Maggie Vo: Tech companies stay private much longer today than historically
Maggie Vo · Hedge Venture Capital: Innovating Risk Management in Early-Stage Investing with Fuel Venture Capital · Jul 11, 2025 · at 3:37
Maggie Vo, Managing Partner and CIO of Fuel Venture Capital, discusses market dynamics that drove investor capital from public markets into private venture investments around 2017.
0:00 / 0:21exact quote · 21.9s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“At that time, that's around 2017, a lot of technology companies decided to stay in the private market much longer than, you know, before, like you have Amazon went to the public market when it was only three years old. Nowadays, you have technology companies, you know, decide to go to the public market when they already, you know, 10 years old or have a, the valuation is already super high.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Maggie Vo
Vo: Traditional VC approach of buying 20% upfront is poor risk management
“Traditional venture capital, they normally like to write short a big check so that at the get go, they get 20% of the companies, right? Because you know, coming from the hedge fund, I do think that that's not the way, you know, the right way looking from the r…”
Vo: Founders cannot offload fundraising to VCs; it requires founder storytelling
“Fundraising is such a big thing when you know, being an intrapreneur, I come across some founders just like, I just want to operate companies, and I don't want to raise funds, and thinking that fundraising is our job, which I don't totally agree with it, but, …”
Vo: AI cannot fully replace humans and always requires human review
“I don't think that the AI can fully, you know, replace human. We always have to have the human look into it. And even everything I'm doing right now is always have to have somebody reviewing it.”
Vo: Retail investors should allocate 5% to 10% to venture capital
“Understand why this asset class is so important and deserve an allocation in the diversified portfolio and bring it to a retail client saying that you need to have five percent, 10% of your portfolio because this is so important because you want your portfolio…”
Fuel VC writes small initial checks and builds positions around KPI milestones
“So at Field Venture, we do face investing, right? We write short a small check. So that we can become an insider. We can, you know, helping you with what you need. And in the meantime, we build a conviction. So we don't just look at flip through the deck and t…”