I listened to a fund of funds investor give her perspective on how her team and other large institutions have changed how they evaluate venture fund managers. Their focus has shifted from increasing portfolio valuation (i.e., markups on start-ups) to distributions (i.e., cash returned by exiting start-ups). Part of the reasoning was around private market valuations’ lag in correcting and its impact on portfolio allocation.

Venture capital investments are private investments, so finding their correct market price usually happens when new funding rounds happen. If a company last raised in 2021, the company’s valuation is usually marked at the 2021 fundraising-round price. Public companies’ valuations are adjusted in the public markets every day, and many have been on a downtrend in 2022. Because venture investments are slower to be marked down, some institutions are over-allocated to venture capital relative to their entire investment portfolio.

For example, venture capital might have accounted for 8% of an investment portfolio in fall 2021 when valuations were high. The max allocation for venture capital in the investment portfolio is 10%, so that 8% allocation was below the limit. As the public equities in the portfolio decreased in value in 2022, venture capital values remained flat (they continued to be marked to their 2021 level because companies are avoiding raising in this environment). That means venture capital might now account for 12% of the overall investment portfolio, which is above the max allocation.

Given this dynamic, the fund-of-funds investor said her team is now more focused on distributions: how much capital have fund managers returned to their limited partners (LPs). For those overallocated in venture capital, distributions are an ideal way to increase cash allocation and reduce their venture capital allocation. Managers who have returned or are returning cash are viewed in a positive light.  

She mentioned that part of a venture fund manager’s job is to know when to sell. Given the rich valuations in 2020 and 2021, her team is looking closely at 2017 or older fund vintages that didn’t use the rich valuations as an opportunity to distribute capital back to LPs.

Very interesting how the LP focus has changed from valuations/markups to cash returns. I suspect this focus will be top of mind for more venture fund managers and trickle down to CEOs of their portfolio companies. This, combined with a tough IPO market and other variables, could make 2023 an active year for acquisitions.

One of the patterns I see in venture capital is fund managers, especially emerging managers, drifting downstream to invest at a later stage as they have success. Managers naturally invest at a later stage as they raise larger funds. More on that here and here.  I understand venture fund managers' desire to raise larger funds, but I see things differently.

Meeting companies at the earliest stages of their formation is a massive opportunity for outsize impact and financial returns. It helps accelerate the success of founders, whose solutions can have a positive impact on society and address overlooked problems. When investments at the time of company formation are successful, they generate outsize returns for founders, employees, and fund managers and their limited partners. Those returns are, hopefully, recycled into other early-stage investments.

Raising larger funds and benefiting from the additional resources generated from increased management fees makes sense, but I think that doing so must be balanced with the risk of not being at the fountainhead of company formation.

Today I caught up with an aspiring founder. He’s been working as an engineer for a growth-stage start-up for the last four years. He’s fully vested and thinking about starting his own company. I always like to understand people’s journey, so I asked about his—specifically, about choosing to get his master’s in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon.

He told me he didn’t even know what Carnegie Mellon was and ended up at the school by chance. He joined the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) as an undergrad and attended their conference. During the conference, he got what he thought was a spam email about Carnegie Mellon and its master’s program. Having never heard of the school, he asked an advisor about it. He learned it was one of the top engineering schools in the country. He decided to stop by the Carnegie Mellon booth to learn more. Talking with the admissions staff, he learned that he perfectly matched the profile they were looking for and that the master’s program was a perfect match for what he was looking for. He was basically admitted on the spot. He accepted and excelled in that program . . . and the rest is history.

Matching is critical at the earliest stages of entrepreneurship and your career. The right conversation can literally change your life trajectory. You must be in the right networks for matching with the right people and resources to occur. This engineer was under-networked and didn’t know what he didn’t know. He didn’t even know that Carnegie Mellon existed, let alone that he should apply. Carnegie Mellon didn’t know he existed, so it couldn’t recruit him. The NSBE was the conduit that allowed him to be matched to Carnegie Mellon. The NSBE played the critical role of finding this engineer by meeting him in his existing network/community. It then connected him with people, companies, and schools in other networks he wasn’t aware of.

This engineer is smart and scrappy, and he has a chip on his shoulder. He’s what I call a high-potential, nonobvious founder (or he will be, when he starts his company). These are the kind of founders I like to bet on. Nothing was handed to them. They earned everything they have by climbing mountains. They’re a little different, so people can’t relate to them, but they’re going to win because they want to prove everyone wrong.

These nonobvious, talented people will drive the next wave of entrepreneurship. Sadly, the current seed-stage venture capital model isn’t set up to find and support these types of founders. I think there’s a massive opportunity to support more nonobvious founders outside the traditional venture capital network, and it’s an area I’d like to focus on.

I chatted with a founder about his plans for his company. His goal is generational wealth for his family. He’s aiming to sell the company in an all-cash deal. I thought the focus on an all-cash deal was interesting given his company’s trajectory. It’s growing quickly, and I believe it has the potential to be worth a billion or even ten billion dollars one day.

Compounding is a powerful force that many—including founders—don’t grasp. If you own equity for a long time in a company with a healthy growth rate, the value of the equity compounds over time and can end up being massive. If accumulating wealth is a priority, owning equity in a great, growing company is the way to accomplish it. The families that understand this concept have continued to own significant equity for decades in the company their patriarch or matriarch started. Their wealth has compounded over that time into massive fortunes. Think Walton family and Walmart. Jim, Alice, and Sam Walton are worth close to $200 billion because of their decades-long ownership in Walmart. Even some of the recent entrepreneurs who’ve accumulated immense wealth did so because of the compounding value of the equity they owned in their company. Think Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk.

Founders (and everyone for that matter) should be keenly aware of the power of compounding when they’re thinking about financial security.

Over the last year or so, I’ve shared with friends a hypothesis that leverage is causing extreme fluctuations in asset prices. I believe it was a material factor in the 2020–2021 runup and that it’s played a significant role in the declines in 2022. Leverage enables an investor to multiply the potential return on an investment. It can involve using borrowed money to amplify bets or other means to allow an investor to have exposure to an asset without fully owning it. Leverage amplifies movement in both directions, which can cause havoc in markets when things move to the downside.

History doesn’t always repeat itself; sometimes it rhymes. I started looking into the past to understand the present. Specifically, periods when interest rates were increased and financial markets experienced high volatility. I’m still early into this, but I’m looking into the mid 1990s now. It was a period of rate hikes and bond volatility that the Fed couldn’t explain at the time. Rate increases kicked off a sequence of events. We now know that volatility was caused by excessive leverage that most were unaware of at the time. Because the leverage wasn’t public knowledge, the volatility was hard to understand or explain. It’s early, and I still have more reading to do about other periods that fit my criteria, but what I’ve learned so far has been interesting.

I’m no economist, but my gut tells me we have more leverage in financial markets than we’re aware of. It may be amplifying market movements to the downside now.

I connected with an investor who shared how he evolved from a start-up founder to venture capital investor. He had an idea of what it meant to be a venture investor, but he learned that the reality is quite different. His first year was one of not knowing. He didn’t know what a good company looked like, so everything looked good to him. He didn’t know what his approach to finding great companies was, so he tried a bunch of stuff. The list of what he didn’t know is long. But the big takeaway from his first year was that he could learn by doing. There’s only so much that people can tell you about the craft; you have to get your hands dirty to learn and get better.

Having always been a practical learner, I agree with the learn-by-doing mantra. Action produces information. You learn from the information, improving your decision-making and actions. This was true for me as a founder, and it’s true for me as an investor. Some of my learning has been painful and expensive, but I’m comfortable with that. Instead of being unhappy about the money, time, or energy lost, I consider them the tuition I paid for knowledge.

If I want to learn how to do something, I now think about ways to do it so I can learn (and maybe pay some tuition too).

Some of the most recognizable private companies usually don’t allow individuals to invest. The interesting thing is that individuals are often the most passionate customers or believers in the company. A well-known private company worth tens of billions of dollars has a die-hard fan base of individuals who don’t have access to investing in it. Only venture capital investors or others close to management get the opportunity to invest.

A founder I chatted with decided to do something about this. He created a petition for individuals to sign to express interest in investing. Each person had to indicate a dollar amount they wanted to invest. He figured that if he aggregated $5 million in commits, he’d be lucky and have a strong case to present to the company’s management. Far exceeding that goal, he got close to $40 million in commits from individuals. The strong showing blew his mind and got the attention of company management. They like the idea of letting passionate individuals invest through a single entity on this founder’s platform.

Time will tell if this deal gets done, but it clearly highlights the massive enthusiasm individuals have about investing in private companies. A lot of capital wants the opportunity to invest in high-quality early-stage private companies. And there’s ample demand by such companies for the capital. The traditional matching process is inefficient and can impede the flow of capital. I like the petition experiment this founder is running and hope it leads to something bigger or a blueprint others can follow.

Earlier this week, I shared a story about a venture capital fund having LPs renege on their capital commitments after signing paperwork. That was the first time I’d heard this from a VC fund manager I know personally. I assumed it was an exception rather than the norm but decided to do some digging.

Yesterday, Forbes published an article about this exact topic and why it’s happening. You can read it here. The article alludes to more established and larger venture capital funds being safer bets for institutional LPs than emerging funds are. I don’t agree with the connection this article makes that institutional LPs are investing now in established funds instead of in emerging funds. Institutional LPs don’t usually invest directly in emerging funds. Rather, emerging funds’ investors are usually family offices, high-net-worth individuals, funds of funds, and maybe some endowments (depending on their size).

I suspect that the LPs that emerging mangers target are being affected by the macro environment more than established funds are. And I suspect they’re trying to avoid selling assets at depressed prices to meet their commitments to emerging funds, or venture capital now represents too big a share of their overall portfolio (given that other asset types are more depressed than venture), or they’re gun-shy because of a looming recession and want to conserve cash.  

LPs reneging might not be the norm in venture capital, but it’s happening more than I realized and likely disproportionately affecting emerging managers. Emerging managers play an important role in getting capital to founders outside the traditional venture capital network and providing alpha to their investors. I suspect the savvy LPs will take advantage of this period and back high-potential emerging managers who will back non-consensus founders who generate outsize returns.

I chatted with a founder who’s building an interesting company. He’s crystal clear about what he wants. He realizes the market he’s going after is small and doesn’t aspire to building a $1 billion company. He’s looking to build one that does $10 million in recurring revenue.

Not all founders want to build a unicorn, and not all companies are solving problems big enough that they could become unicorns. This founder is realistic; he doesn’t have unicorn ambitions.

He raised a few million dollars from investors and accelerated hiring significantly in anticipation of revenue growth. Things haven’t gone according to plan, and they’ve missed revenue targets. Given the revenue and growth rate, the team is now too big. Translation: the company is burning cash too fast.

The founder said he plans to raise more capital if revenue growth doesn’t accelerate. I was surprised. He wants to build a $10 million company but is thinking about raising capital as if he were building a unicorn. Let’s assume he tries to raise another $2 million. A total of $5 million raised to build a $10 million business isn’t appealing to most investors, and his capital raise would likely be difficult. Especially in the macro environment we have now.

I hope this founder can figure out how to grow his revenue. If he can, his company will grow into his current team size. Otherwise, he likely won’t be able to raise capital and may have to reconsider what size team is appropriate for the stage and growth rate of his company.

Over the last few months, I’ve talked with several VC fund managers who’ve experienced fundraising from limited partners taking longer than planned. These aren’t emerging managers. They’ve established themselves with previous funds that returned capital to their limited partners. But as the public market and other asset prices have come down, limited partners have been slower to commit to making new investments.

Today I heard another story: limited partners who’ve signed paperwork and committed to investing in a VC fund reneging. They will no longer provide any capital to the VC fund. Notably, these limited partners are individuals, not large institutions.

This is just one story from one fund manager. I imagine it’s the exception rather than the norm, but it’s something I plan to watch closely. If this starts happening more often, emerging managers and the founders they back will likely be hit hardest.