The Lost Art of Early Stage Venture Capital

This has a significant impact on the competitive advantages of a firm in the market as it scales. When party rounds were the standard course for smaller seed firms, connections were the scarce skill set, enabling access to deals led by other reputable firms. As these funds have become larger and rounds have become increasingly tighter, conviction b... See more

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

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

First, most venture capital firms use antiquated business models that prevent them from being able to move quickly, reach scale, and establish strong competitive moats. Most venture firms are built on a partnership model, like law firms.