Of these companies that become well financed we only need 15–25% of those to pan out to return 2–3x the fund. But this is all driven on the assumption that we didn’t write a $20 million check out of the gate, that we didn’t pay a $100 million pre-money valuation and that we took a meaningful ownership stake by making a very early bet on founders an... See more

But I thought a better way of thinking about how we manage our portfolios is to think about it as a funnel. If we do 36–40 deals in a Seed Fund, somewhere between 25–40% would likely see big up-rounds within the first 12–24 months. This translates to about 12–15 investments.

This is never how it actually happens, but you get the idea. Startups should receive risk capital to literally derisk certain aspects of the business.

However, over the last decade or so, something shifted. Traditional venture funds that specialized in early-stage risk started to add buckets of “growth equity” that were supposed to be utilized for ... See more

There’s a broad spectrum of VCs and founders, the latter of whom possess differing levels of capability to maintain high growth and continually raise equity dollars at inflated valuations. For example, there are many companies who raise an angel/seed round, then a Series A, spend most of it on customer acquisition which flows right into FB and Goog... See more

This higher risk level in health/pharma companies shows up in the way VCs structure their investments. In an early-stage round of financing for a software company, all the investors may dilute the founders by around 15 to 30 percent of the company’s stock. For a typical early-stage pharma or biotech company, investors may dilute the founders at a h

... See more