Plaza Ventures Deploys 40% to 60% of Capital on Day One
Matthew Liebowitz · 1356 Early Employee Who Wants to Sell A Few Shares? Plaza Ventures New Model Is What You Need. · Apr 11, 2019 · at 5:05
Matthew Liebowitz, General Partner at Plaza Ventures, explains to Nathan Latka how his fund's investment structure provides more upfront transparency than traditional blind-pool venture capital funds.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Whereas what we're saying to our LPs is, Hey, here's where typically 40 to 60% of your capital is going on day one. So we've already diligenced these companies, and we basically raise a fund in lockstep with doing the investments.”
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 Matthew Liebowitz
Plaza Ventures raises annual funds, seeding one-third with internal capital
“So instead of raising a large one year, 10 year monolithic fund, we raise one or two funds every year. We seed each of the fund with about a third of our own capital.”
Plaza Ventures operates on a zero-fee, 20 percent carry model
“We don't actually charge any management fees in any of our funds. We take a 20% carried interest after a hundred percent return to capital. So, so think of us as a zero and 20 model.”
Plaza Ventures is the first dedicated tech secondary fund in Canada
“There's definitely, we identified about 40 groups in the U.S. That do this either as a core focus and or a sleeve on their platform, but we're first to market, believe it or not, in Canada.”
Canadian tech companies now scale to $100M+ revenue before exiting
“It used to be that you know, a company would get to five, ten million revenue and then sell. Now companies are much more bullish and are looking to go to a hundred million plus in revenue, and thus they have a lot more of an employee base that's underneath the…”
Plaza Ventures Targets 18 to 36 Month Secondary Liquidity Windows
“So we are not buying out other VC funds. We're not, the pitch is to the, to management is not, Hey, We're investing in your company and thus it could delay an IPO. It's actually quite the opposite. We're actually going down a level or two and going and buying …”
Plaza Ventures executes employee secondaries in lockstep with company CEOs
“So we're not going around the CEO. We're doing it in lockstep with them in parallel with them. And in fact, in every deal we've done thus far in every transaction we're looking at thus far, frankly, the CEO is our number one champion. And they've actually been…”