Tag: Vc

  • The Venture Capitalist’s Paradox

    The Venture Capitalist’s Paradox

    Relying on market efficiency while investing in idiosyncrasy

    Venture capital is the hunt for outliers; ideas that are not well understood by the wider market. This strategy is rooted in the need for risk capital to finance frontier businesses.

    You can see how this played out in previous generations of tech: Amazon, Airbnb, Canva, Coinbase, Dropbox, Google, Shopify, Slack, Uber… All of these companies faced an uphill battle with investor interest, and went on to produce incredible exits for the early believers. Similarly, there are many examples where the founder’s own capital paved the way: SpaceX, Tesla, Palantir, Anduril…

    On the other hand, it seems relatively more difficult to find stories of competitive early rounds leading to great outcomes. Stripe, perhaps?

    This understanding of venture capital is reinforced by the data:

    We find that consensus entrants are less viable, while non-consensus entrants are more likely to prosper. Non-consensus entrepreneurs who buck the trends are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.

    The Non-consensus Entrepreneur: Organizational Responses to Vital Events

    Despite this, today’s venture capitalists have an absurd reliance on the market as their lens to understand value. Herd behavior drives investor attention, and (what passes for) valuation is primarily derived from relative measures like ARR multiples.

    Investors set out to generate alpha with their unique ability to recognise novel opportunities, but rely on broad market sentiment as a lens to understand what is worth pursuing.

    This paradox has stumped observers.

    This heavy reliance on comparable companies in the VC valuation process is perhaps unsurprising, given that relative pricing methods are not uncommon in M&A markets overall. What is less clear, however, is the exact driver behind this method, and the understanding of why a relative pricing methodology will impact startups’ valuations.

    What Drives Startup Valuations?

    Whether it’s marketplaces, crypto or today’s AI boom, capital herds into the category and drives up prices, and those prices then become “comps” for others.

    Ultimately, the surge in deals creates a greater volume of market data for that category, reducing information friction for investment, allowing for more deals to be made more quickly. This compounding influence quickly overheats activity.

    In addition to competition driving up prices and compressing due diligence timelines, there’s a further pernicious consequence: while information friction is reduced around the consensus, it is increased elsewhere.

    Founders building truly innovative products find themselves facing a wall of blank-faced investors programmed with category multiples. The difficulty of raising capital becomes so great that many simply reorient their ambition to lower quality projects closer to the experience of venture capitalists. This is clearly a fundamental failure:

    Information frictions in valuation can lead startups to select projects that align with the expertise of potential venture capital (VC) investors, a strategy I refer to as catering […] where a startup trades off project quality with the informational benefits of catering.

    Startup Catering to Venture Capitalists

    Fundamental Value

    If all of this was to hold true, we should see an increase in performance by the few VCs that maintain a lens on fundamental (rather than relative) value. In theory, these investors would be better able to recognise outlier value and unique opportunities.

    Indeed, that does appear to be the case. Multiple studies on venture capital investment performance and decision making processes have reached the conclusion that VCs would benefit from a better understanding of fundamental value:

    Venture capital funds who base their investment strategy on fundamental values and a long-term view seem to have a measurable advantage over those who engage in subjective short-term trading strategies.”

    How Fundamental are Fundamental Values?

    Ideally, a startup would combine a full fledged fundamental cash flow-based approach with a thorough comparable companies analysis to cover both its intrinsic value and a market-based measure.

    What Drives Startup Valuations?

    So, the paradox is laid bare and the remaining question is why this is the case. There are two potential explanations:

    1. VCs do not understand valuation. A decade of ZIRP-fuelled spreadsheet investing has destroyed the institutional understanding of risk and the purpose of venture capital.
    2. There are other incentives at work which explain this phenomenon; reasons why VCs would be reluctant to closely analyse fundamental value.

    Explanation 1: Hanlon’s Razor

    Unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of evidence to make the case that this is unintentional; a result of simple incompetence and herd behavior. Indeed, herding is a well-studied phenomenon in professional investment, particularly when insecurity is high:

    Under certain circumstances, managers simply mimic the investment decisions of other managers, ignoring substantive private information. Although this behavior is inefficient from a social standpoint, it can be rational from the perspective of managers who are concerned about their reputations in the labor market.

    Herd Behavior and Investment

    Chronic groupthink, and the atrophy of independent reasoning, further explains why VCs are also often unable to clearly articulate the process that goes into their investment decisions:

    The findings suggest that VCs are not good at introspecting about their own decision process. […] This lack of systematic understanding impedes learning. VCs cannot make accurate adjustments to their evaluation process if they do not truly understand it. Therefore, VCs may suffer from a systematic bias that impedes the performance of their investment portfolio.

    A lack of insight: do venture capitalists really understand their own decision process?

    Many VCs have simply emulated the practices of their peers without fully understanding why. Indeed, those peers probably couldn’t provide a rationale either. It’s an industry of investors copying each other’s homework while pretending to be original thinkers.

    Action without understanding purpose naturally erodes standards. Not only does this make VCs bad fiduciaries, it also precludes any learning and institutional development.

    Almost half of the VCs, particularly the early-stage, IT, and smaller VCs, admit to often making gut investment decisions. We also asked respondents whether they quantitatively analyze their past investment decisions and performance. This is very uncommon, with only one out of ten VCs doing so.

    How Do Venture Capitalists Make Decisions?

    Explanation 2: cui bono?

    The alternate theory is that there may be some genuine motive for VCs to avoid looking too carefully at fundamental value. That somehow they are able to profit from a reality in which it is not an important driver of activity.

    Perhaps it is simply because today’s VCs behave more like traders, rather than investors. That the easier opportunity is to glom onto hot categories and ride the exuberance to an overpriced exit somewhere down the line, rather than trying to find good investments.

    This is also not an original accusation:

    For those who are holding on to the belief that venture capitalists are the last bastion of smart money, it is time to let go. While there are a few exceptions, venture capitalists for the most part are traders on steroids, riding the momentum train, and being ridden over by it, when it turns.

    Putting the (Insta)cart before the Grocery (horse): A COVID Favorite’s Reality Check!

    Venture capital, as a discipline, runs an existential risk of invalidating itself by becoming institutionally what crypto is colloquially. If venture capital is just about “[creating] the impression [of] recoupment”, then its no better than the pump and dumps of the crypto bros.

    Institutionalized Belief In The Greater Fool

    Yet again, there’s evidence that this is the case.

    VCs are heavily influenced by market conditions, optimism and FOMO. None of these are original accusations, although it might be interesting to learn this has been demonstrated in research:

    The optimistic market sentiments and fears of missing out in hot markets can significantly shift VCs’ attention towards cheap talk, such as promises of high growth. Such conditions may even prompt VCs to neglect costly signals such as the profitability of new ventures.

    Venture Capitalists’ Decision Making in Hot and Cold Markets: The Effect of Signals and Cheap Talk

    This is confirmed by research looking at this question from the other side, where it is demonstrated that VCs are commensurately less likely to herd in periods with greater uncertainty and less optimistic momentum to channel capital:

    The study finds a significant negative relationship between economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and herding behavior, indicating that venture capitalists are more likely to make independent judgments when EPU rises.

    Economic policy uncertainty and herding behavior in venture capital market: Evidence from China

    Even when a VC talks about wanting to find category winners, they are also implicitly talking about riding a category. Were they hunting for genuine outliers, the category wouldn’t matter. There is a reason, for example, why some VCs widely publicise the categories they invest in as great opportunities, and others choose to keep any alpha for themselves.

    The final reason is simple: subjective, market-based pricing is opaque and open to manipulation. VCs can collectively produce and support higher marks regardless of underlying value. They can also choose to be “opportunistically optimistic” about a portfolio company:

    During fundraising periods the valuations tend to be inflated compared to other periods in the life of the fund. This has large effects on reported interim performance measures that appear in fundraising documents. We find a distinctive pattern of abnormal valuations which matches quite closely the period up to the first close of the follow on fund. It is hard to rationalize the pattern we observe except as a positive bias in valuation during fundraising.

    How Fair are the Valuations of Private Equity Funds?

    Indeed, much of the fallout post-2022 involved LPs feeling fairly miffed that managers weren’t being honest about underlying portfolio company value. As long as VCs broadly maintained marks, there was still hope to raise another fund on those mostly meaningless proxy metrics of performance.

    In Conclusion,

    • Many VCs choose to play a short-term trading game
      By focusing on market momentum, rather than companies, through relative valuation methods, VCs operate more like traders.
    • Most VCs take the path of least resistance when adopting practices
      While analysing fundamental value offers outperformance, relative value is easier to understand and offers strategic advantages.

    Most VCs identify as investors, and some of them still are. Mostly the smaller, boutique firms who were quick to realise that they could not compete in consensus categories against the multi-stage platforms.

    There is value in being a trader if you have multi-billion dollar funds and can both manifest and then coast on the beta of technology markets. They behave like market makers on the way up, extracting opportunistic liquidity, and can aim to concentrate resources into the handfull of winners before the market turns.

    This strategy is toxic to smaller investors, many of whom are simply washed out in the boom-and-bust cycles that this amplifies. Instead, these investors, focused on identifying true outliers, need to consider polishing their lens on fundamental value.

    (top image: Ascending and Descending by M.C. Escher)

  • Explorers and Industrialists

    Explorers and Industrialists

    The two faces of what we sometimes call venture capital, and the cognitive dissonance they create.

    This blog started out as a place to write about the intersection of science fiction and technology. The first article about venture capital, and the opium of consensus, emerged from watching VCs herd into thinly-veiled crypto scams in the name of “web3“.

    The influence of consensus remains poorly understood, and the subject of distracting counterfactuals, despite being widely discussed for as long as “investor” has been a profession.

    Words must have meaning

    Venture capital is the practice of identifying nascent business opportunities with radical potential; the application of process to extract outsized value from extreme idiosyncratic risk.

    In this context, venture capital is clearly not a consensus-oriented discipline. Both theoretical and quantitative perspectives support this reality; the intention, goals, behavior and performance.

    We find that consensus entrants are less viable, while non-consensus entrants are more likely to prosper. Non-consensus entrepreneurs who buck the trends are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.

    The Non-consensus Entrepreneur: Organizational Responses to Vital Events

    Simply look back at the early-days of venture capital’s largest outcomes, where the majority did not have investors competing for access, driving up the price. Fundraising was a struggle for those founders, and in that struggle was the opportunity for those on the other side of the table.

    It’s very hard to make money on successful and consensus. Because if something is already consensus then money will have already flooded in and the profit opportunity is gone. And so by definition in venture capital, if you are doing it right, you are continuously investing in things that are non-consensus at the time of investment.

    Marc Andreessen, a16z

    Indeed, if consensus were to play a meaningful role in venture capital, it would fail on the only two things it sets out to achieve:

    • Maximise ROI for LPs through idiosyncratic risk
    • Finance the development of novel innovations

    In addition, there is no such thing as a downstream supply of “non-consensus capital”. If you fund non-consensus companies then you have to be able to support them to the point where their potential is obvious and larger/later generalists can be convinced. It’s paradoxical to believe that other investors will share your non-consensus viewpoint.

    Cognitive dissonance

    The root of the confusion about consensus (and entry price, portfolio construction, attention, relationships…) is the mixing of two different private market strategies. One is venture capital, and the other is something else that just falls into the venture capital allocation bucket.

    This other strategy emerged in the period from 2011 to 2021, enabled by low interest-rates, as described by Everett Randle in “Playing different games“:

    Tiger identified several rules / norms / commonly held ideas in venture/growth that are stale & outdated and built a strategy to exploit the contemporary realities around those ideas at scale.

    Everett Randle, Kleiner Perkins

    The capital mechanics of this strategy were explained further by Kyle Harrison, in “The Unholy Trininty of Venture Capital“:

    So you have massive capital allocators looking for places they can farm yield and they don’t want to be slinging hundreds of $30M checks. Capital agglomerators represent the perfect solution. Hit your 7-8% yield target, be able to park $250M a pop without being the majority of the fund, and sit back and relax.

    Kyle Harrison, Contrary

    Versions of “bigger/faster/cheaper capital” have since been employed by other multi-stage platform firms, and the consquences are dramatic:

    If success in venture capital is driven by non-consensus investments, in less competitive ecosystems with more rational pricing, why would an investor pursue a strategy directly to the contrary?

    The answer is indicated in Martin Casado’s episode with Harry Stebbings, in which he described missing the category winner as the greatest sin of investing.

    This hunger to capture the most extreme “power law” category leaders is a requirement of the exit math involved in multi-billion dollar funds. Consequently, these platforms also raise substantial early-stage funds to index any emerging theme, putting an option on the future of those companies.

    A mega-VC with $5-10B annual funds is really searching for only one thing: a company they can pile over $1b into with a potential for 5-10X on the $1b. With this, seed fund is inconsequential money used to increase the odds of main objective.

    Bill Gurley, Benchmark

    The startup industrial complex that has emerged is not optimised for non-consensus investing, and nor does it need to be. Investors at these platforms are hired to compete and win in known areas — and have attitudes to match:

    Successful startups fit into a mold that investors understand, and that more often than not those startups attracted meaningful competition among top investors.

    Martin Casado, a16z

    If a company has tons of hype and seems overvalued, don’t run away. Run towards it. Hype is good. Means they’ll raise, exit at higher valuation. And the price likely won’t feel overpriced after the startup exits.

    Andrew Chen, a16z

    The output is a rough index of high-growth private technology companies. The platforms are harvesting the beta from innovation, rather than finding the alpha in outliers. Even the giant outcomes become so well/over-priced that their returns risk converging with benchmarks.

    Categorically, this is not venture capital in any meaningful sense.

    The only reason we call this venture is because LPs need to call it venture so CIOs can hit annual allocation targets they promised boards. This is venture allocation, not venture returns.

    Will Quist, Slow

    Venture Alpha and Venture Beta

    To repeat a point already well-hammered, the platform strategy is entirely different, with a different LP base, a different return profile, and different rules.

    The difference between the Andreessen quote above, and the more recent quotes from Chen and Casado, is simply that in 2014 Andreessen Horowitz was a venture capital firm. Today it is an asset manager, an RIA with a multi-stage platform strategy, perhaps best described as a venture bank.

    Many VCs have sought to assimilate “tier 1” multi-stage behavior, acting out what they believe LPs and peers expect to see despite the fundamentally incompatible models. This herding around identity and behavior reflects the extreme level of insecurity in venture capital, a product of the long feedback cycles and futility of trying to reproduce success in a world of exceptions.

    Venture Banks

    There is no harmony with venture capital, and the behaviors of these platform investors should not be emulated by venture capitalists — whether or not they also call themselves venture capitalists.

    To put a point on this: The platforms explicitly benefit from consensus and price inflation. Both are toxic to venture capital.

    As long as both strategies are discussed under the banner of venture capital, we’ll keep wasting time on pointless debates about markets and incentives, and investors will keep making dumb, confused decisions.

    (top image: A Steam Hammer at Work, by James Nasmyth)

  • Downstream of Seed

    Downstream of Seed

    One of the concepts we emphasize at Equidam is the inversion of qualitative and quantitative factors in startup valuation, as you go from Seed1 to pre-IPO funding.

    The archetypal Seed startup (perhaps just an idea) has nothing to measure. Investors must use their imagination, peer into the future, project a scenario. On the other hand, a startup raising the last round of private capital before an IPO will be weighed and measured almost entirely on financial metrics.

    Even as early as Series A you have access to some useful data. Can they actually build the thing? Do customers really want it? Does anyone want to work there? All sources of rich signal to help you make an objective decision about the company.

    Seed is different. Success comes down to the quality and consistency of your subjective, independent judgement. In many ways it is a unique discipline within the strategy of venture.

    What happens if you try to find a path in the data?

    You find…

    Essentially, it’s a hunt for outliers with no shortcuts and two specific qualifiers for any investment strategy:

    1. Any attempt to pattern-match to past success is going to dramatically limit your pool of opportunity, with no clear upside.
    2. Any constraints built into your investment strategy (sector, region, industry) are essentially a sacrifice of volatility (potential alpha).

    Thus, the ideal Seed investor is likely to be a generalist, with no preconceptions about what great founders look like, where they come from, or what they might be building.

    Rather than the hubris of a (supposed) rockstar stock-picker, Seed investors will find confidence through constructing solid processes, systematically rewarding good decisions and mitigating bad ones.

    They wont necessarily benefit from operational experience, but they will benefit from being able to recognise a good business. Indeed, some basic financial principles, often overlooked by today’s managers, can help uncover the potential in novel opportunities.

    Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they’ll have a firm grip on the biases which manifest in all forms of investing. Particularly the curse of overconfidence which erodes the positive influence of success.

    In summary, considering all of the above, we should expect Seed investors to present with an idiosyncratic worldview, some robust fundamental skills and an appetite for risk.

    Sadly, reality is the opposite: Seed investors are often risk-averse herd animals with little real competence. They have Rick Rubin-esque affectations, pontificating on ‘taste’ and ‘craft’, while copying each other’s homework and hiding deep insecurity.

    Why? Predictably, it’s the incentives.

    In the last 15 years we’ve seen the emergence of a Startup Industrial Complex, where a treadmill of capital, services and brand-strength was offered to participating firms and startups. If you wanted quick, reliable markups and easy downstream financing for your portfolio then you hopped on board.

    This movement destroyed the institutional contrarianism of Seed investing. Billions of dollars were piled into safe SaaS money-printers when capital was cheap. When the market for safe investments was saturated, investors responded by dumping huge sums of capital into silly ideas (remember NFTs?).

    That’s “risk”, right?

    This worked during ZIRP, because everything was going up and to the right. Public markets were so cracked-out on COVID and cheap capital that they grabbed anything at IPO. But it was never going to last.

    Seed VCs (and their LPs) need to recognise that role is, and always has been, to find breakout companies before they are obvious. Not to compete for deals. Not to seek validation from colleagues. To find those outliers. To be uncomfortably idiosyncratic. That’s it. That’s everything.

    Critically, while it may lag by a decade or so, everything else is downstream from Seed.

    The entire venture capital strategy depends on Seed investors doing their job properly. The entire premise of venture-backed innovation, and the promise of venture-scale returns, are entirely dependent on the health of Seed.

    (image source: “Venice; the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Foscari to the Carità”, by Canaletto)

    1. Pre-seed isn’t real []
    2. There is a variety of perspectives you can use to confirm this. []
  • Risk Capital

    Risk Capital

    The history of human progress is predicated on the history of efficient risk capital formation.

    WIll Manidis

    The story of venture capital (and its precursors) is a story of risk. You can take this back as far as you like, from ARDC to Christopher Columbus. From whaling expeditions to space exploration.

    Risk is the product.

    And, essentially, it boils down to this calculation:

    The merit of any investment depends on whether the probability of success multiplied by the forecasted return is greater than the cost.

    • Investments that are perceived to have a high probability of success attract a lot of competition.
    • Investments that are perceived to have a low probability of success attract very little competition.

    Venture capital is at the far end of this spectrum, where the ‘skill’ is in recognising when the market has mispriced risk because an idea is unconventional rather than bad.

    This brings us to the first category of risk in this conversation: idiosyncratic risk.


    Idiosyncratic Risk

    (the specific risk of an investment)

    Idiosyncratic risk reflects the specific potential of an investment: the probability of success, and the assumed return if it is succesful.

    Assuming you cannot change the probability of success or the assumed return, there are two ways to handle idiosyncratic risk:

    • Making low probability investments profitable by diversifying away total failure.1
    • Making low probability investments profitable by pricing the risk appropriately through valuation.

    These are the two main levers of venture capital, which is focused on what Howard Marks refers to as uncomfortably idiosyncratic investments:

    The question is, do you dare to be different? To diverge from the pack is required if you’re going to be a superior in anything. Number two, do you dare to be wrong? Number three, do you dare to look wrong? Because even things which are going to be right in the long run, maybe look wrong in the short run. So, you have to be willing to live with all those three things, different, wrong, and looking wrong, in order to be able to take the risk required and engage in the idiosyncratic behavior required for success.

    Highlights from a conversation with Howard Marks

    Idiosyncratic risk contrasts with the other main category of risk that investors must consider: systematic risk.


    Systematic Risk

    (broader market-related risk)

    If idiosyncratic risk is typified by venture capital, then systematic risk is typified by index funds. Consider the extent to which index fund performance is influenced by individual companies versus major political or economic events.

    Nevertheless, systematic risk is a consideration in venture capital, and there are two ways to handle it:

    • Avoid consensus, where competition drives up prices without increasing success rate or scale.
    • Avoid market-based pricing, where macro factors can drive up prices without increasing success rate or scale.

    Exposure to systematic risk essentially destroys an investor’s ability to properly manage (and extract value from) idiosyncratic risk.


    Alpha vs Beta

    If we consider idiosyncratic risk as the source of ‘alpha’ (ability to beat benchmarks) in venture capital, systematic risk reflects the ‘beta’ (convergence with benchmarks).

    A striking shift in venture capital over the last 30 years, particularly the last 15, is the extent to which the balance has shifted from idiosyncratic risk to systematic risk. This is a consequence of prolonged ‘hot market’ conditions, where consensus offers a mirage of success.

    Consider a typical VC in 2025. They’re likely to be focused on AI opportunities, guided by pattern-matching and market pricing (aka, “playing the game on the field”). Investing, in this scenario, is reduced to a relatively simple box-checking exercise.

    All of this implies significant systematic risk; the firm is riding beta more than they are producing alpha. This creates extreme fragility.

    Systematic risk has always been a concern, but it has been amplified in recent years by cheap capital and social media. The herd has grown larger and louder; more difficult for inexperienced or insecure investors to ignore:

    • Taking systematic risk means following the crowd. It’s an easier story to sell LPs, and there’s less career risk if it goes wrong as accountability is spread across the industry.
    • Taking idiosyncratic risk means wandering freely. It’s tough to spin into a coherent pitch, and there’s more obvious career risk associated with the judgement of those investments.

    Despite mountains of theory and evidence supporting idiosyncratic risk as the source of outperformance, it’s just not where the incentives lie for venture capital.

    The Jackpot Paradox

    There are fundamental consequences of the drift towards systematic risk in venture capital:

    • The muscles of portfolio construction and valuation atrophy, as consensus-driven ‘access’ dominates behavior and idiosyncratic risk falls out of favour.
    • The typical ‘power law’ distribution of outputs collapses as few genuine outliers can be realised from a concentrated pattern of investment.
    • As returns converge on a mediocre market-rate, investors manufacture risk by feeding power law back into the system as an input, trying to create outlier returns.
    • Success is further concentrated in a system that becomes increasingly negative sum overall.

    This broadly summarises where we’re at today. A disappointing scenario that represents failure to the actual bag-holders on the LP end, failure to founders, and failure to innovation.

    A lot of the blame falls in the lap of LPs. The low fidelity interface with GPs means that LPs have a general bias towards compelling stories which invite systematic risk.

    Thus, venture capital is reduced to a wealth-destroying competition for access to the hottest deals, fundamentally at odds with the concept of ‘uncomfortably idiosyncratic’ risk and generating alpha.


    Note 1: While idiosyncratic risk can be managed through diversification, diversification doesn’t necessarily produce greater systematic risk.

    Note 2: Another way to look at the ‘venture bank’ versus ‘venture capital’ paradigm is that venture banks are deliberately set up to embrace systematic risk.


    (image source: Rembrandt’s “Storm on the Sea of Galilee”, used on the cover of “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk” by Peter L. Bernstein.)

    1. Though this is deliberately not a post about portfolio construction, which I have written about too much already. []
  • Incentives and Outcomes

    Incentives and Outcomes

    Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome

    Charlie Munger

    One of the most thought-provoking articles in venture last year was Jamin Ball’s “Misaligned Incentives“, in which he talked about the difference between 2% firms and 20% firms.

    The 2% firms are optimizing for deployment. The 20% are optimizing for large company outcomes. There’s one path where the incentives are aligned.

    Jamin Ball, Partner at Altimeter Capital

    The article was significantly because it was represented a large allocator acknowledging the issue with incentives in private markets. Not a novel take on the problem, but resounding confirmation.

    Ball stopped short of suggesting an alternative incentive structure, which was probably wise given visceral opposition to change. Many influential firms have grown fat and happy in the laissez-faire status quo of venture capital.

    Ball — like many people, myself included — framed carried interest as the ‘performance pay’ component of VC compensation. The problem is implicit: we have therefore accepted that fees are not connected to performance.

    For decades, we’ve accepted the wisdom that carry = performance, and fees = operational pay. Nobody thought to question that reality.

    Unfortuantely, for many firms (and certainly the majority of venture capital dollars under management), carry is a mirage. It exists so investors can pretend that performance is a meaningful component of their compensation while they continue optimising for scale.

    European Waterfall vs. American Waterfall

    European waterfall is a whole-fund approach to carry, whereby GPs don’t receive carried interest until LPs have had 1x of the fund (plus a hurdle) returned to them. American waterfall operates on a deal-by-deal approach, with a clawback provision if the fund isn’t returned (plus a hurdle).

    Paying for Performance in Private Equity: Evidence from VC Partnerships

    We know the american waterfall model (while imperfect) has historically outperformed, and yet the european waterfall has become standard. Venture capital has biased towards the ‘LP friendly’ approach to carried interest, even though it reduces their carry income, because it enables more easily scaling funds.

    We find strong evidence that GP-friendly contracts are associated with better performance on both a gross- and net-of-fee basis. The public market equivalent (PME) is around 0.82 for fund-as-a-whole (LP-friendly) contracts but is over 1.24 for deal-by-deal (GP-friendly) contracts.

    Paying for Performance in Private Equity: Evidence from VC Partnerships

    In summary, the problem is not that VCs have picked fees over carry as the more attractive incentive, it’s that carry has been used as a smokescreen for the exploitation of fees.

    Consider these few points, from the perspective of a seed GP:

    • If you charge a fee to manage the fund, you should not raise a successor fund without a serious step-down in those fees. Otherwise, what are you being paid for?
    • You should not charge management fees on investments you’re no longer truly managing. If you have no meaningful influence over a company in your portfolio, what are you being paid to do with it?
    • Indeed, if you’re no longer truly managing those investments, it’s incumbent on you to sell enough of your stake to lock-in a reasonable return when the opportunity is available.
    • If you raise a larger subsequent fund, you should be able to explain how that strategy allows you to extract a similar level of performance from a larger pool of capital. Otherwise, how can you rationally justify a larger total fee income?
    • Everybody knows that markups are bullshit. If you want to raise a second fund, get at least 2x back to your LPs through secondaries first. DPI is the only proof that there’s value in your investments.

    None of this should be surprising or even unintuitive, and yet…

    • Successor fund step-downs are remarkably uncommon.
    • Most US funds still do fees on total comitted capital, not even fees on invested capital, never mind fees on actively managed investments.
    • GPs are being paid to hold companies when they’d be better off securing an exit, or propping up zombie portfolio companies just to continue harvesting fees.
    • Few GPs have a sophisticated view on early returns, with most still focusing on MOIC rather than IRR and assuming late-stage price inflation will continue.
    • VCs expect founders to present a coherent pitch covering growth strategy and the implicit capital requirements. The LP-GP relationship is far cruder.
    • The whole venture ecosystem knows markups are barely worth the paper they are written on — and yet these incremental metrics continue to drive fundraising activity.

    Over the past 15 years, LPs have become so preoccupied with getting into the hottest name-brand funds that there has been little scrutiny given to the fundamental logic of terms.

    Today, with the market bifurcated into ‘venture banks’ and traditional venture capital, there is the opportunity to return to first principles.

    We can start by examining the extremes:


    Ending the charade; 100% fees

    In an entirely fee-based environment, without carry as a smokescreen for bad actors, fees would likely be more clearly connected to performance — addressing the concerns laid out above.

    This has the benefit of being a more predictable approach to compensation, likely attracting more responsible fiduciaries and level-headed investors. Less swinging for the fences, and more methodical investing and steady DPI.

    However, it would also mean losing an important minority of brilliant investors who are genuinely motivated by carry.1


    Ending the AUM game; 100% carry

    In a scenario where investors only ‘eat what they kill’, performance would matter so much — across so many dimensions — that VCs would have to very quickly develop better practices on portfolio management and liquidity.

    Of course, the downside is that compensation would be heavily backloaded, with no compensation for the early years of deploying capital and developing exits. A deeply unhealthy barrier to entry for emerging managers.


    What’s interesting about these two edge-cases, on opposite ends of the spectrum, is that both produce the same outcome: a greater level of professionalism, with a more sophisticated view on portfolio management and liquidity than we see today.

    Clearly, neither extreme is a good option and the ideal is somewhere in the middle — with both fees and carry in the mix. However, central to incentivising better outcomes is an end the fee exploitation game, with two key realisations for LPs:

    1. Fees must be connected to performance, in that a GP should not be able to raise another fund if they have not yet demonstrated concrete performance.
    2. The only meaningful demonstration of performance is DPI. Fortunately, as the market embraces secondaries, it’s possible to generate meaningful DPI much sooner.

    Venture capital needs to evolve alongside more distant exit horizons by making better use of secondary liquidity, more cleanly dividing the market into early and late stage strategies — which can each then better play to their strengths:

    Venture Trifurcation

    Indeed, some of the best early stage investors around today are already adapting to this reality:

    The times that it’s easiest to sell into these uprounds, are probably the times you should think seriously about it if you’re a seed fund.

    Mike Maples, Jr, Parter at Floodgate

    We were able to take a 1x or a 2x of the entire fund off [the table] and still be very long in that company. That locks in a legacy, locks in a return, and shortens the time to payback.

    Josh Kopelman, Co-Founder of First Round Capital

    For funds like [mine], selling stock of private startups to other investors will be “75% to 80% of the dollars that [limited partners] get back in the next five years.

    Charles Hudson, GP at Precursor

    You’re told ‘illiquidity is a feature, not a bug’ and ‘let your winners ride.’ But when the physics of the model shift, you often need to with it. 

    Hunter Walk, Partner at Homebrew

    I’ve been doing the ‘anti-VC’ strategy of selling my winners […] When a company gets overvalued, and I can no longer underwrite a 10x.

    Fabrice Grinda, Founding Partner at FJ Labs

    You sell at the B, and you actually — for us, with the way our math worked — could have a north of 3x fund. But I also wouldn’t want to give up the future upside. We actually ran that through the C and the D. The big ‘Aha’ for me was that selling at the Series B, a little bit, was actually very prudent for a couple of reasons.

    Charles Hudson, GP at Precursor Ventures

    With all of this in mind, it no longer unreasonable for LPs expect something like a 2x return on their capital by year 6, and for VCs to raise new funds based on hitting that 2x target. Ensuring a decent return (on an IRR basis) for their LPs while companies are still within their orbit of influence.2

    Unsurprisingly, proposals to fix fee income are unpopular, and not only with those who profit from the status quo. There is a lack of systems thinking which would allow participants to grasp the interconnected factors which shape outcomes, and see the opportunity for change.3

    Indeed, many of the objections are based on silly recursive logic, e.g.

    • secondaries aren’t a good market ➝ because they’re only used to sell poor quality assets ➝ so they’re not a good market
    • returns in venture come from a few giant outcomes ➝ so we hold to IPO ➝ so more value accrues to a few survivors ➝ so most of the returns come from a few giant outcomes
    • you can’t get liquidity on markups➝ because they’re optimised for fees not liquidity ➝ so markups aren’t liquid

    In essence, power law and illiquidity are both absolutely realities of the venture strategy, but both have also been used to excuse and entrench suboptimal practices.

    The Opportunity of Secondaries

    A common misconception: the value of investments increases consistently (even exponentially) over time, so GPs should always hold to maturity. This idea has played a significant part in slowing down the use of secondary transactions. It’s not really true.

    Investments often don’t increase in value. Quite often, they fail outright. Failure rate does reduce over time (39% at seed, 13% at series D), but it remains significant throughout.

    Analyst Note: VC Returns by Series: Part IV

    To quote the brilliant thread from Rob Go:

    Typically, you think of a series A startup as less risky than a seed startup, and a series D startup as less risky than a series A startup. This is often true, but because VC dollars both add and remove risk, the move down the risk curve is less linear.

    This is especially true for ‘the biggest winners’ who are often absorbing huge amounts of capital from the ‘venture banks’:

    But in recent years, this picture has been skewed even more, especially if the capital raised comes from a mega VC fund. At each funding round, there is a significant re-risking of the startup, to the point that you are not moving meaningfully down the risk curve for a long long time. And even at a late stage, a mega funding round can bring you right back up to the point of maximum risk.

    “Re-Risking” by Rob Go

    These rounds are also often highly dilutive; particularly with the proclivity of large firms to ignore pro-rata and cram-down early investors.

    So, in an absolute sense, there is a sustained risk of failure which slowly concentrates portfolio returns into fewer companies over time, which will decelerate TVPI growth (or even turn it negative).

    On top of that, there are often terms included in later rounds which mean that shares held by early investors become relatively overvalued. Particularly, IPO ratchet clauses and automatic conversion vetos. Thus, even if the theoretical TVPI of a seed fund remains flat, in reality it may be falling:

    “In November 2015, Square went public at $9 per share with a pre-IPO value of $2.66 billion, substantially less than its $6 billion post–money valuation in October 2014. The Series E preferred shareholders were given $93 million worth of extra shares because of their IPO ratchet clause. This reinforces the idea that these shares were much more valuable than common shares and that Square was highly overvalued.”

    Squaring Venture Capital Valuations With Reality

    Looking at AngelList data, the best time for a fund to sell (on an IRR basis, and ignoring the clauses above) would be year 8 — with value concentrating (but not really net expanding) in years 9 through 12.

    What to Know About TVPI

    That means the typical investment (assuming a 3 year deployment period) would be best positioned for a (partial) sale in years 5-7. Considering this, it’s difficult to make the case that GPs should be holding 100% for the ultimate outcome, every time. If they do, they are concentrating their risk without necessarily improving the portfolio outcome.

    To take this a step further, we could assume in a more rational market, less dominated by hype (more secondary activity driving more pricing tension, fewer bullshit markups), the illustrated TVPI would flatten out more gradually — so less of an obvious time to sell.

    In short, the story here is not about opportunistic secondaries to drive better IRR. The real case to be made is for a comprehensive secondaries strategy, and opportunistic holding. For too long, there has been ideological friction around secondaries which has held back venture performance and enabled some very bad habits. It’s time to change that.

    If there’s a chance to wipe the slate clean for venture capital, for LPs and GPs to return to first principles on compensation, incentives and ideal outcomes — to begin aligning venture capital with a high-performing meritocracy — it’s here, today.

    Ironically, innovations in venture capital haven’t kept pace with the companies we serve. Our industry is still beholden to a rigid 10-year fund cycle pioneered in the 1970s. As chips shrank and software flew to the cloud, venture capital kept operating on the business equivalent of floppy disks. Once upon a time the 10-year fund cycle made sense. But the assumptions it’s based on no longer hold true, curtailing meaningful relationships prematurely and misaligning companies and their investment partners.

    Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital

    [EDIT 24/06/2025: Added a quote from Charles Hudson]

    1. Listening to Jack Altman’s podcast with Josh Kopelman of First Round helped change my mind on this. []
    2. I believe a 2x return is not an unreasonable target, but the market would adapt if it were. []
    3. This observation is based on the feedback I had to an initial proposal. []
  • Venture Capital’s ‘Knowledge Work’ Problem

    Venture Capital’s ‘Knowledge Work’ Problem

    While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.

    source: The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking

    This article is broken down into five segments:

    1. Priorities in venture capital
    2. The importance of cycles
    3. Forcing a reset
    4. The ‘knowledge work’ problem
    5. Operating from strength

    Priorities in Venture Capital

    In colder markets, founders just need capital on reasonable terms, and it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. Value-add propositions and brand strength are less important; access to hot companies doesn’t move the needle as much for LPs. Instead they care more about differentiation through strategy.

    In hotter markets, the opposite is true. Investors will be chasing the fastest growing companies in the most attractive categories, out on the thin ice of excess risk. LPs, sold the same dream, care only about how GPs can parlay their way into those deals. How you invest is irrelevant, what matters is your network and your brand.

    Strangely, at the peak things begin to come full circle. In 2021, when there the incredible amount of capital was spread across a record 1,594 firms, there was a horseshoe effect: with such abundant opportunity for investment, LPs and VCs once again saw the opportunity in strategy-driven alpha.

    The Future of Venture Capital Early signs of disruption suggest how the industry may be impacted

    In normal circumstances, the next stage of this cycle is the crash. The firms that leaned the hardest into chasing heat would be the most exposed, with portfolios that are the most obviously out of alignment with value. What’s left are the firms who chose to focus on solid strategy, who can begin harvesting deals in the down market.

    In 2022, this shift was derailed by the emergence of venture banks, designed to escape the typical cycles of venture. The largest firms raised the most capital in subsequent years. Access remained an important part of the story for LPs, especially with the convenient rise of AI.

    In fact, you could argue that this was the second time that cycle was disrupted, as many experienced investors called the top in 2016-2018 only to be thwarted by COVID. Two years of intense, irrational enthusiasm for digital only exacerbated the problem.

    The Importance of Cycles

    Consider how much of the natural world has evolved alongside fire. Wildfires serve an important purpose in preventing ecosystems from choking themselves to death on redundant biomass, and there are even species that have evolved to use fire as a mechanism to spread their seeds.

    Humanities view of fire as a threat, and the goal of suppressing it entirely in the natural environment, has had disastrous consequences. We have seen the emergence of ‘mega-fires‘, where biomass accumulates to the point where spread is fierce and inevitable.

    There are clear parallels here in venture. The extent to which the market is suffering today is proportional to the amount of time it took to hit a correction. What’s worse, for reasons described above we haven’t yet really allowed the full cycle to complete.

    Forcing a Reset

    While venture banks steam off into the distance, and venture capital tries to figure out how to navigate this environment, there are three signs of change.

    • Increasingly, there’s talk of smaller LPs like family offices looking to pursue direct investing strategies. In theory, this affords them a similar level of risk with better economics, but questions remain about their bandwidth to do this properly.
    • There’s been a surprising number of high profile GP departures, both launching their own funds and not. In many cases, this means partners are giving up wharever carry incentive they had. This suggests some discomfort in the status quo.
    • An increasing number of founders talking about bootstrapping or ‘seedstrapping’ (one and done fundrasing), or other strategies to avoid the problems assocaited with getting on the venture capital treadmill and the expectations involved.

    For the GPs that remain, it’s time to consider what the world would look like if the cycle had completed. How would they be forced to act in a truly ‘down market’ environment. Indeed, if you consider that many smaller firms have been priced out of AI, that may already feel like their reallity.

    It is clear that the bar for performance is significantly higher in a cash constrained environment with higher interest rates. While that may not change the reality for venture banks, it is existential for traditional venture capital.

    The ‘Knowledge Work’ Problem

    In hot markets, where investors take a prescriptive approach to investment, there is a huge problem with atrophy. Completely separate to the poor investments that come out of these periods, it’s also worth examining the practices they establish.

    Investors that spend all of their time chasing hot deals based on a number of set criteria have the same basic problem as knowledge workers that rely on Generative AI solutions: they are not using their critical thinking muscles. Executing orders, not problem solving.

    Consider how little actual thinking you have to do about an investment if your process is focused on second-order factors. Is it on an a16z market map, is it on YC’s Request for Startups, are other “tier 1” investors are in the round? Will downstream investors will give you the markups you need, and will LPs will be excited about it?

    This behavior, geared towards capital velocity, is focused on second order information and pattern matching. It is a prescriptive approach that informs what gets investment, displacing the first-order considerations about things like team, opportunity, valuation, market and strategy.

    This dissertation focuses exclusively on moral hazard, which refers to a venture capitalist’s propensity to exert less effort and shirk their fiduciary duties to the investors to maximize their self-interest; specifically, a VC’s propensity to choose subjective selection criteria over more cognitively taxing objective criteria when faced with multiple options and fewer resource restrictions.

    “Venture Capitalists’ Decision-Making Under Changing Resource Availability”, by Noah John Pettit

    While this approach might broadly work for venture banks, with an army of low-impact investors looking to index across new technology trends, it will not deliver the returns required by the traditional venture model.

    Operating from Strength

    The contrary to prescriptive investing is quite literally the hunt for outliers. Backing illegible companies. Being consensus averse. Resisting what have been the loudest models.

    This might sound like cowboy investing. A Rick Rubin-esque vibes based approach to venture capital. It certainly can be, and if you happen to be Rick Rubin it might just work — but why take the risk?

    The way for these investors to operate from a position of strength is to build process alpha. That is, do everything you can to prevent being wrong for predictable reasons (controlling for bias), and to manage the risk of being completely wrong a lot of the time (portfolio construction). Not to overintellectualise investment decisions, but to give yourself the strongest foundation to embrace the risk of uncertainty.

    To take the analogy a bit further, for all that Rick Rubin is a total eccentric, guided by his own taste without the need for external validation, he is not cavalier about it. He pays immense attention to environment and routine in order to help him get the best return on his time.

    There’s never a need for investors to stray from this disciplined mode of operation, it just so happens that most are prey to the cycles of venture capital and the temptation to inflate fees when opportunity arises.

    Discpline is easy when opportunity is limited.

  • Venture Banks

    Venture Banks

    In venture capital circles, the most widely discussed trend of 2024 (outside of AI) has been the concentration of capital into “venture banks” like Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital. The household names of venture capital have had a blockbuster year, while others carefully ration the tail-end of their last fund. 

    The first quarter opened with Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst scooping up 44% of the available capital. 2024 is closing on a similar note, with 9 firms having captured more than half of all funds raised so far. The 30 most capitalized firms this year collectively represent three quarters of the pool raised by at least 380 funds

    However, the real anomaly is not how much the large funds have raised, but rather how poorly everyone else has done. Why has the bottom fallen out of the market for smaller funds, if the giant firms are still able to vacuum up capital? 

    There are a range of opinions on this question: Consider the insights shared by Sam Lessin, in The Venture Capital Regatta; Yoni Rechtman in Return, Bifurcation or Megafund Dominance; or Charles Hudson, in Three Future States of the Early-Stage VC Ecosystem. Both are respected investors with valuable perspectives but a slightly different set of base assumptions, so triangulating on objectivity is difficult. 

    Ask a hundred GPs or LPs where they draw the line between small funds and large funds, or how they define multi-stage and multi-sector strategies, and you will get a hundred different answers. The lack of standard definitions and common understandings has dramatically hindered productive discourse about venture capital over the years. 

    Importantly, it has obscured the manner in which multi-stage venture capital has diverged from the rest of the market. Today, it operates a novel model for startup investment, targeting a new class of LPs with a very different premise.

    A Rapacious Playbook

    In 2011, Jay Levy of Zelkova Ventures wrote an article about the conflicting interests involved in insider pricing. His point was simple: when investors led rounds for existing portfolio companies, their desire for greater ownership would be outweighed by their need to show performance. 

    Two things are striking about this article:

    1. Jay’s concern probably seems alien or overly-dramatic to anyone who entered venture capital within the last decade. Today, it’s just the game on the table. 
    1. It is also likely to be the single largest contributing factor to the pricing bubble that grew during ZIRP and exploded in 2022, if you follow the incentives created. 

    In a rational market, where VCs are all stage-specific, each round of investment has a different lead investor. That means, at regular intervals in the company’s development, it will be valued by a neutral third-party. Outside investors that want to maximize ownership will go up against founders that want to limit dilution. From that tension, we expect a generally fair outcome to emerge. 

    Venture capital relies on this tension, and the increasing financial savvy of investors as the investment moves downstream, stewarding companies toward exits. From qualitative analysis at the earliest stages to the quality of cash flow at maturity; you move the dial from founder strength to financial performance as you go from pre-seed to IPO, and so the expertise of investors evolves in parallel.

    Multi-stage firms have a different (and fairly rapacious) view on this process. Instead of inviting scrutiny of the value of their portfolio companies, their strategy is to keep that in-house, or within a network of associated firms. Rather than rational pricing through the tension of buyer and seller, they have embraced the jagged edge of what Jay Levy described: why worry about valuation if pricing can be a competitive advantage? 

    Want 3-4x markups on investments to show LPs? Just do subsequent rounds at 3-4x and get them rubber-stamped by networked investors. With “performance” taken care of, it’s easier to raise more capital to feed portfolio companies, fuelling aggressive growth to grow into those markups. It’s putting the cart before the horse, compared to conventional venture thinking, but it has a certain brutal charm.

    So, we’re beginning to see that the ‘capital as a competitive advantage’ playbook didn’t expire with ZIRP. A decade of cheap capital was what it took to prove the model, and today it just needs a different class of LP to back it. Indeed, multi-stage GPs appear to have spent 2023 with their heads down, consolidating around the best-looking secondary opportunities (SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril) ahead of a grand tour in the Middle East. Sovereign wealth, with giant pools of capital and no great pressure on liquidity, are complementary to the traditional large institutional LPs for this strategy. 

    Exploiting Venture Capital’s Flaws

    As multi-stage firms have expanded their funds under management, they’ve had to similarly scale their ability to capture market share. This has been solved through a fairly innovative list of features, each of which exploits a different dynamic of venture markets: 

    Platform Teams: Leaning into size as an advantage, multi-stage VCs have built platform teams with the advertised intent to offer support and resources to portfolio companies. In reality, portfolio teams are the serfs of the venture world, managing the burden of a large portfolio for a relatively small team of partners while generally adding little value for founders. 

    Signalling Risk: VCs are wildly vulnerable to herd behavior. An example of this is “signalling risk”: concern about the signal of how other investors respond to a startup. Despite being obviously silly, this essentially means “tier 1” firms get prima nocta on every founder they touch, so they scoop them up en masse with scout programs and EIR initiatives. 

    Backing GPs: While the rest of the market struggles, multi-stage funds can raise additional vehicles through which they become LPs in emerging managers. They look like the good guys, supporting the underdogs, broadening the market and encouraging competition. In fact, they are entrenching centralized positions in the relationship model of venture capital.

    Operator Investors: In the last decade, there has been an ideological shift towards the idea of ‘operator investors’. Former founders are seen as the ideal archetype for venture capital, having first-hand experience building companies. As it turns out, they don’t really make for better investors, they’re just extremely well networked and have credibility with founders.

    Procyclical Pricing: A huge amount of valuation wisdom has been discarded over the last decade, as the industry as a whole adapted to deal velocity with cruder pricing models—e.g. revenue multiples, raise/ownership, etc. These common practices lack critical specificity and amplify volatility in the market, a problem for venture firms that rely on rational pricing.

    The Value of Venture Beta

    The product of this multi-stage approach to startup investment is “venture beta”: returns will broadly track the market, while they expand in network, assets, and market share. For the largest institutional LPs, like sovereign wealth, this is fine: acceptable returns with minimal volatility, and they can brag about funding innovation with the support of the most prestigious firms.

    Further out, this model’s success depends on whether it can produce companies that are attractive to public market investors or private market acquirers. Up to now, large infusions of capital with crude pricing have produced sloppy, undisciplined businesses. The IPO market is still reeling from being force-fed companies with poor financial health in 2021. Whether this misalignment can be fixed, or is inherent to the strategy, has yet to be seen.  

    Some early stage VCs have commented that multi-stage VCs still rely on small, contrarian firms to identify opportunities before they are ‘legible’. It seems more accurate to say that small firms are just another source of signal about new market opportunities for the mutli-stage strategy, rather than a crucial part of the chain. Scout programs, hackathons and accelerators all create redundancy for the competence of small firms in this capacity. 

    For Those Seeking Alpha

    While historical patterns would indicate that the funding will bounce back for everyone else next year, it is worth some urgent reflection on how the growing share of multi-stage capital influences the market. 

    In the short term, multi-stage firms tapping into a new LP base shouldn’t have a huge impact on smaller funds, although many of their usual LPs will be spooked by the shift. GPs should have a good answer for how they adapt to this reality. How can they compete against the capital, network and brand strength of multi-stage firms in future? With increasing skepticism about the “value add” from venture capitalists, what do they offer founders that the multi-stage firms can’t?

    For GPs with high domain expertise in hard sciences, there is enough evidence of outperformance to differentiate them from large generalists. For everyone else, the burden of proof is going to be higher than ever, and will require becoming disciples of venture theory: Read everything there is about portfolio construction, historical performance, decision making, biases and strategy, and build a rock-solid case for LPs that you deliver on the two critical fronts:

    1. The potential to deliver excellent returns, in contrast to the mediocre performance of the largest firms. Not by swinging for the fences on every hit, but with properly optimized portfolio, price discipline, and solid understanding of the underlying theory. 
    1. Backing the best founders with the most important ideas. However good a multi-stage fund gets at identifying early stage opportunities, their model will always bias towards consensus themes and capital-intensive ideas. It is a limitation. 

    Essentially, GPs of smaller funds need to meet divergence with divergence, and embrace the strengths of their size and strategy: contrarianism and discipline, which amount to a form of value investing for early stage companies. Finding the easily overlooked. The alpha. 

    The Fork in the Road

    Multi-stage GPs spent the last decade cosplaying as VCs, despite their practices being opposed to the conventional rationale of venture capital. You can’t make good judgements about price vs value or question consensus themes if your existence is predicated on assigning arbitrary markups and chasing the hottest companies.

    Over the last decade, many VCs have sought to emulate “tier 1” multi-stage behavior, acting out what they believe LPs and peers expect to see despite the fundamentally incompatible models. This herding around identity and behavior reflects the extreme level of insecurity in venture capital, a product of the long feedback cycles and futility of trying to reproduce success in a world of exceptions. It has also produced some extremely poor practices, and bad attitudes.

    The more VCs study the history, theory and current reality of private market activity, the more conviction they can develop about their own mindset as investors. The more confidence they have, the better they will fare as individuals in a discipline where peer-validation is poison and the herd is always wrong.

    If that’s not for you, then there is a lucrative future to be had working at a venture bank. 

    But you need to decide which path to take. 

  • 6 Measures to Correct VC Incentives

    6 Measures to Correct VC Incentives

    1. VCs taking public money (pensions, sovereigns, etc) must publicly disclose all deals, terms, marks and position changes.
    2. LPs managing public money must publicly disclose all fund positions and cash returns.
    3. Tax treatment for anything up to ~series A should be extremely advantageous to small managers.
    4. No passing public money through multiple layers (e.g. VCs acting as LPs to EMs).
    5. LPs managing public money should not offer bonuses to their allocators based on short-term performance.
    6. LPs managing public money should have something similar to polical rules around disclosing gifts, travel, hospitality, etc.

    This is just a start. The highest level changes that should be made to correct some of the perverse incentives in venture capital today, providing adequate accountability for public capital.

    There’s much more to talk about in terms of diverging small AUM and large AUM managers, or standards for valuation and reporting marks, but that starts to get deeper into the weeds.

    First, we need to be concerned with how pension money is being invested and the long-term implications that has on the startup funding and innovation.

    Giant pools of capital being awarded and invested in an unmeritocratic manner have a toxic influence on the venture market.

    Originally posted in response to a question by Brandon Brooks, here.

  • Why venture capital should embrace divergence

    Why venture capital should embrace divergence

    In the last post, I talked about the hunt for liquidity in VC and the role that transparency has in building a healthy secondary market.

    To take that further, we should look more carefully at the structure of venture capital, the direction the asset class is moving, and lay out a direction which can address the question of stronger secondaries and access to liquidity.

    Venture capital spent the last decade pulling itself in two. The vast amount of capital resulted in the expansion of early investing while also keeping companies private for much longer. The role of a GP is now more specialised, with a greater focus either on the qualitative metrics at early stage, or the quantaitive metrics at later stage.

    This divergence is new enough that it still causes significant confusion; it’s easy to find people talking at cross purposes because they exist at opposite ends of the market. The differences are so fundamental that they are practically separate asset classes.

    It is in these differences that the future of venture capital lies: the value unlocked by embracing the divergent strengths of early and late stage managers — with the former selling significant stakes from their portfolio to the latter.

    This could represent a major positive development for venture capital, for a number of good reasons:

    • Shortening liquidity horizons to ~6 years1
    • Reduce the dilution required in a startup’s lifetime.
    • Shortening the feedback horizons for LPs who cannot rely on incremental metrics like TVPI/IRR
    • Better optimised for a firm’s specialisation on go-to-market or growth problems
    • Reducing the risk exposure associated with downstream capital and later stage competitive pressure
    • Limiting capital waste by introducing sell/buy tension at an earlier point in the startup’s life cycle, encouraging more rational pricing
    • Preventing momentum investing from large funds distorting investment selection at early stages

    In practice, this results in a division of the venture asset class into two main categories. While there will inevitably be some overlap in the middle, and some exceptions, it seems worth separating the two disciplines and their specific attributes:


    Early VC: Pre-Seed – Series B/C

    Smaller, thesis-driven firms that are focused on finding outliers. Founder friendly, research heavy, experimental, eccentric. Carrying a relatively smaller burden in terms of dilligence and transparency.

    • Fund size: < $500M
    • LPs: Accredited Investors/HNWs/FOs/Smaller Institutions
    • Liquidity: Primarily secondaries 

    Late VC: Series B/C – Exit

    Larger, metrics-driven firms that source strong performers directly from the early stage firms. Looking at proven businesses with high growth potential through a more standardised lens. Transparent about both deployments and LPs.  

    • Fund size: > $500M
    • LPs: MFOs/Larger Institutions/Sovereign Funds
    • Liquidity: IPO, PE secondaries, M&A

    This bifurcation has two important additonal benefits:

    1. It shortens the feedback window for VC performance, and disincentivises pouring capital into hot deals for inflated TVPI.
    2. It provides clear deliniation for introducing major institutional capital and the enhanced regualtory scrutiny that should imply.

    These two points reflect the goals of creating a more favourable environment for LPs, a more robust fundraising ecosystem that is less prone to bubbles and crashes, and an approach to enhancing transaprency without hampering the smaller early stage firms.

    There are three hanging questions about the economics of this change:

    1. Whether the basic 2/20 fee structure ought to change in this scenario, and whether it should be significantly different between the two?
    2. The degree to which a rational market will change venture capital returns. How much have expectations been warped by the history of dumping overheated companies at IPO? Can we expect a more stable growth in value through the life of a company?
    3. What is different for firms like Lightspeed which may be using a continuation fund to buy their own secondaries?

    In both of these cases, I think the solution is to let the market experiment and work this out — especially with added transparency and scrutiny on practices — I have more faith in positive outcomes. Even for Lightspeed, the performance of both units will be under seperate scrutiny, so the incentives should still work.

    Why now?

    What has changed in the last two years which makes this proposition attractive? Well, the IPO window closed. The strategy (as discussed in my previous article) of dumping companies with inflated valuations on public market investors came to an end.

    An underestimated effect of that strategy, which dominated VC for the previous decade or so, was that it meant a disproportionate amount of value was unlocked at IPO — and VCs didn’t necessarily believe in the value of companies on the way there.2

    Consequently, nobody wanted to offload their shares in a winning company until it went public. That’s when the big payout was. Clearly LPs liked the outsized returns for as long as they lasted, but now that era is over we are firmly back to looking at the timeline on returns.

    In a market with a more rational perspective on value and pricing, you can make sense of a transaction at any point. Secondaries become much more appealing. Again, this is all covered in more detail in the previous article.

    Certainly we appear to be at a point in history where every stakeholder in venture, from founders to LPs, should be interested in finding a better way forward.

    This is just one proposal for what that might look like.

    (top image: The Choice of Hercules, by Annibale Carracci)

    1. Maybe longer in today’s market, but I expect that to contract again []
    2. This is where the frankly obnoxious view of valuation as an arbitrary milestone comes from. []
  • Deus Ex Machina

    Deus Ex Machina

    The success of AI is existential for venture capital

    Imagine entering VC in 2020, full of enthusiasm about a the unstoppable wave of technology. Your peers are impressed; it’s a prestigious industry that is perceived as commanding a lot of power through capital.

    You have to put aside your personal thesis in favour of the firm’s strategy on crypto, micromobility, rapid delivery, creator economy, and web3. Each of those sectors are benefitting from venture capital enthusiasm and weaponised capital, driving prices through the roof. It’s an exciting time, though you’re not feeling as involved as you would like to be.

    In fact, you’d quite like to make the case for investment in other industries; overlooked opportunities which offer larger ownership stakes and cleaner cap tables. It’s difficult to justify the change of strategy when the biggest markups are all coming from a few hot sectors, so you avoid the friction.

    Andreessen and Sequoia can’t be wrong, right?

    Capital is flowing into the asset class from LPs at an unprecedented rate. Rather than pressure to justify and properly diligence investments, you are pressed to ensure capital is deployed and opportunities aren’t missed. Access to hot deals and co-investment with the tier-1 firms is how you stay relevant to LPs. Success is now largely dependent on your relationships across the industry.

    It creeps up on you that your colleagues have stopped talking about exits. TVPI looks phenomenal. There’s no rush for any portfolio to go public. Now the conversation is about pricing and the appetite of downstream investors. Beyond that, it’s someone else’s problem.

    For the first time, your spidey-senses start to tingle.

    Early in 2022, concern ripples across the industry. Worries of recession, interest rates on the rise, and a weak public market that has lost interest in recent VC-backed IPOs. In simpler times, you would have papered over the cracks by highlighting fund resilience. Now, the idea fills you with dread. None of your portcos are growing much and auditors are on your tail to correct markups.

    With surprising speed, the tables turn. An era of unprecedented growth and optimism comes to an end. Y Combinator writes the eulogy with an open letter to their portfolio companies. Venture-backed hypergrowth is shelved in favour of finding a path to profitability. The red-hot sectors which had promised game-changing returns are quietly scrubbed from websites and bios.

    By Mid-2023, venture capital feels like a fever-dream. Many of the most exciting investments from 2020 and 2021 have imploded or recapitalised. Layoffs are the norm, even for many VC firms. Nobody in the arena wants to talk about why.

    Fortunately, nobody has to dwell on the cause of the downturn for too long: exciting new tech from companies like OpenAI and Midjourney provides the perfect source of distraction. A whole new gold rush to sell to LPs.

    The incredible possibilities offered by powerful, accessible AI models will spawn companies with growth potential not seen since the early years of Google and Amazon. It promises to easily turn-around a few years of poor performance for the venture asset class.

    Of course, there are nay-sayers. Not the doomers who speak of an AI-driven apocalypse, at least they buy into the incredible scope of the technology. They are believers. The real problem are the cynics.

    The cynic’s claim is that today’s “AI” is just an evolution of decades-long work on machine learning, neural networks and natural language processing. Yes, the hardware is a lot better, processing at scale is much easier, but fundamentally not a huge amount has changed. Models will be commoditised and commercial applications will favour incumbents who have data and distribution. It’s not the generational game-changer that venture capitalists claim.

    Those who believe the hype (or those whose career depends on it) preach the gospel of salvation for an entire generation of managers. The narrative battleground is shifted to the conflict between these two groups, the doomers and the boomers, away from the cynics who offer nothing but grim reality.

    Evangelism reaches new heights. Marc Andreessen who led the charge on the 2011 – 2022 bull run with his essay, “Why Software Is Eating the World“, proclaims even greater optimism with the publication of “Why AI Will Save the World“.

    It gnaws at you. Do you really believe? Do the numbers make sense, or is venture capital back at its usual bullshit? Is it your responsibility to just blindly support this as an insider?

    Worse, what if this fails too? The consequences for the venture asset class are difficult to contemplate.

    At some point, you are sure the music is going to stop.

    Until then, the only path you can see is to continue following your peers. As long as you are all doing the same thing, no failure can be pinned on you.

    …Right?

    Each day you scramble to find the hottest AI deals in your network and secure allocation. You keep making the same promises and assurances.

    You lean into the identity, blend into the herd. Any sense of irony in wearing the uniform disappears. You begin to believe.