Liquid Venture Capital

A great deal has been written about what constitutes Venture Capital and what does not (including by this very author) in these seventy years. Though many different things to many different people, Justice Potter Stewart’s famous dictum in Jacobellis v. Ohio works for our purposes:I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I ... See more

Capital is flowing into crypto. Over $20B in crypto funds have been raised since the start of 2021 per Dove Metrics. Dry powder is abundant, but liquidity is asymmetrically distributed. Most capital is focused on early-stage, private projects. That’s not sustainable. While retail investors have been able to consume the float of historical crypto ve... See more

In the past, there have been many attempts at disrupting venture capital:

• The proliferation of angel investors (AngelList, 2010)


• Enactment and regulation of equity crowdfunding (Jobs Act, 2012)


• Cryptonative crowdfunding via token sales (2013)

While many of these efforts were successful at generating a greater supply of passive capital for founders, the... See more

This means crypto is democratizing access to otherwise private investment opportunities — I think this is pretty cool. But crypto projects still want access to VC capital and expertise. Good VC investors can provide a lot of value and help projects grow and succeed.

Technology, new fund structures, and regulatory changes are combining to work their magic here, too. Platforms like AngelList and Forge give regular (albeit, currently, high net worth) people the opportunity to access high risk, high reward venture investments, from early to late stage, and even in the public markets.

Summary: If you assume the next 5 years of crypto venture funds produce blended 10x returns, then (based on recent investing volumes) these cohorts of token projects will need to produce an estimated $2T of market cap and over $800B of float would enter markets on a 5-10 year time horizon. This cannot be absorbed by retail; it will require institut... See more

VC is a Power Law business which means only a few cos deliver most of the returns - David Clark from VenCap breaks it down with data on 11.350 companies from 259 funds from 1986 - 2018. Only 1.1% out of 11,350 cos returned the whole fund!

David Clark responded to my tweet that median fund size for fund returners was $350M and many funds >$1b

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- Largely founder owned via capital efficient growth