 30, 2021 positive
Oct 25, 2021 neutral
Oct 25, 2021 bearish
Oct 25, 2021 neutral
Oct 25, 2021 negative
VC funds cannot afford concentrated bets in regulatory-risk sectors like Chinese education
“Lately, I've been thinking a lot about risk management because I've been thinking about China and some of the manager's That we're so overweight in some of the education companies and things like that. You can't really do that in venture capital because it's a…”
Nov 1, 2021 negative
Singh: Venture capitalists consistently misunderstand and overestimate true serviceable market sizes
“So my greatest investment recipe is historically, I would say everybody misunderstands TAM. When you look at venture capital, everyone's like, Hey, I've got this platform that's going to get real estate investing online. Real estate's a 10 trillion dollar indu…”
Nov 4, 2021 negative
Nov 4, 2021
Nov 4, 2021
Nov 4, 2021 neutral
Nov 18, 2021
Samani: Market timing is the hardest risk for venture investors
“The one that I would say we consistently struggle with the most, and I think most other VCs also probably struggle with the most is timing. Being too early is always painful. It sucks being too late. It's usually easier to tell if you're too late than it is to…”
Nov 24, 2021 neutral
Nov 29, 2021
Dec 16, 2021 positive
Dec 16, 2021 positive
Dec 16, 2021 negative
Dec 30, 2021
Dec 30, 2021 positive
Yuppin: Early-stage VC funds outperform mature firms weighed down by fund size
“You're looking for earlier stage funds because you often see much higher performance when life is simple, fund size is smaller, and you have the singular mission of just investing. Things get really complicated by fund eight, nine. Firms are big. You're on Doz…”
Dec 30, 2021 bullish
Montgomery: VCs should hold top companies longer via life cycle funds
“I think you want to own these companies forever. I mean, I think they're great companies, and you sell them, and you pay tax. Could we have more of a life cycle? Yeah, I think that's a lesson learned, that we probably could stay in these companies longer, and …”
Dec 30, 2021 positive
Montgomery: VCs must concentrate aggressively when finding rare standout companies
“And then if you're lucky enough to find a good company every couple years, like a CrowdStrike, and you really figure that out, and you gotta back up the bus, because you're not, those don't come along every month. I don't think there's that many great opportun…”
Dec 30, 2021
Jan 3, 2022 positive
Rosenthal: Y Combinator proves early-stage VC scales because founders avoid help
“Well, it turns out there's a whole class of entrepreneurs, a large percentage of them that don't need or want your help. So I would actually push back. I think it actually can scale quite well. Y Combinator's a perfect example of this. They've done thousands a…”
Jan 3, 2022 neutral
Gilbert: Early venture capital had no stages, just $2 million checks
“There was no real notion of early stage venture capital versus late stage venture capital. There was venture capital, and that meant writing a two-ish million dollar check, and hopefully that was enough to get the company profitable so that it could go public.”
Jan 3, 2022 positive
Jan 3, 2022 neutral
Gilbert: Startup investing is no longer venture capital, just capital
“So I think my one liner on what is it today is it's no longer venture capital. It's just capital. And by that I mean, with very few exceptions, you look at maybe incubation, maybe like true pre-seed, There are public market investors and very wealthy individua…”
Jan 3, 2022 positive
Rosenthal: Andreessen Horowitz reshaped venture capital through high-velocity seed investing
“And Andreessen was the firm that really got this. It started deploying tons of capital, doing lots of seed investments, high valuations, high capital velocity deployment, and really has reshaped the whole industry around it.”
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 neutral
Jan 10, 2022 neutral
Jan 24, 2022 neutral
Grinda: Top two super unicorns each decade create 40% of VC value
“So the top two deals of each decade, which are the super unicorns, create 40% of the value. The next 20 deals, which are like decacorns, create another 20% of the value. The next hundred deals that are the unicorns create another 20% of the value, and the rest…”
Jan 24, 2022 negative
Jan 31, 2022 neutral
Hamed: Early-stage venture capitalists are effectively just merchant bankers
“The term that most people in venture capital wouldn't want me to use Is that we're sort of merchant bankers. We run around, we invest some of our own capital. And then our job is to tell the rest of the market that they should invest at a higher price. And so …”
Jan 31, 2022 negative
Hamed: Venture capital is a sales asset class, not an investing one
“Venture capital often becomes more of a sales and business development asset class than it does an investing asset class. It's very rare that in venture, you're crunching a bunch of data, whereas in credit, you're just relying on the data.”
Jan 31, 2022 neutral
Jan 31, 2022 negative
Jan 31, 2022 neutral
Hamed: Venture investing means turning contrarian ideas into consensus within 12 months
“It's sort of a contrarian business, but what it really is, it's a contrarian business that you're really working hard to turn into a consensus business. If you invest in a company and 12 months later is still contrarian, the company's gonna run out of money un…”
Jan 31, 2022 neutral
Hamed: Seed deals need 30x to 50x returns, Series A needs 10x
“And really loose venture math is often something like you need a 30 to 50 X return if you do a seed deal, you need a 10 to 20 X if you're going to do a series A deal, and about a 10 X if you're going to do a series B deal, deduced by how many of the companies …”
Feb 14, 2022 negative
Feb 14, 2022 negative
Kayden: Successful venture investing requires securing ownership early at Series A
“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.”
Feb 14, 2022 bullish
Kayden: Blockchain is a fundamental technology disruptive to venture capital
“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…”
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Wolfe: Average Venture Investor Does Cursory Diligence and Wings Decisions
“And in this environment, the amount of diligence that the average investor is doing to identify those risks is cursory at best. It is like showing up for the finals exam if you're in college or, you know, your kids and just winging it. People are just winging …”
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Wolfe: Venture Returns and LP Cash Distributions Will Slow or Turn Negative
“Eventually the great things that we've seen over the past few years, which are exceptional returns, not just unrealized, but realized and returned and distributed cash to LPs is going to either slow down or reverse and potentially be negative, which is somethi…”
Feb 21, 2022 bearish
Wolfe: Sub-$10M ARR Startups Routinely Received Billion-Dollar Valuations
“Remember, you're investing in companies where the new normal has been that a company with five or seven or eight or sub-ten million ARR, annual recurring revenue, is getting a billion-dollar valuation. We used to look at things where it was like one or two or …”
Mar 7, 2022 bullish
Mar 14, 2022 negative
Sethi: Venture valuations are inflated at seed and late stages
“It's really, really early at the seed stage. You have a, maybe a product, a team or an idea, maybe you have a demo, but you're mainly going off of a narrative that people get excited about. And so people bid that. And that's the market price that you pay. So i…”
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Quintini: High capital velocity harms company, employee, and LP returns
“The abundance of capital and the velocity of capital makes investing companies, you know, for certain funds and certain dynamics, almost like cheap options. And for founders, that's their one shot. That's a career. That's a livelihood and their employees lives…”
Mar 21, 2022 negative
Mar 28, 2022 positive
Xu: Traditional VC fund lifespans force premature exits from winning investments
“So I think the biggest mistake, if you ask me, is that we're not able to hold on to the winner because the fund has limited life. And the once and all solve this problem is just have this evergreen structure that enable us to hold on to a winner for a long, lo…”
Mar 28, 2022 bearish
Xu: Venture capital firms relying on global investment committees will fail
“First of all, I think venture capital is a very local business, because you have to fill the market, not only you meet the entrepreneur, then the consumer, the competitor, it has to be a local decision. Whoever has a global decision, you know, I see city in Ne…”
Apr 4, 2022 neutral
Papa: Post-2000 VCs Shifted Completely from Backing Inexperience to Seasoned Operators
“In 99, the temporal wisdom was back folks without experience because they'll see new ways of solving problems. So it became an asset to be inexperienced. Once we got through 2000, the pendulum swung all the way back hard. All investors wanted to see is that yo…”
Apr 4, 2022 negative
Papa: VCs succeed through luck and portfolio theory, not picking genius
“The thing about venture capital is you have folks that are wrong more than half the time, yet claim their geniuses that they knew exactly the right companies to pick. It's really portfolio theory. That's their friend. They're getting lucky. It'd be much more h…”
Apr 4, 2022
Papa: Early-stage venture will always be regional because trust requires prior relationships
“One of the reasons you're always going to have some regional nature in the earlier stages of these is if you're backing great people, it tends to be someone you already know. You're going to have more confidence. You're going to stretch more. You're going to s…”
Apr 11, 2022 positive
Apr 11, 2022 neutral
Apr 11, 2022 positive
Arthur Rock built the first modern venture capital fund
“Arthur Rock, who was the pioneer of West Coast venture capital, because he was the one who was the first then to set up a fund that succeeded, that we would recognize as similar to the funds that we see today. And he was also the first one to really Invest in …”
Apr 18, 2022
Venture capital requires acting as a promoter despite a 90% failure rate
“If anybody thinks venture is easy, they are out of their tree. It is incredibly difficult. You have to get, you have to be a salesperson. You have to promote things and think they're the best thing ever, if you're a good venture capitalist, realizing that you'…”
May 2, 2022 neutral
Dowling: Leave venture allocations unfilled if lacking access to premier managers
“It is a access class, not just an asset class, and so that means you may not be able to do as much venture. There's still great venture companies out there. It's the new breed, the people that leave the larger firms and start up and do great at a smaller size,…”
May 5, 2022 bullish
Drobny: Private markets are effectively long equity; macro provides real diversification
“Venture strategies, private equity, real estate, they're all equity strategies, and so if you look at your portfolio, you're going to be long S&P, basically. So macro provides a diversifier, and if it's not working, great, the rest of your portfolio is working…”
May 16, 2022 neutral
May 16, 2022 neutral
Under-allocated LPs will keep venture fundraising active despite institutional crowding
“I think it will make it a little more difficult for fundraising, but with that said, I still think there are enough potential LPs that had difficulty getting access where there's still going to be allocations made to venture from LPs that are under allocated t…”
May 16, 2022 bullish
May 23, 2022 negative
Libby: Non-lead venture capital firms offering generic operational help are redundant
“If you're not going to get one of the top VCs, you don't need five VCs that are all doing the same thing. Like, oh, we'll help you with talent, and we'll do this and that. 10 years ago that mattered, but now all those tools are available to the companies.”
May 23, 2022 bearish
Libby: Lower-cost ETF equivalents will disrupt traditional venture capital fee structures
“I think that that's going to come to the venture world too. It's been a momentum trade. And so if you're Sequoia or Forerunner or Bessemer, you have services and tools. I think it's going to be hard to prove that you should be getting two in 20 versus an ETF e…”
Jun 13, 2022 neutral
Veremis: Most institutions treat crypto as a venture capital sub-allocation
“I think at this point, It is considered a sub-allocation to venture capital by the vast majority of institutions, and it's just a much more volatile subset of venture capital because there, there's early liquidity, you know, portfolios start having marks, they…”
Jun 13, 2022 positive
Jun 13, 2022 neutral
Jun 16, 2022 bullish
Jul 7, 2022
Jul 18, 2022 bearish
Giannini: Venture capital is entering a difficult five-year downturn
“That cyclicality has not been changed, and I suspect we're in for a fairly difficult period of time in the venture world. And unfortunately, That takes time. Look at the 2000 and I'm not at all suggesting we're going to be like 2000. I don't think we are, but …”
Aug 4, 2022 positive
Aug 15, 2022
Enright: Unlike VCs, Hedge Fund LPs Advise Against Multi-Manager Partnerships
“VCs are always advising founders of businesses, get a partner. You don't want to go through this alone. It's lonely, but LPs are always advising hedge funds. Don't be a multi-manager. Don't have partners. It gets complicated. And so it can be a very isolating …”
Sep 5, 2022 neutral
Seides: Hedge funds lack playbooks because founders rarely launch second funds
“Unlike in, say, venture capital, the ecosystem around hedge funds has no information base of entrepreneurship, because if somebody starts a successful hedge fund, they never start another business, so there's no opportunity to say, I'm a serial entrepreneur in…”
Sep 5, 2022 negative
Ted Seides: Private equity and venture capital are impractical for retail investors
“Things like venture capital and private equity and real estate investing all require a lot of resources to either find the deals or to find the managers who are conducting those deals globally. Those investment areas, the winners tend to be very plugged in and…”
Sep 19, 2022 neutral
Nov 14, 2022 neutral
Jan 23, 2023 negative
Thomas: Under 2% of VC goes to women and diverse-owned firms
“When we look at markets like venture capital, and you say less than two percent of that capital is allocated to women in diverse-owned firms, but women and ethnically diverse people make up 70% of the population in expanding, that's a huge disconnect.”
Feb 27, 2023 positive
Feb 27, 2023
Feb 27, 2023 negative
Feb 27, 2023 neutral
Feb 27, 2023 negative
Apr 3, 2023
Joy: Church Commissioners holds 13% to 14% in private equity, split evenly between buyout and VC
“So we've been in private equity investing since the mid-nineteen nineties. It's roughly about 13 to 14% of our overall book, which is a sizable amount, but it's not nearly as big as some other investors have. I'm happy with that. It's roughly split equal betwe…”
Apr 17, 2023 positive
Toomey: Venture and Asia require more diversification than North American buyout
“You probably should have more diversification in venture in Asia than you do in the North American buyout market because the dispersion of returns that our QIS team has shown over the 40 years of data that we have says you do want to grab some of that right ha…”
Apr 17, 2023 bearish
Toomey: Crossover and Mutual Fund Tech Managers Saw 25% Valuation Drops
“And I think certain managers, particularly the crossover investors, the mutual fund investors that publish their company valuations every quarter now, they really invested into that and took those valuations up to full value. That's where we saw the greatest d…”
May 8, 2023 neutral
May 22, 2023
Falls: Andover's VC Exposure Hit Nearly 35% of Endowment in 1999
“So we were pretty heavily invested in venture capital. Andover was an early mover in venture capital in the eighties. So we were early investors in funds like Matrix and some others. And that had risen to, in 99, to be almost 35% of the endowment. It was like …”
May 25, 2023 bullish
May 25, 2023 bearish
Jun 12, 2023 negative
Jul 13, 2023 neutral
Jul 13, 2023 positive
Unlike VC, buyout private equity thrives on multi-tiered secondary sales
“On the flip side, if you go to the buyout world, it's this evolution of man, the lower middle market folks. Get companies, and they sell to the middle market folks, sell to the large cap folks, and you have that virtuous cycle. And actually, you have situation…”
Jul 13, 2023
Jul 13, 2023
Traditional venture capital operates on an 'IPO or bust' ethos
“Since the dawn of venture capital, it's been IPO or bust. You're going to have these, we call them needle movers, these iconic companies that really define venture capital and define venture capital firms. The quest is about that versus we've got really good c…”
Jul 13, 2023 positive
Investors must build a 'goodwill bank' to ask founders tough questions
“Building a relationship, coffees, dinners, lunches, whatever, with the CEO, with the management team, because what you're doing is you're building trust and respect, and you're building this goodwill bank such that when tough times happen, you have the agency …”
Jul 13, 2023 negative
Traditional venture operating partners lack full status and check-writing power
“Probably the biggest difference is they're not full partners, and sometimes they're not in the full partner meetings, and they don't have the check writing capability in that if there's a follow-on or some financing, they have to go back to the partner group o…”
Sep 9, 2023 bearish
Seides: Aggregate venture capital returns fail to compensate for risk
“Over reasonably long periods of time, aggregate venture returns more or less match marketable equity returns, indicating the providers of capital fail to receive compensation for the substantial risk inherent in startup investing.”
Sep 11, 2023 neutral
Sep 25, 2023 positive
David Swensen modeled Yale's real estate strategy on private equity and VC
“David Swenson was a first principles investor, and he looked at the real estate business in the eighties and said, this doesn't make any sense. And he thought that the fee-based nature of the business, there was no alignment of interest. There was lots of sepa…”
Oct 2, 2023
Oct 23, 2023 negative
Mercer's Sebusch: Short 2-to-5-year carry vesting destroys venture fund alignment
“I've seen An explosion of short vesting schedules of two to four to five years, and it's just not great alignment. I don't want a GP to be able to leave after two years, get a hundred percent of their carry, sit on the beach, and now the team or the LP base ha…”
Oct 30, 2023 neutral
Ou: GroveStreet targets VC, growth equity, and sub-$1.5B buyout funds
“Our targets have remained quite consistent over the 25 years, and those are venture capital, growth equity, and lower mid-market buyouts, which we typically define as funds sub one and a half billion dollars, and we do them through commitments to funds and co-…”
Oct 30, 2023 positive
Oct 30, 2023 bearish
Nov 13, 2023 positive
Heitzmann: Top founders now seek hands-on investor help over pure capital
“The interesting part of this phase of the market, whereas maybe in the 2020 to 20 22 time, folks just wanted the money with the least amount of dilution. If you don't want to take a board seat, great. I don't really need it. I just want the money. I think the …”
Nov 13, 2023 bearish
Heitzmann: Thousands of startups needing capital will fail by late 2024
“There's thousands of companies that are going to need capital between now and the end of 24. The investors at almost every stage have generally been hurt by the macroeconomic environment. The purse strings are pretty tight. But the amount of companies that may…”
Nov 23, 2023 bullish
Nov 23, 2023 positive
Dec 18, 2023 negative
Sernovitz: VCs mistakenly intellectualize macro tailwinds as proprietary investing philosophy
“The one thing I'm really fascinated is the need to make this a philosophy, to make this a structure, to make this a long LinkedIn post, to make this a TED talk about what investing is, what meaning is, and to analogize to science when, in fact, it's just as ha…”
Dec 18, 2023
Jan 1, 2024 negative
Housel: Excessive VC Capital Broke Good Businesses by Forcing Unnatural Growth
“There were so many businesses in the last decade that were good businesses with a good product that customers loved. And let's say their natural growth rate was 50% per year. Just throwing that out there. But a lot of VCs are like, oh, we're going to give you …”
Jan 8, 2024 bearish
Marshall: Slow deal volume will strain firm management in venture and biotech
“I think we're going to start seeing this in venture and bio right now, and maybe real estate where deal volume is slow. What are they doing all day? How do you manage that as the managing partner? You're going to start seeing that.”
Feb 19, 2024 positive
Mauboussin: Mandatory long lockups in VC and PE benefit investors
“And because venture and buyouts have essentially longer time horizons, whether people like it or not, they have to sit in their seats for a while. And that's actually, I think probably been to their benefit versus to their detriment.”
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Mar 11, 2024 bullish
Leffell: Aging VC and PE funds will soon create forced-selling opportunities
“Whether it's banks or fund selling, we're going to see opportunities where venture capital and private equity funds are winding down. They're at their ten-year Limit. Maybe they can get another year. They're gonna have to sell things.”
Apr 1, 2024
Apr 15, 2024 bearish
Apr 15, 2024
Apr 22, 2024 neutral
Morehead: In private funds, sector exposure drives risk far more than company age
“Now, a single venture capital company is a risky thing, but in how we're investing via funds, it's actually not that risky. So from our perspective on the private side, the thing that really drives risk is sector exposure”
Apr 22, 2024 positive
Apr 29, 2024 neutral
Johnson: Institutional Allocators Cannot Trade Venture NAV Cycles
“Venture is incredibly cyclical. There are going to be times when our venture NAV really spikes, and we just had that, and then it's going to come back down. I am in absolutely no position to trade our venture NAV. No one is. So that's not what I'm going to do.…”
Jun 3, 2024 neutral
Jul 8, 2024
Connaughton: Bain Capital started with VC and growth equity, not institutions
“We didn't have LPs that were institutional. We didn't know anybody on Wall Street. We actually started out in venture capital and growth equity because you could just write checks, didn't rely on other people's checks. And the money we raised was from the part…”
Aug 5, 2024 neutral
Simkin: Unlimited upside asymmetry won't stop venture capitalists from going broke
“But that does not mean because of the asymmetries that venture capital is a winning business because you've got this unlimited upside, or that insurance is a losing business because you've got this unlimited downside. Ultimately, what it comes down to is appro…”
Aug 12, 2024 negative
Samuels: First-time venture fund managers rarely understand portfolio construction
“I think portfolio construction is one thing, especially in the venture side, where newer funds, founders on the GP side, who haven't done this before, have very little idea of how to construct a portfolio, whether it's having reserves or position sizing, the p…”
Sep 9, 2024 negative
Sep 9, 2024 negative
Venture capital capacity limits restrict large public pension allocations
“So venture capital, for example, can be difficult for us to ask because the gating item for venture capital is oftentimes not capital. We have lots and lots of capital, but if someone has a five hundred million dollar fund and we say we want two hundred millio…”
Oct 7, 2024
Nesbitt: Manager selection drives returns in VC far more than beta
“In venture, you can make the right asset allocation decision, but if you can't get the best managers, or at least the top quartile managers, it's not going to matter. It's not going to deliver. That's most true in venture, maybe a little less so in buyout and …”
Oct 21, 2024 neutral
Briner: Late 1990s endowments were passive retirement posts for alumni
“Many endowments at that time were essentially where alumni went to retire after a successful career, and they put in some stocks and some bonds, and they didn't really do a whole lot, and so that profession was evolving massively at the time, in part the tech …”
Oct 25, 2024 neutral
$50M Commitment Is Subscale for New PE, Real Estate, and Hedge Funds
“Even if Yale wants to continue the relationship, the fifty million dollar commitment is subscale for most strategies. An early stage venture capital or small cap public equity manager may be ready to roll with fifty million dollars, but managers of real estate…”
Nov 18, 2024 neutral
Feb 3, 2025 bearish
Pompliano predicts Series A and later venture returns will compress to 15%
“Now, what we've seen over the last decade or so is so much capital coming to the market. Maybe there's been an incremental increase in the number of good companies created every year, but it's not kept pace with the amount of capital. And so my thought process…”
Feb 3, 2025 neutral
Pompliano claims average VC funds outperformed QQQ by 400 basis points
“QQQ's been compounding it, call it, 1313 and a half, maybe 14%, depending on what their starting point over the last decade or so. The average venture fund, if you give them all the credit for their paper marks, 17% a year or something, maybe 18%. So if you ju…”
Feb 24, 2025 negative
Mar 24, 2025
Dietrich allocates roughly 55% of its private portfolio to venture capital
“So if I take the 90 as a whole pie, a hundred percent, probably 55% of that pie is venture. And then the other is split evenly, roughly, between growth equity funds and buyout funds. We don't touch any real estate. We do very little in the energy space.”
Mar 24, 2025 positive
Multi-billion VC funds need 50% concentration in few winners to 4x
“When they see a company they've backed in the seed in Series A, they will lean in hard on the subsequent Rounds to the point where at the end of portfolio construction, they might have 40, 50% of the fund in three or four companies. That, to us, is exactly how…”
Mar 24, 2025
Mar 31, 2025 bearish
Reynolds: Thousands of Zombie VC Funds Will Never Raise Again
“There's thousands of zombie funds. In the market that will never raise another fund because their track record does not justify it, and because people will realize that venture is not a get-rich-quick scheme, that not everyone and their mother deserves to have…”
Mar 31, 2025 neutral
Reynolds: Institutional PE/VC allocations grew from under 1% to 5-10%
“The exposure to Private equity and venture capital for most institutional investors when I started there was probably less than one percent on average, and by the time I left it was probably five or 10, so you can imagine the growth and the transformation that…”
Mar 31, 2025 neutral
Reynolds: 2020–2021 venture boom mirrored 2005–2007 buyout bubble
“The boom that happened in venture during the period that capital was free in 2020 and 20 21 felt very similar to me as the boom of excessive leverage in oh five, oh six, oh seven, in that you had investors that were increasing allocations to an asset class.”
May 26, 2025 neutral
May 26, 2025 neutral
Portfolios targeting 9% to 10% long-term returns do not need venture capital
“If you told me that your target return over the long haul was nine or 10%, which is going to be U.S. Large cap equities in long-term capital market assumptions, you don't need to venture in your portfolio to achieve that.”
May 26, 2025
Jul 14, 2025 neutral
Jul 14, 2025
Sullivan: Top-tier VC list is broader today than 15-20 years ago
“The list of who's a top tier venture capitalist is maybe a little broader than it was 15 or 20 years ago, and there are probably more people that have, from a standing start, been able to move into that realm than was the case for a lot of my career.”
Jul 14, 2025 negative
Jul 14, 2025
Jul 14, 2025 positive
Sullivan: Venture capital is driven by a self-reinforcing success feedback loop
“It is such a feedback loop business where success begets success. The best venture firms would attract the best entrepreneurs. They had the best corporate relationships. They could hire the best partners. If you were an entrepreneur needing help with your star…”
Jul 14, 2025 neutral
Sep 1, 2025 neutral
Arndt: Future Fund holds over $2B in venture exposure
“We've worked very hard to slowly build the portfolio to the point where today it's about a bit over two billion dollars of exposure, which is meaningful to some extent at the fund level, but more importantly, it's also very diversifying from the rest of the fu…”
Sep 1, 2025 negative
Arndt: Fund-wide fee caps risk cutting out hedge funds, PE, and VC
“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…”
Sep 1, 2025 positive
Arndt: Venture capital outperformance is exceptionally persistent compared to other asset classes
“Firstly, our research showed that unlike almost any other asset class, the strongly performing managers tend to be persistent. And I think that's probably due to the fact that the entrepreneurs are attracted to the people who backed the last successful deals a…”
Nov 6, 2025
Venture power laws demand broad indexing rather than attempting to pick winners
“The way that we think about the power law is, one, it's real. Most of the returns are gonna be driven by the big generational companies. Two, picking winners is very hard. Combining those two points, you need to be in every credible deal.”
Nov 10, 2025 bearish
Nov 10, 2025 negative
Ripley: Raising VC fund size without securing more ownership breaks fund math
“That's a major problem. We see that they want a bigger fund size, but they don't want to buy more ownership. And that's like saying, Hey, I want to start paying 15 times EBITDA for companies, but this company will grow really large. And so it'll be okay. At so…”
Nov 10, 2025
Nov 10, 2025 bearish
Nov 10, 2025 bearish
Nov 10, 2025 neutral
Dec 8, 2025 bearish
Wolfe: At least 50% of subscale VC funds will go out of business
“The long tail of funds that are subscale, I have predicted that you would see a 50% involuntary exit or extinction rate, that they would go out of business, and why? Because they're under-reserved, they've over-invested, they have too many portfolio companies,…”
Dec 22, 2025 neutral
Jan 12, 2026 negative
Feb 23, 2026
Feb 23, 2026 bearish
Feb 23, 2026
Grefenstette: Dietrich Foundation allocates an outlier 52% of total NAV to venture
“Dietrich Foundation is 1.6 billion in total assets, and we have pretty unusual allocation where about 90% of our assets are in private strategies. Venture capital alone is around 52% of the total NAV right now, which is quite the outlier”
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Warrington: Institutional LPs cannot reliably evaluate an early-stage venture manager's picking ability
“We can probably figure out how well someone can source, what networks are they in, and we can probably figure out whether they have that right to win. What we've accepted is Is that their ability to pick? We probably don't have the data points to properly asse…”
Feb 23, 2026 bullish
Feb 23, 2026 bearish
Grefenstette: An influx of copycat sector pitch decks signals a cycle peak
“Increasingly we've seen this pattern where there might be a targeted sector that we hadn't heard anyone spending a lot of time on, and then suddenly we get eight, nine people sending us decks highlighting this sector thesis. I want to pick on sports There are …”
Feb 23, 2026 bullish
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Warrington: Underwriting venture funds centers on a manager's right to win ownership
“Where we think about the math, it really boils down to the VC's right to win the check they're going to invest. What we mean by that is if someone's trying to own 20% of a company at the seed stage, They better have a good argument why that founder wants their…”
Feb 23, 2026 bearish
Mar 2, 2026
Baker: Atreides requires trusted founders or board VCs for large private bets
“I don't like to invest in a company and make it a big position unless it's either a repeat founder who I've had a long duration relationship with, or there is a VC who I have a close personal and professional relationship with, Who has a really good track reco…”
Mar 9, 2026 negative
Mar 23, 2026 negative
Grantham: Endowment boards struggle to manage giant egos of wealthy PE and VC donors
“Many committees are a nearly impossible task where, particularly in the endowment business, colleges, because rich graduates who've made big donations, Would love to sit on the board. They are treated with kid gloves because they're wonderfully good at making …”
Mar 23, 2026 positive
Mar 23, 2026 bullish
Apr 6, 2026 positive
Sub-$200M Venture Funds Offer Asymmetric Outcomes That Established Mega-Funds Cannot Match
“We should have more managers who are at that smaller level of the fund sizes, two hundred million and below, where their outcomes could be a 50 X or an 80 X. There's good reasons to invest with established managers. You end up paying a lot in fees for returns …”
Jun 22, 2026 bullish
Jul 27, 2026