Venture Fund Portfolio Construction | Journal | Kauffman Fellows

Required Return Fund Capital to Targeted Net Return: Going off the example above, if a fund is targeting a 3x net return, meaning they wish to pay to their investors $3 for every $1 invested, the required fund return to hit 3x is actually higher than $300M given fees and carry. It is important to understand the total required return needed to hit

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Graduation Rate Assumptions: Individual company dilution needs to be factored into fund performance. One way to do this is to make some assumptions around the percentage of total companies raising subsequent financing rounds, as well as assumptions on the size and pre-money valuations of those rounds. Some funds may assume that of all the seed inv

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Funds taking a more concentrated approach and investing in fewer companies most likely are assuming that one of their investments has an extremely large outcome while the rest either go to zero or whose exits are much more modest. This is called the power law dynamic and historically, this can be seen happening often in venture capital. Funds takin... See more

Portfolio construction is the careful calculus of a number of different decisions related to how a fund is run and the impact that each of those inputs have on each other . The major contributing factors to portfolio construction are:

Of course most funds hope that not all but one company they invest in has an exit, so the GPs must then make some assumptions around the percentage of companies that go to zero, return 1x capital, return a modest 3x capital, return a healthy 25x capital and return more than 100x capital. Making assumptions around graduation rates can help GPs bette... See more