The Ledger
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Sullivan: Yale was an early backer of Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Mayfield
“Yale was already an investor with some of the preeminent firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, people like that.”
Sullivan: Yale backed virtually all 15 targeted venture firms within five years
“So we made a list of 15 different firms, went out and met all of them. Within five years, we were investors with virtually all of those firms, and most of them did fabulously well for us in the nineties and many since then, and some of them are still in our po…”
Sullivan: Scaled private equity firms are fragmenting into niche sub-verticals
“Some of the firms that verticalized 10 or 12 years ago are now creating sub verticals. The industrial team is not the industrial team anymore. There's the aerospace team, and the packaging team, and whatever else.”
Sullivan: Yale avoided private equity firms doing large public market buyouts
“We tended to avoid firms that did big things in the public markets.”
Sullivan: Sustained 30-40% PE IRRs inevitably get bid down by inflows
“If there's a world where firms are generating consistently 30, 40% IRRs, people are going to notice that, and some people are going to say, hey, I should do that too, and then the returns inevitably get bid down.”
Sullivan: During dot-com boom, some VC funds saw 90% of deals profit
“They'd have funds where 90% of the companies they invested in were profitable deals.”
Sullivan: Yale's VC managers rapidly grew from $200M to $1B funds
“Pretty much all of the venture firms we worked with, if in 1995, they were managing a two hundred million dollar fund. By 1999, they were managing a billion dollar fund. And then they were investing the billion dollar fund in nine months, which again, proved t…”
Sullivan: Diligencing VC firms requires speaking directly with portfolio CEOs
“We always found it extremely useful to talk to the CEOs and the entrepreneurs of the portfolio companies of the venture firms”
Sullivan: Allocators must verify managers offer more than just commodity capital
“Trying to find people where the answer is not just they had money is really important. That's true across the private investment world is there are tons of people with money. There's tons of money out there. You need to ask why the people that are making the d…”