Evergreen fund

“The default in Silicon Valley was that you would find a technical founder, hire a GM or CEO type, have that guy on top, eventually fire the technical founder, and eventually fire the CEO too. The investors really ran the company. That’s how venture capital worked for its first 50 years until Founders Fund came in.”

Our industry is still beholden to a rigid 10-year fund cycle pioneered in the 1970s. As chips shrank and software flew to the cloud, venture capital kept operating on the business equivalent of floppy disks. Once upon a time the 10-year fund cycle made sense.

$1b = unicorn. $10B = decacorn. $100B = centicorn. $1T = kilocorn. It's very clear to me that the large multi-stage firms are now purely centicorn and kilocorn shops. a16z raising $20B, Sequoia and others changing their reg status to hold companies beyond IPO, it's a new game and a new capital stack in venture. Sequoia and Sutter Hill put $2m in to... See more

Principles

January 1, 2025

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Blake Robbins

There are seven themes we keep coming back to. They shape how we work, learn, and try to show up in the world.

Cautiously Optimistic

Yes, before no. It's way too easy to be default-pessimistic.

Endless Curiosity

“I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds... See more

Golden vouchsafed to Kushner was that investment firms, as they scale, start to lose a sense of their identity and wind up focusing not on what they’re good at but on the size of their assets under management, in turn leading to a lower cost of capital, less ambitious people, more mediocrity, and lower returns.

To be clear, there are prerequisites to most of these things happening. Right now, it’s difficult to actually convert any short-term pricing edge into an actual trade—deals take weeks to months to close, secondary sales take weeks to months to execute. And, companies themselves may continue to serve as a check even if greater liquidity... See more

The point is not to just play the game

The point is to win your game

Startups like Listen Labs and Bridgetown Research are ones to watch in this space.

Yet the details behind Thrive’s biggest successes—the ones that have taken it from a plucky little New York firm with a seemingly counterintuitive mission set into a technology investing behemoth—do make one wonder whether Kushner’s greater gift isn’t his taste in other people.