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The Suburban in the Garage, Or Big Investors and Their Funds

About 15 years ago, I learned a lesson I’ve carried around ever since: when I was a rookie consultant visiting an industrial firm in the Midwest I got in a discussion with our client-side project leader about why people sometimes buy things that don’t make obvious sense.  “For instance,” my client asked rhetorically, “why do you think the Chevy Suburban [the only extra-large SUV at the time] annually tops the owner loyalty and re-purchase rankings when there are so many great cars out there?  You'd think every once in a while some other car would topple the 'Burban, no?  And who wants to drive such a behemoth, anyhow?"  Before I could whip up a smart-sounding, yet hollow textbook answer about key buyer purchase criteria or some such noise, he answered his own question, “what the heck else are they going to buy, though?  If you've got four kids or three dogs or a snowmobile you have to tow, there's just no other choice.  What’s the alternative?  Buy two cars and split up the family when you go out?"  

I’ve thought a lot about that story lately, as it offers an important metaphor for investors.  After all, like large SUVs, big venture and private equity funds have been getting kicked around a lot lately.  (And I think I can credibly say that I’d been an early and consistent (and sometimes unfair?) fist-shaker in the direction of some large funds.  Sure, there are some big funds out there that will be successful -- and to be clear, I don’t root against anyone; that’s bad karma -- but the arithmetic facing sizable funds is daunting.)  Yet, despite my ever-mounting cynicism and some good research and analysis that bolsters the small-fund argument, I’ve actually started to feel some sympathy for big funds and their investors and I’ll (not-so) secretly express a hope that larger investors stay focused on bigger funds.  After all, they’re like the Suburban buyers of the story: if they must go out for a spin, it just makes sense for them to find larger vehicles.

See, if you have a gazillion dollars to put to work, it’s actually pretty hard to execute a smaller fund-oriented program, even though many large investors are currently fetishizing such a strategy.  And to those investors thinking about jumping on the small fund bandwagon, I’ll note that such funds tend to be hard to find, challenging to diligence, difficult to “sell” internally, expensive to monitor (at least in terms of time), and catalytic of insomnia.  Indeed, I love my managers like I love my children -- all equally but differently -- yet the younger ones tend to keep me up more at night.  For sure, the rewards can be great and I’ve got high hopes for all the kiddies, but people never let me forget that I’ve taken a lot of career risk . . .

And then you get to the practical challenge: if an institution is deploying a ba-jillion bucks a year, it’s hard to do it in $10 million chunks.  Even if one could write a bigger check to a smaller (sub-$200M?) fund how much more would you want to do?  Would you want to be 25% of the fund?  40%?  Would the GP want you to be that big?  And if an institution is writing a bunch of $10 million checks, are they writing too many of them and seeding a whole bunch of competitors in a space?  Are they ruining the experiment by participating in it?  Stretching our tiring metaphor, if everyone’s trading in their Suburbans for a pair of roadsters and taking two cars out on family trips instead, all those incremental cars on the road will snarl traffic, no?

So let’s raise a glass to big funds with a toast of sincere best wishes for their success . . . of course, I’ll be explicit about my ulterior motive: keeping the small fund space the preserve of the nimbletons.  If big players continue to focus on big funds, it’ll be more beer for us.

The Gatsby Funds

In my younger and more vulnerable years, I must have read The Great Gatsby a dozen times.  Maybe more.  And I loved and identified with the humble narrator, Nick Carraway.  His thousand mile journey to New Haven from Minnesota was much further than my hundred mile one from Brooklyn, but we shared the same occasional outsider's bewilderment at the antics of the eastern elite.

And yesterday, as I sat out on the deck of the Rosewood Sand Hill gazing up at the thin wafer of the moon rising out of the verdant hills and ascending the sanguine sky I wondered what Nick would've thought of this place.  Because sometimes I wonder if Silicon Valley is the modern version of Fitzgerald's Jazz Age playground.  Call it East Egg 2.0.  

But there are days on which it feels like there's a hush about the place; the raucous energy is muted and the punchbowls seem to have gone missing.  Sure, the future's still under construction here; the quiet is punctuated by the staccato tap-tap of programmers and designers working on the new new thing as cooling fans whir in the distance.  But there's a whiff of introspective stillness like that to be found on crisp autumn evenings after the grand shore places have closed for the season.

And maybe that stillness is the melancholy realization that the receding tide will beach some of the dinghies in the harbor.  Some even suggest that the venture business should shrink by half.  But which half?  There's a pandemic of bellyaching about "the venture asset class" among LPs, but I suspect that most investors will keep coming back . . . remember, most Americans hate Congress, but love their Congressman.  I think the venture business is the same way.  

But I'm always asking myself, "what do I need to believe to believe that a particular fund will be successful?"  There are a lot of good investors out there with compelling stories; in fact, there are probably more than I could invest in if I had three lifetimes.  But there's a whole other swath of the business for whom heroic leaps of faith are necessary; the arithmetic of their funds doesn't quite work, or they need too many outcomes to come out just-so, or the IPO market needs to be bubble-icious once more.  Like Jay Gatsby's, their reality is an idealized and stylized rendition of a sloppy present; it's not necessarily a false rendition . . .  just a hopeful one.  And it occurred to me as I pondered the imponderable future that the last few paragraphs of the book capture the challenge facing these funds, The Gatsby Funds, better than I ever could:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter - tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further . . . And one fine morning -- 

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Founder Visas: A Good Idea

I hate to admit it, but I'm not a fan of Indian food.  And it’s not just Indian food, it’s almost any ethnic cuisine.  You see, my immigrant parents aimed to fully assimilate: I’m named Chris, because that was the most popular boychild name at NY Hospital in 1972, I was encouraged to play baseball because it was the National Pastime, and nobody likes apple pie as much as me.  Nobody.  And since my parents emigrated from different countries - thrown together by fate in Bryant Park on a sunny afternoon in 1970 - there was no "local cuisine" at home.  For better or worse, my tastes were more influenced by the cuisine of Oak Brook, or Northfield, Illinois than by the food of anyplace else.

But there I was, eating lunch at Saravana Bhavan in Sunnyvale (ahh, the things we endure on our spouses' birthdays!) when I started noticing the t-shirts from local start-ups and NASDAQ 100 companies that stood out like a dense chain of barren, monochromatic islands among a colorful, undulating sea of saris.  I wondered how many of these foreign-born tech-sters would still be here in one year's time?  Three years?  Five years?  Because in case you haven't noticed, America is facing a brain drain unlike any in our history. 

America?  With a brain drain?!?  Whoa!  Now, there are a ton of reasons for it, but a key one of them is the byzantine complexity of our immigration laws.  (Check out Manu Kumar's compelling success story to get an idea of the challenges faced by immigrant-entrepreneurs.)  But hey, immigration laws are complex because people bemoan the loss of jobs to immigrants; that's a debate that's been going on since the earliest days of the Republic and it's not one that I'll get into here.

But I will say that I'm a huge fan of Paul Graham's Founder Visa idea.  Why not allocate 10,000 of today's existing visas specifically to people who want to come here to start companies?  I get the whole H-1B controversy, but if someone's here to plant and nurture an entrepreneurial seed in the most fertile soil in the world, let's let them try before they go do it elsewhere and we find ourselves in a Dust Bowl.  Anyhow, if someone is trying to start a business, they won't be competing for jobs; the Founder Visa envisions prohibiting these cats from working for existing companies.

And indeed, the impact of these immigrant-founders on the economy is profound.  If entrepreneurship is as American as apple pie, then it's got a coconut burfi, a fortune cookie, some strudel, and a maybe a cappuccino or Tim Hortons double double on the side.  Some estimate that a quarter of all US start-ups are founded by people born elsewhere while over half of Silicon Valley's are launched by immigrants.  These companies aren't just creators of hundreds of thousands of jobs; they're part of the very idea of America, the America where anything is possible.

And that very idea of limitless possibility animated prior generations of immigrants as they helped forge a mighty nation.  Their memorial was the New Colossus that stands in New York Harbor.  And like those immigrants of yore, this generation of nation-building immigrants deserves a monument.  Wouldn't it be fitting for their symbol to be a virtual one, not a physical one?

So, you Twitter-heads among the readership: send a tweet using the #StartupVisa hashtag and include @2gov (or register on 2gov.org - see Eric Ries's post here for instructions).  Lend your voice to the clamor seeking to preserve one of the pillars of American entrepreneurship.

Keeping the Window Open

Most people seem to have a favorite Saturday Night Live skit.  One of my favorites is, "Ruining It For Everybody," a 1993 masterwork that features John Malkovich and some cast members discussing how they did something to ruin things for everyone else.  The Adam Sandler character, for example, explains why many restaurant bathrooms are now, ahem, "for customers only."

Of course, finance is full of people who ruin things for everybody, too (thanks for the SarbOx, Enron!)  But the most insidious wreckers are those companies that go public and then miss their numbers within a few quarters (what's up, Rosetta Stone?!?)  It's those flubs that have a chilling effect on the market for emerging growth companies. 

And as the IPO backlog builds, I hope the bankers take out only those companies that can keep the momentum going, not just those that will pay enough fees to help them get out of arrears at The Stanwich Club.

I say this because, as institutional investors, we've seen that movie before.  And I worry that the IPO market for IT companies could start to look like the market for biotechs: long stretches of desolation punctuated by sporadic frenzies of activity that end when public investors start to feel snookered. 

There are some good companies in the IPO pipeline right now and I wish them all well.  Their success should lead to more opportunity for other companies.  I just hope that the backers and bankers of some of the hundreds of other companies considering a public offering think long and hard about pushing a marginal or unprepared company into the arena.

Please don't be that guy; don't ruin it for everybody.

Systemically Important

It's been thrilling to watch the Green Revolution unfold on Twitter.  It reminds me of those sweltering days of Tienanmen long ago.  You see, back then there was a Chinese immigrant-owned business over on Church Avenue and the fax machine in the back groaned nonstop as it disgorged furtively-sent messages on curly-thermal parchment.  Unofficial word of officially-banned events crept out of the top of the machine as a half-dozen men crowded around, anxious for news of home and breathless at each pause in the transmission.  Every break in the traffic gave smoke-stained fingers the chance to tear off the latest pages, place them on the backup fax (connected to a telephone jack in an apartment upstairs by a hundred feet of frayed cord), and relay the fresh news on to another clutch of emigres in Boston, Honolulu, Vancouver.

Such was the Fax Americana.  Technology in the service of information, democracy and freedom.

So here we are again, two decades later, watching voices from the other side of the globe cry out.  And with each Tweet, it becomes more evident that the United States has outsourced the public face of its foreign policy to Silicon Valley.  Of course, this is happening just as the bureaucrats in DC are contemplating a raft of regulations aimed at the types of firms that fund the companies that allow the administration to exercise soft power.  Ironic, no?

There's even talk in some quarters of venture firms being tangled up in yet more onerous regulations targeted at firms that pose systemic risk to the financial system.  Funny: the way I see it, the only systemic risk that Silicon Valley poses is to opacity and oppression everywhere.

Raisins in the Sun

Memo to self: check in with the crystal ball repair joint.  (That blasted crystal ball of mine's been in the shop for way too long!  I do have to admit that that it never really worked all that well, but I'd hoped that they could've tuned it up by now.)

In the meanwhile, I've been trying to avoid daring forecasts.  But here's a prediction that's not too saucy: exits of venture-backed companies will continue to be modest for as far out as the eye can see.  Sure, a company or two might ring the bell every now and again, but I suspect that we'll continue to be disappointed with the number of start-ups that crack the hundred million dollar exit mark each year.  And in a bloated overcapitalized world, that just can't be enough return to keep the teeming masses of lottery players interested.

But they continue to play and show no signs of letting up.  And hey, everyone's got a strategy – or at least a rationalization.  Who am I to say that my play's better than anyone else's?  I've got no monopoly on wisdom (and a broken crystal ball, too!)

Here's what I do know, though: markets are price discovery mechanisms and right now things seem a bit out of whack since different markets are sending us wildly conflicting signals.  In exit markets, the stats are daunting: no venture backed IPOs in Q2, M&A volume down considerably, sophisticated strategic buyers beating down valuations simply because they can, dwindling numbers of investment banks available to serve as public offering bookrunners, etc.  Meanwhile, private markets remain firm with round-to-round valuations up meaningfully, according to law firm Fenwick and West.  What's up with that?

I know, I know: we invest for the long term and today's public market gyrations should not affect start-ups that just begun securing reference customers or whatnot.  Yes, yes, I know there's a haves-and-have-not financing market where some companies get multiple term sheets while others go hungry.
Now back in the day, when I was trading public securities, the oldsters would extend a craggy finger our way and admonish us that, "there's a fine line between being right and being early".  Yet, what I've always loved about VC is that you get paid for being early.

All that said, isn't it bizarre that there will likely be aggregate mark-ups in many LP portfolios while liquidity markets are (and will likely continue to be) so bad?  The year-over-year benchmarks keep chugging along in VC; sure, many start-up companies are progressing, but progressing to what?  It's almost as if the train is accelerating into the oncoming wreck.  Cue the surging violins: there's . . . just . . . so . . . much . . . tension!

And at some point, this tension needs to get resolved.  Or does it?  Are the mark-ups a portent of good things ahead or just a snooze bar that allows us to pull the velveteen covers up over our heads and momentarily ward off the pearl-gray chill of morning?  Without an effective price discovery mechanism, it's tough to tell if one's throwing good money after bad.  And in that kind of environment, folks can seek out (selectively) whatever data confirms their hypotheses.

And that’s what keeps the Dollar and a Dream guys coming back.  It can be easy to overlook a lack of distributions when the quarterly reports look rosy.  Like a late-inning rally that energizes those fans that haven’t yet started making their way for the B, D, or 4 trains, there might even be a distribution every now and again to ignite the bonfire of hope.  But that fire needs dollars to keep burning – not just paper – and eventually, the flames will burn down to smoldering embers.  Will investors bail out before we get to that point, or will they continue waiting, watching, hoping?  

"What happens to a dream deferred?" asked Langston Hughes.  "Maybe it just sags like a heavy load / Or does it explode?"  Given the disconnect between public and private markets, I'm betting that the Dollar and a Dream guys are going to get just enough positive feedback that the former of Langston's possible outcomes will be true, not the latter.

Justify My Love

My buddy Peter – a very smart cat – was a pure math major in college. Once, I asked him what the difference between pure and applied math was and he told me with an impish grin: “the applied math guys know how to add . . .” Of course, Peter went to Brown University, a very funky place, so I’m sure that he could’ve done an interpretive dance about the Lebesgue Outer Measure and still gotten a passing grade on his senior thesis (just kidding . . . feel the love, Providence!)

I, on the other hand, studied history in college which means that I’m good with trivia at cocktail parties, but that’s about it. Every now and again, though, I get to thinking about arithmetic; specifically, the arithmetic of the venture business and I wonder if we’re all closer to the pure math end of the spectrum than the applied end.

VC math should be pretty straightforward: send a dollar out to a portfolio company and hope it comes back with a few of its friends. Do that often enough and you’ve got a good fund-level return.

Unfortunately, the LPs who invest a Dollar and a Dream have prevented the shakeout that we were all talking about in 2002 from happening and there continue to be too many iffy $500 million “early stage” funds out there. Now I’ve got nothing against $500 million funds in particular. Despite my seed-stage and smaller-fund bias (I like being "long idiosyncrasy and short momentum"), we’ve got a few investments in that size stratum and think those specific guys have some distinctive advantages.

Here’s where it gets dicey for the masses, though (and I’ll make some gross simplifying assumptions): if you’re an LP and investing in an run-of-the-mill $500 million fund hoping to get a 3x net return, that fund has to generate $1.75 billion in returns ($1.25B in profit less 20% carry equals two turns of profit). Of course, that’s just the capital that accrues to the firm’s ownership stake. Since a lot of firms end up owning only 10-15% of their companies at exit, you’ve typically got to gross the $1.75 billion up by a factor of between 6.67 and 10. That suggests that those firms need to create between $12 and $17 billion of market cap just to get a 3x fund-level net return to their LPs. Caliente!

Let’s unpack that box a bit more: at the $15 billion midpoint of the exit range above, a firm that invests in 25 early-stage companies will have to get, on average, $600 million exit valuations for each and every one of them. That’s a pretty daunting number when you consider that the typical M&A valuation has hovered in the high double-digit millions for quite some time.

Of course, such a batting average would be unprecedented (this is a slugging percentage business, after all), so if you assume that a quarter of the companies generate all the returns while the other three quarters collectively return the cost basis, each of those 6 home run companies has to enjoy an exit valuation of $1.67 billion (roughly what Google paid for YouTube). That’s livin’ la vida loca!

The situation above is exacerbated by the fact that not all firms invest 100% of their capital because they reserve up to 15% of capital for fees. Also, you could make the argument that the firms most likely to earn the above returns will charge premium carries, making the hurdle higher for compelling net returns. To be fair, firms have a few levers to pull – maintaining higher ownership percentages (!) in companies and recycling capital – that can make the challenge less daunting. They could also deploy less capital per company, but that’s tough to do with a larger fund.

Like I said, though, I do still believe that some firms will be the exceptions that prove the rule; some will be good while some others will be lucky.

In the meanwhile, a lot of LPs will be serenading their GPs with the line from that old Madonna song (cue the sensuous and moody bass line): “I’m just wanting, needing, waiting for you to justify my love. Hoping, praying for you to justify my love . . .”

A Dollar and a Dream

Anyone remember Curtis Sharp? A long time ago, Curtis won a $5 million New York Lottery jackpot and he spent the rest of the 1980s sashaying around New York in bespoke suits and bowler hats attracting crowds wherever he went. Curtis was the Man. Charismatic and impish, Curtis was the Toast of the Town.

I once saw Curtis at a Yankee game and the aura around him was palpable. He was Electric. People just wanted to touch Curtis. Maybe some of that luck would rub off.

That afternoon, a few rows behind us, a drunk kept yelling at no one in particular: “You can’t win if you don’t play!” I thought that the guy was pretty creative for exhorting the listless Yanks (it was 1989, after all) to get in the game by using the Lotto marketing slogan within earshot of Curtis. I appreciated the confluence.

I think of Curtis often . . . around my shop, I’ve started calling Curtis the patron saint of LPs who invest in venture capital funds. Don’t get me wrong, I love VC. We continue to find extraordinary people doing venture investing in extraordinary ways.

It just strikes me that when you push some LPs to articulate why they have outsize venture commitments when history shows that only the smallest slice of the business has rewarded the faith, they throw out New York Lottery slogans with Ivy League veneer. They use words like “optionality,” and “asymmetric payoff.” They might as well be mimicking the catchphrases from the Lotto TV commercials: “Hey, you never know,” or “All you need is a dollar and a dream.”

They just want to be Curtis: The Guy That Beat The Odds.

I hope that everyone makes loads of money and I never root against anyone. That’s bad karma. I do find myself asking, though, how many LPs who invest in venture firms are committing the fallacy of composition: Some people have made fabulous returns in venture, therefore venture will provide fabulous returns. But hey, as they say: you can’t win if you don’t play.