venture capital
also referred to as: vc · vcs · venture capital industry
85 statements across 40 episodes · 21 bullish · 35 bearish · 40 people on the record · first statement Feb 1, 2024 by Xander Oltmann · across every show →
Everything said about venture capital, oldest first
Feb 1, 2024 bullish
Oltmann: VC deployment, late-stage check sizes, and deal volume will surge in H2 2024
“And then the second half of this year I think we're going to see a significant increase in just dollars deployed from venture funds. That's also going to be on, you know, individual check sizes, I think are going to go up again in the later stages. And then al…”
Mar 3, 2024 bearish
Kolicich: Venture capital will shrink over five years unless AI takes off
“I don't think it's gonna, you know, the space is gonna crash or everybody leave overnight, but I think just slowly over the next five years, unless AI really takes off, you'll see a general shrinking of venture capital, I think”
Mar 8, 2024 neutral
Weisburd: Power laws in VC end around a $100M valuation
“Power laws pretty much end at about a hundred million dollar valuation, right? Depending on obviously like whether stuff will expand, you can't invest out a five hundred million dollar valuation, get a thousand X. It's just the math. Math doesn't work”
Mar 8, 2024 bearish
Weisburd: VC Is the Worst Asset Class Outside the Top Quartile
“Venture capital is also the worst asset class on the planet as well. There's not many funds where you can invest and you could lose money or lose like half your money. So venture capital is all about getting into the top, top quartile and getting to those top …”
Mar 8, 2024 positive
Mar 8, 2024 bullish
Mar 8, 2024 neutral
Mar 8, 2024 neutral
Mar 8, 2024 neutral
Weisburd: LPs lack true returns data to evaluate VCs until Fund 4
“What's kind of crazy about VC is that you don't really know until fund four. Why is that? Because you typically are raising in two, three year increments. So you don't really know. You don't really have DPI until let's say fund three. So you don't know. You do…”
Mar 8, 2024 neutral
Weisburd: DPI is ground truth for VC returns, but a lagging indicator
“So I think DPI is important. And DPI is kind of like ground truth. Like it's an equalizer. You could be the worst marketer in the world, but eventually like your DPI will catch up. Right? So it is a great equalizer is the most empirical fact, but it is a highl…”
Mar 8, 2024 positive
Weisburd: Investors should allocate capital in six-to-seven-year increments
“One key thing is to always be in the market, always be time diversified. And there's a very actionable way to do that, which is you make sure you invest in six to seven year increments. So you're putting in a sixth of your money every year to make sure that yo…”
Mar 8, 2024 positive
Weisburd: Selling 10% to 20% of big winners generates DPI to raise next fund
“I think you sell 10, 10, 15, 20%. A lot of LGPs get short-term greedy. They're like, well, I wanted to let it ride and get more carry. Well, first of all, I could go down to zero. But secondly, if they're really thinking, you know, strategically, that DPI will…”
Mar 8, 2024 negative
Weisburd: The idea that VC performance takes 15 years to evaluate is idiotic
“A lot of people say, you don't know until year 15 whether you're good at VC. That's completely idiotic because you obviously have people marking you up. Once you get to a series B, you could sell via secondary. So whether or not you choose to sell does not mea…”
Apr 7, 2024 neutral
Housel: VC funds' top winners are rarely the investments expected to drive returns
“When they look back in hindsight and they have two or three massive, massive winners, massive exits by and large, those were not the companies that they expected to be driving their portfolio returns when they first made those investments. And by and large, th…”
Apr 7, 2024
Housel: Investors must believe absurd stories because winning startups also sounded ridiculous
“So the fact that we can point out Theranos and FTX and WeWork, I think doesn't do justice to say that, like, you shouldn't believe in ridiculous stories, because the ones that do work out were also ridiculous stories.”
Apr 7, 2024 neutral
Housel: Capital cycles inevitably attract tourist investors who leave in downturns
“It's always the case that whenever you have a capital cycle in any, whether it's public markets or private equity or VC, that you're going to get a lot of
Tourist investors, people who are there because it's fun and they want to be there to enjoy the view, but…”
Apr 7, 2024 bearish
Apr 7, 2024 bearish
Apr 7, 2024 neutral
Jun 14, 2024
Jun 14, 2024 negative
Jun 14, 2024 positive
Jun 14, 2024 neutral
Hunter Walk: Only 5% of VCs are exceptional and 5% are horrible
“And then you get inside the industry and you realize like, actually it's a single hump. There's five percent of VCs who are really, really good at what they do. And even part of that is self-awareness, right? Oh, I'm best in these situations and this stage of …”
Jun 28, 2024 negative
Jun 28, 2024
Suster: Seed funds take 15 years to yield most profits
“A seed fund has a 10 to 12 year maturity, and it's really more like 15 years, and that's just the truth about venture capital. It takes longer for your fund to mature, and you might return your fund in year seven, eight, or nine, but you're yielding most of th…”
Jun 28, 2024
Mark Suster says VCs must time trends for five-year horizons
“So it's our job to invest in something that we believe is going to happen in five years and being correct. If it's going to happen in a year, you probably missed the trend and there's probably 10 other VCs that were investing four years ago. And if you invest …”
Jun 28, 2024 negative
Jun 28, 2024 positive
Suster: A VC's job is to be a sparring partner, not the decider
“I view it as our job to like be a sparring partner and it's lonely being CEO. I was CEO twice is very lonely and you don't get a lot of advice. And when you get advice, most of it is not applicable. And so I view it as our job to have an opinion and to state t…”
Jun 28, 2024 bearish
Jul 24, 2024 negative
Jul 24, 2024 negative
Sep 20, 2024
Alter: Deal droughts and sunk costs cause severe VC cognitive biases
“There's things like discovery bias, which is sort of the notion of, I found this investment, so I love it, and it's personal to me. Or there's sunk cost bias, which is really common as well. You know, I spent three weeks in due diligence, so I love it. Or, you…”
Dec 20, 2024 neutral
Banister: VC money is fungible; differentiation comes from ethics and values
“Well, if you think about it, all VCs are kind of, we have money, it's the same, right? It's not, the money's not different. So what makes us stand apart is our ethics, and who we are, and what we stand for, and our compass.”
Jan 30, 2025 bearish
Ritter: VC industry received more capital in 2020-2021 than it needs
“What is different this time is the amount of money that's in this industry right now. It is, there is so much capital that came in over the pandemic and in the 20, 21 timeframe that that is you know, it's probably more than the industry needs”
Jan 30, 2025 positive
Ritter: LPs Know Real Venture Returns Come from Early Stage, Not Late Stage
“Most of the LPs that are backing this segment, the venture capital segment, know that the real returns come from early stage and later stage is great, but it's a different, it's closer to their buyout category than it is to their what they call venture capital…”
Jan 30, 2025 neutral
Ritter: Mega-funds require 5 to 10 hits to match smaller fund multiples
“Venture is a hits business and you have to be able to have one or two really exciting companies in each portfolio and produce wonderful LP returns for our investors. And if you're either too small where you simply can't be in those great companies or too big w…”
Feb 14, 2025 negative
McCormick: Much of VC Diligence Is Performative Theater to Justify Deals
“Cause I do think there's like just so much venture theater. Where, like, you just have to do a bunch of stuff because, like, your boss, you know, your GP expects it, or their LPs expect it. Like, there's just a bunch of, like, shit that you have to produce to,…”
Mar 14, 2025 positive
Mar 14, 2025 negative
Mar 14, 2025 negative
Mar 28, 2025 neutral
Mar 28, 2025 positive
May 5, 2025 negative
May 5, 2025
Moore: Deciding which founders to pursue is the limiting factor in venture
“The limiting factor is really who do you choose to do that work with, right? You cannot do it with 20 different companies at once. And so there is this element of taste and picking that goes into that that I think you actually have to take very, very seriously…”
Jun 27, 2025 bullish
Altman: AI applications are the best venture investment opportunity in 2025
“Applications are just like the
Obvious place for me, both because of my background, but it's also what I think is like the best place for venture in 20, 25 to be investing because you're basically investing behind the fundamental belief that like AI is going t…”
Jun 27, 2025 negative
Jun 27, 2025 bullish
Altman: Mid-sized VC funds can succeed despite Andreessen's barbell theory
“Marc Andreessen mentioned that There's basically this barbell where you can either be really small, you can be really big. The middle is not there, but I had a guest recently that I haven't posted yet who, you know, we didn't talk numbers, but I would say is i…”
Jul 3, 2025
Jul 10, 2025 neutral
VCs will block life-changing startup acquisitions that miss fund return thresholds
“I think the truth is that even with your board as a founder, I'm not sure your incentives are completely aligned because it's back to, well, first of all, what is the price on the table, right? Is it a nice two or three X for the VCs on the board or not? Becau…”
Jul 25, 2025
Jul 25, 2025 bearish
Jul 25, 2025 bearish
Vasavada: Pension Funds and Endowments Are Overallocated to Venture
“So if you look at the side of the managers, most managers are tapped out on LPs.
So if you go, if you're starting a venture fund tomorrow or you're starting a new middle market private equity fund and you're going to go pitch the traditional pension funds, end…”
Aug 6, 2025 bullish
Aug 18, 2025 bearish
Aug 22, 2025 bullish
Oetting: Growth Hardtech Needs Risk-Tolerant Infrastructure Project Financing
“There's a big gap between using venture capital and the private credit markets that are more traditional and sort of profit oriented. And there really needs to be an basically infrastructure financing or project financing for growth stage businesses. That's a …”
Aug 27, 2025
Agrawal: Just 0.3% of Startups Generate 90% of Venture Gross Profits
“The rough math of our business is there's 5000 companies that raise every year that we track. 500 of those, so 10% of those, will raise from tier one investors, 15 of the 5000 will return over 90% of the gross profits for a given vintage.”
Oct 3, 2025 bullish
Oct 17, 2025 positive
Gil: No investor can out-ideate thousands of founders acting as distributed search
“You could think of them as a distributed search function, right? You have thousands of people exploring all the space of entrepreneurship. And so how can any one person or small group of people come up with better ideas and thousands of people in a distributed…”
Oct 30, 2025 neutral
Lin: Doubling Valuations Halves Fund Shots and Demands Double Conviction
“But if you double the valuation, that means you have half the number of shots that you can deploy. You just have to be twice as good. And so my push for the industry is if you're going to write a check that is twice as large for the, then you need to have twic…”
Oct 30, 2025 bearish
Nov 29, 2025 neutral
Tusk: High-quality startups generally do not need an investor's cash
“Like, any really great startup to get into typically doesn't need your money in the first place, right? Anyone who desperately needs your money There might be a reason why. I mean, occasionally there's a diamond in the rough that no one believed in, but genera…”
Nov 29, 2025 negative
Tusk: Institutional LPs want familiar strategies, not truly differentiated ones
“What it turns out that institutional investors want to hear, they think they want a different, they say they want, they think they want a differentiated strategy. They don't. What they want is This is exactly what you already know and are comfortable with this…”
Nov 29, 2025 negative
Tusk: VCs who participate in political favor-trading will regret it
“From a long-term American standpoint, I actually think that we're gonna, VC as a sector, for those who participated in this, unless they just made so much money and only just care about how much money they have and nothing else, are gonna really regret it.”
Nov 29, 2025 bearish
Dec 18, 2025 positive
Stephens: Heavy portfolio concentration drives superior venture fund returns
“Concentration and venture is a really important one. This is like the idea that you don't want to have a thousand investments in a billion dollar fund. You want to have like a massive amount of concentration in the top few positions in that fund. That's someth…”
Dec 27, 2025
Mignano: Rapid AI fundraising rounds force VCs to invest earlier
“Some of these companies, you know, they're growing revenue so quickly that the rounds are happening in such quick succession. And oftentimes, if you're the seed investor and things are going kind of well, you might quickly do the series A. And then by the time…”
Dec 27, 2025 negative
Mignano: Venture capital ARR metrics are often poorly defined and misleading
“So w one of the things that I take a little bit of an issue with right now in venture is there's so much of a focus on this ARR number. And it's not even defined properly half the time, right? Like you might just take some of these companies are literally just…”
Dec 31, 2025 negative
Feb 5, 2026 negative
Das: Over-raising capital erodes startup hunger and hinders recruitment
“Because if you raise too much money, we've seen companies where this happens to, A, there's an illusion of success. So the people aren't hungry anymore. We're already successful. We're a billion dollar company. Can we even fail? Right? Like that's one. Number …”
Feb 5, 2026 negative
Das: Doing over three deals per partner annually prevents effective portfolio support
“If you're doing five plus deals per partner a year, definitely five, but I would argue like even three or four at some .2 years in, you're going to have like six companies that you're heavily involved with, and you're not really going to have time to do work f…”
Feb 5, 2026 neutral
Mar 11, 2026
Mar 27, 2026 neutral
Del Buono: AI Startup Check Sizes Make Fund Scale Essential in Venture
“All asset management industries have some scale benefits to them. Venture traditionally had less and now has a lot. So if you're going to back a new AI startup, you can't show up with a million dollar check or two million dollar check that it's useless or let …”
Mar 30, 2026 bullish
Mar 30, 2026 bearish
Mar 30, 2026 positive
Apr 20, 2026 negative
Apr 29, 2026 negative
Harrison: VCs chase market size while ignoring ethical consequences of investments
“Like, everybody should be having more philosophical debates about the things that they are investing in. We don't have nearly enough philosophical debates about the implications. We just say, Hey, this is a hot technology and it looks like it's ripping and peo…”
May 22, 2026 bearish
Jun 11, 2026 negative
Singerman argues venture capital should ignore portfolio management and reserve calculations
“Venture capital to me has put the most money into the best companies possible at the best price possible. Nowhere in that is like portfolio management and reserve calculations and ownership percentages and all that nonsense.”
Jun 14, 2026 negative
Jun 15, 2026 positive
Zhao: Narrative driving and storytelling are core to the venture capital role
“The role of an investor is very narrative oriented. You are often selling a startup, you are selling Investors in your fund. You're selling partners on why they should pick you, and so I think this idea of storytelling, this idea of narrative driving is core t…”
Jun 15, 2026 positive
Jul 6, 2026 negative
Miller: VCs making founders' funding rounds about themselves is 'cringeworthy'
“I mean, we always, I think we always kind of looked at the social media posts about a founder raising around and a VC making about themselves as like pretty cringeworth. Like, don't throw your shoulder out patting yourself on the back type of situation.”