Michel Del Buono, CIO of a16z Perennial, warns about indirect secondary vehicle structures and multi-layered employee SPVs used to trade shares in private tech companies.
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Del Buono: Most tech-focused RIAs have at most one or two professional investors
“So a lot of these firms do not have professional investors. So I often ask people as a quiz how many professional investors do you think are in, you know, RIA XYZ? And people will answer, I mean, percent, right? People answer me, 20%, 50%, 30%, but the number …”
Opinion
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 …”
Insight
Del Buono: Putting initial founder liquidity into friends' startups almost always fails
“I'll see someone with their very first liquidity, the very, very first liquidity, they take it and instead of doing something a little bit safe in case there's a rainy day, they turn around and they go put it in a bunch of like very early stage startups.
Often…”
Insight
Attorneys and CPAs ignore tax-loss strategies that rival complex trust structures
“Where I find that people have difficulty is you hire attorneys, right, and they're going to tell you everything about, or CPAs, about these trusts, but they're not going to have the knowledge
To compare that and contrast that to an investment strategy that gen…”
Insight
Wealth managers push diversification strictly to earn fees on founder stock
“Wealth managers, asset managers, It's very self-serving for them to say, hey, you should liquidate everything because obviously they can't, they're not going to charge you fees on your concentrate position. It's your stock. You brought it to the table, but the…”
Insight
Winning concentrated startup stock usually continues to perform well post-liquidity
“History has shown that hanging onto your stock Generally speaking, not always. There are counter examples, of course, to everything. Generally, you know, that stock that got you to the liquidity point will probably continue to do pretty well.”