Super LP

Midas, Son of Gordias

People think of the Midas Touch as a good thing . . . So did King Midas of Phrygia -- for a while.  After all, what could be better than having everything you touch turn to gold.  Forget quantitative easing and other modern-day Federal Reserve shenanigans; King Midas is the archetype for printing money first and asking questions later . . . 

And, indeed, not thinking through things was the beginning of the end for the good King.  After all, a Golden Touch is an epic gift right up until you need to eat (or in later recountings, hug your daughter.)  So there sat poor Midas with a glass of golden ice where his water had been and plate of gleaming food before him . . . and that's when his belly started getting rumbly.  Pretty soon, Midas cried out to Dionysus to reverse the gift the wine-god had given him (the Touch was payback for helping sober up a lushy-pants satyr.)  Dionysus -- never one to pass up a glass of wine or a chance to teach a lesson -- told Midas to head down to the banks of the river Pactolus and wash everything in its waters, thus returning the gilded items to their original states.  In the end, Midas was poorer, but wiser (for the moment.)

But some cats never learn: Midas decided to take his newfound wisdom and go hang out in the woods for a while with Pan, the god of mischief.  Always feisty, Pan challenged Apollo to a music contest.  Of course, Pan with his rustic pipes stood no chance against Apollo and his Golden Lyre on that week's episode of Olympian Idol.  When the notes were played, all the judges raved that Apollo had the better tune . . . except for Midas.  And not only did he vote against Apollo, but Midas also got mouthy with the Patron of Delphi much like an ancient Simon Cowell.  For his insolence, Apollo said, "you have an ass's ears!" and a pair of floppy donkey ears grew from Midas's head that stuck with him the rest of his days.

Aside from being a great exemplar of the Greek Tragic Cycle, what does this parable have to do with investing?  

Well, first off, you've got to admire Midas for his willingness to be contrarian during the Pan vs. Apollo battle of the bands.  I often note that the fear of being wrong and alone pushes people in finance to do conventional stuff and run with the crowd.  But in doing so, they take the possibility of being right and alone out of play.  This is what Lord Keynes was talking about when he said, "worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally”.  But being non-consensus right is where fortunes and reputations are made; that's the heroic investing quardant.  Of course, Midas probably pushed it a bit far in defying an Olympian god.  Indeed, while Mr. Market can be a harsh taskmaster, underperformance is rarely punished with the rageful pique that the Immortals could muster.  The two-by-two matrix below lays out the scope of outcomes for the financier.

And that's where this post comes full-circle: Back in 2005, I was pitching our then-latest private equity fund of funds offering to a salty investment committee.  Toward the tail end of the discussion, one of the most cynical of the members of that committee asked, "but how many Midas Listers are in your portfolio?" in referring to Forbes' annual ranking of venture captialists.  I started giving an answer that approximated a 2005 version of Dan Primack's critique from this morning, but after a few moments, I stopped and said, "but wait a second: you're not paying us to invest in the Midas List of 1999 -- that's just conventional wisdom --you're really paying us to invest in the people who will be on the Midas List in the 2010s, that's the real challenge.  Some of them might be the same, but many will be different."  I didn't really believe in the Midas List, but the line made for great rhetoric.  I remember that discussion vividly because immedaitely after, I met my friend Josh Kopelman from a then-nascent First Round Capital for the first time for memorable lunch outside of Philadelphia.  

And indeed, while it seemed like a really contrarian move back then to invest in First Round's pre-institutional funds -- among other things we did in those heady early days of the micro-VC movement -- I always knew that there was something disruptive about the voodoo those guys were up to collectively.  Even though I remain pretty cynical about the Midas List, it has been gratifying to see some of the folks I've known for a while in the micro-cap VC space like Josh and now his partner Rob Hayes, Mike Maples and Steve Anderson (and cats like Bryce Roberts in recent years) get some well-deserved recongition.  Congrats to everyone on the List (even if I don't buy into it entirely.)  And thanks for making all of us that invested in you look good.  Keep putting that moolah in the coolah!

Dispatches from the Disruption, Part 2

Here's the second half of last week's post:

Now, let's get back to one of my favorite topics: disregard for convention.  A wise man once told me that most investors follow a set of rules that typically make them middle-of-road, B-level investors, but in breaking their rules they can become either  A-level investors (rarely), or (more frequently) C-minus investors.  And indeed, I've always been a bit insouciantly petulant about rules, but as far as guidelines go, but I've got to give James Montier from GMO a tip of the cap for The Seven Immutable Rules of Investing:

1. Always insist on a margin of safety

2. This time is never different

3. Be patient and wait for the fat pitch

4. Be contrarian

5. Risk is the permanent loss of capital, never a number

6. Be leery of leverage

7. Never invest in something you don't understand

And, generally, those are pretty darn good rules.  The value investor in me swoons.  But the Californian in me wonders if these rules are little more than a wind-break against the perennial gales of creative destruction?  In this zip code, after all, those rules are more honored in the breach than in the observance.   And surely, if investors had followed those rules exclusively all along, we'd still be communicating via horse-mounted couriers as we farmed the Appalachian Watershed with oxen, oppressed by the inexorable tyranny of the seasons and the immutable fright of nightfall.  Instead, we live, work, and play in ways that are scarcely recognizable to our parents and would've been unimaginable to our forebears.  Much of that progress was financed by the investors who broke their rules; some made mints while most didn't.

Now, I don't mean to critique value-oriented investing, as assets need an anchor around which to contextualize their valuation.  But if the last century, with its optimists triumphant, suggested anything to us, maybe it's that the value of businesses isn't really the discounted value of their dividends?  Perhaps businesses are better thought of as portfolios of options, some of which are very long-dated and way out-of-the-money.  And maybe the central wonder of the American economy, with California as its exemplar, is that it offers the best framework for capturing the random forward lurch of progress?  After all, the US economy, more so than that of any other nation, seems geared around exercising profitable options while letting unprofitable ones expire, often (and hopefully) cheaply.  This asymmetry is getting even more acute as value chains continue to fragment and the cost of hatching and nurturing an idea continues to drop.  The resulting left- and right-tail opportunities may be hard to differentiate from each other, but those who are unafraid of being wrong and alone will give themselves the electric opportunity of being right and alone. 

I love working on a street thick with start-ups and it's been fun to watch these companies strive and stumble and pivot and grow.  I love visiting them when engineers are piled up on top of each other in a too-cramped space; its a visceral and sensory experience when a startup finds its cadence.  The old east coast value investor in me wonders aloud, "who would invest in this stuff?  It's bananas!  These guys are violating at least four of The Seven Rules!" 

But the west coast Chris hears an echo of Steinbeck's description of Cannery Row: "[Silicon Valley] in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

Dispatches from the Disruption, Part 1

[Apologies for the self-indulgent post, back to investment soapboxing next time!]

Three years ago, I moved to California to open a new office in Palo Alto for my firm.  (You'll notice I never name my outfit in the blog; that's not because I'm trying to be coy or an attention-hog.  Rather, I've always tried to keep the blog "personal" so as not to run afoul of some regulatory trap for the unwary and embroil my employer in undeserved controversy.)

Anyhow, I'd already been spending 80 days a year on the west coast, meeting with entrepreneurs and investment managers, so it just made sense to make the leap.  When a then-six year-old Miss LP started matter-of-factly calling me "Weekend Dad," I knew it was time to gather up the brood and light out for the territories to follow in the footsteps of pioneers, gold rushers, dust bowlers, and dot com-mers.  At the time, I told our CEO that when our lease was up in three years time, either we'd need a lot more space because we'd been able to plant a potent seed in a fertile landscape, or we'd need no space at all, because the experiment hadn't succeeded.

Turns out that the truth lies somewhere in between, boring as that sounds. California may forever be a sunny and ample land, but for a dynamic investment firm with a global, multi-asset class perspective, other coasts and climes beckon and geographic footprints need to be reassessed from time to time.  And in our reassessment as the lease-end approached, we decided to close the office . . . and I decided to stay out here and, sadly, part ways with my firm in doing so.

And here’s another boredom-inducing tidbit: there's no drama or backstory to tell.  My firm tried to lure me back East; I thought about it, talked to the family, gazed for a while at a nearby grove of redwoods imperial -- as a son of Whitman's Brooklyn, I'm endlessly captivated by the stalwart trees of the West -- and politely declined.

I've had a blast working for my company; they're good people pursuing an important mission.  It's been a great seven years, but the allure of California is just too strong; I've been mesmerized by this magical place, and I don't think I'll ever leave.

I don't really know what did it: the weather is the easy throw-away answer, but maybe I've been beguiled by the succession of start-ups that I've hosted here in the office?  Or it could be the open architecture of relationships out here.  People seem to network for sport, and, if you're at all credible, you're a phone call or two away from anyone.  Perhaps I've been enchanted by my neighbor who walks his home-built robot each morning, or that Miss LP asked me to clean out the garage because she wants to invent something in there?  But, ultimately, it's the energy and intensity of the people here.  Everyone seems to be Working on Something Disruptive.  And it's not just the entrepreneurs, it's the investors, too.  There's a disregard for convention that seems to define the Very Idea of California; we're not only struggling over the size of the slices of the pie, but we're also trying to figure out how to make the pie bigger.  Hector St John de Crevecoeur could've scarcely imagined California when he wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, but his words seem to presage all the Golden State would offer: "Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.  Americans are the western pilgrims."

The inquiring reader asks: "what's next?"  Here's the best answer your humble narrator can offer: I'm not sure yet.  I've got a bunch of plates spinning, some of which could be really interesting, and I'm spending time with as many smart people from as many different walks of life as I can get plugged into.  The blank sheet of paper beckons and Walt Whitman's words echo: "I, now thirty-[nine] years old in perfect health begin / Hoping to cease not till death."

 

Party Like it's 1998!

So there I was, reading the announcement of the Skype IPO filing and scratching my head.  After all, a $100 million offering doesn't sound like all that much when the current investors bought in at a $2.75B price a little while back.  How tiny a share of the company were they going to offer?  Two percent?  Three percent?

And after all, don't you need some float for institutions to be interested?  And indeed, some industry watchers had previously speculated that the company might seek to raise a much larger offering: think north of a billion (one beeeeeeeeellllion dollars - said with pinky to corner of mouth.)  I was even bouncing it around with a banker buddy who suggested that institutional public market investors today demand 10-20% of the shares to be floated as part of an initial offering; if he saw a random company executing a $100M offering, he'd said his guess of the total market cap would be in the $500M-$750M range.  There's no way that's the case with Skype, particularly if they company is doing a couple of hundred million a year in "adjusted EBITDA" (also known as EBBS, Earnings Before, ahem, Bad Stuff.)

Now in fairness, I'm neither an investor in any fund that invested in Skype, nor am I a banker, so there may be a backstory to which I'm not privy.  And who knows: that $100M offering amount may even be a placeholder for another, larger, offering amount.  But the lunchtime conversations here in Silicon Valley keep coming back to the modest offering size.

But for me, it's a case of deja vu all over again: it's all about the magic of the thin float.  You see, I still bear scars from having been a fundamentally-oriented equity analyst at a hedge fund of sorts in the late 90s.  During that time, it was almost impossible to perform fundamental analysis and keep a beta-neutral book.  There was just so much liquidity in the system that things like sector rotation and technical factors almost always trumped hard-nosed, Graham and Dodd, old school analysis.  Try adding any short names to the portfolio!  If something had a whiff of broken-ness, it was cheap and anything that was cheap was an acquisition candidate for firms flush with cash and inexpensive public currency.  It seems that all of one's short sales would get bought at a premium, wrecking performance.

And then, starting in earnest in 1997, the emerging tech firms got in on the action: pretty soon bankers figured out that floating only a tiny portion of a company set the stage for the stock to jump as retail investors would gladly pay up in the after-market, just to get in on the new, new thing (and the banks proudly touted their post-IPO performance in their pitchbooks).  Things didn't catch fire for fundamental reasons, they burst into flame because the thin float acted as both the ignition source and the accelerant.  Just ask the guys at the Globe.com who priced at $9 and opened in the $80s.

And once the price got fixed at a certain level, existing holders could trickle out their shares at inflated prices.  Of course, as we all know, that strategy worked until it didn't.

Now, let's be clear.  I'm not being crabby about Skype.  I'm keen for them to have a successful offering (if for no other reason, because their recent announcement of expansion plans in Palo Alto is probably good for my home value.)  But if we learned any lesson from the late '90s (and, more recently, the late '08 action offered a similar lesson on the downside,) it's that stock prices are only vaguely related to fundamentals; it's supply and demand that sets the price.  Maybe Old Man O'Malley's Brooklyn wisdom had something to offer the public markets: "youse guys would pay twenny bucks for the last slice of dollah-fitty pizza at tree-toity in the morning when youse got your drink on . . ."

Summertime . . . (and micro-VC)

It's been a slow summer on the blogging front . . . but I've got a couple of posts on better articulating a fund's value proposition and surmounting fundraising challenges that I'm going to put up right after Labor Day.  I'm just trying to be helpful . . . providing a public service and whatnot.

In the interim, I thought I'd share an iPhone pic that I took at a July 4th concert not far from St. Johnsbury, Vermont.  Of course, that town is named for Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, author of the seminal 1782 work, Letters From An American Farmer.  In that book, de Crevecoeur famously asks: "what then is this new man, this American?"  His answer presages the two centuries of progress that followed:

"Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of man, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims."

* * *

Speaking of great changes in the world, here's a link to a Q&A at PEHub on micro-cap VC I did this morning:  http://bit.ly/cTUPwB

From PEHub.com

Q&A on Micro-VC Funds, With Someone Who Actually Invests In Them

We’ve spent a lot of time lately discussing micro-VCs, including last week’s news on Floodgate ($73m fund close) and 500 Startups (new $30m fund being raised). So I spent some time discussing the phenomenon with Chris Douvos, who invests in mico-VC funds through his role as a managing director with The Investment Fund for Foundations:

How long have you been investing in micro-VC funds, or super-angel, funds??

We’ve been active in this space since around 2005, and have invested over time in several of the archetypal managers.

Who are those archetypical managers?

Well, the main one is someone we actually haven’t given money to: Ron Conway. He’s created a fantastic ecosystem. But we’ve backed some of the people who have taken types of things he does and refined them a bit. For example, one of our earliest investments was in First Round. We think those guys have brought an aggressively thoughtful approach to the challenges of investing in seed-stage companies.

I love the O’Reilly AlphaTech guys, whose differential is that they’re leveraging the larger O’Reilly ecosystem. In the case of O’Reilly or First Round or Floodgate, they’ve created brands around themselves that magnetizes interesting people. That helps them punch above their weight.

How do you define a micro-VC fund?

I was at a Silicon Valley Bank shindig the other day, and people were talking about segmenting the space. “Who is a super-angel compared to a seed-stage VC, etc…”

To me, what initially attracted me to the space is that it was about people who had found that the arithmetic was on their side. They were recognizing some really meaningful trends at certain types of startups – capital efficiency and the fast cycling of ideas at IT/Internet companies – and were typically people with some sort of entrepreneurial background with a bit of investing experience thrown in.  They saw a capital gap that they could fill by being nimble in the sense of traditional angels, but also bring a level of activity and DNA-setting that was the hallmark of more institutionally-focused funds.

The idea wasn’t necessarily to supplant VCs, but to be a value-added early processor of companies. The startups would be far better off for having this earlier participation, and then traditional VCs would bring their own skills to the table.

[remainder after the jump]

Waking Up In Woodside [REPOST from PEHub]

[Originally posted over at PEHub as the guest column on July 2, 2010]

So there I was, listening to the infectiously giddy (and, indeed, bittersweet) Katy Perry tune “Waking Up In Vegas.” Now, I realize that I’m probably more than twice the age of the typical Katy Perry listener, but the ditty struck a chord. There’s a great moment about halfway through the song in which Katy seems to be at the bottom of her stack of chips, and she urges her gambling partner to “Send out an S.O.S.” But, then, as she pauses to inhale, the momentary silence is filled with an ethereal, angelic sigh, perhaps portending a change of luck. With the wheel of fortune finally spinning her way, she changes her tune and exhorts her sidekick with renewed optimism: “and get some cash out!”

Maybe it was because I was driving back from an annual meeting during which I’d heard some GPs describe a great year after a period of difficulty, but the first time I heard the song on the radio I thought it was a must-add to my mental soundtrack of the VC world. After all, the way some people think about venture and its potential for discontinuous outcomes (and punishing loss rates) makes it akin to gambling; I’ve always thought of Curtis Sharp as the patron saint of some venture investors, no?

Anyhow, as I thought about it a bit more, I re-envisioned the song as a lament from entrepreneurs to venture capitalists who sit on their Boards. Spoofing the song, I’ve replaced Vegas with Woodside, a tony Silicon Valley hamlet that’s home to many VCs and entrepreneurs. Keeping true to the original, there’s little rhyme and funky meter, but here it is for your enjoyment:

Waking Up In Woodside

We’ve got a Board meeting
Last quarter’s all a blur
We need a term sheet ‘cause you’re under-reserved — and we’re broke

I lost my sales VP, but you lost a key LP
Spare me the lessons from G-S-B
or Mike Porter
You just want to sneak out and get to Tahoe

Don’t be a baby
Remember what you told me:
Sometimes the guys at TechCrunch can be such haters
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside
We need some cash to get us out of beta
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside

OK, we’ll cut our burn
Why do you act so stern, dressed up like Steve Jobs?
And why, why did you drop us from your firm’s website?
Call up your partners
‘Cause now we need a bridge loan

Don’t be a baby
Remember what you told me:
Sometimes the guys at TechCrunch can be such haters
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside
We need some cash to get us out of beta
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside

How do we all get out of this?
Capital efficiency, intellectual property
Send out a press release
And get a slot at DEMO
We’re gonna file an S-1!

Don’t be a baby
Remember what you told me:
Sometimes the guys at TechCrunch can be such haters
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside
We need some cash to get us out of beta
That’s what you get for waking up in Woodside

We’ll make the quarter; make, make, make the quarter!
Let’s file for IPO, baby
Let’s get some cash out, baby

One View of the Future of VC Allocations

So I'm working on a blog post with some fundraising tips for PE and VC pros that are making the rounds.  The thesis is: you've got to come to meetings armed with better rhetoric, as many institutions have become wildly cynical about private equity strategies after feeling the acute sting of illiquidity during the downturn.  Said another way, people realized that the cost of illiquidity was much higher than they had estimated and many asset allocators are now (re)asking the questions: "are we getting adequately compensated for the risk and illiquidity of privates?" and, more importantly, "why bother?"  Talking about being top quartile will get you nowhere when the person across the table reports to a CIO who's obsessed with the opportunity costs of their capital. 

But before I finished that post, I thought I'd put up a slide deck that I pulled together a few months ago; I've presented variants of this storyline to a few different groups since the beginning of the year.  It's a review of some dynamics that impact institutional investor attitudes towards VC, but I think several of the thoughts are generalizable across private equity. 

Now, I don't think there are necessarily any earth-shattering insights embedded in the slides; it's more of a refresher of first principles.  On the other hand, I continue to be surprised at the number of GPs with whom I speak that think LPs will return en masse with open checkbooks at any moment.  I didn't want to be all gloomy and doom-y, so I tried to end the presentation on a optimistic note, but I do hope that people understand that we've crossed over to a new paradigm that's different from the illiquidity bull market that marked the better part of the last 15 years.  This isn't just a "get-a-mulligan" detour on the way back to 2006; instead, I think the fundraising equilibrium we find over the coming quarters and years will feel a lot more like the tough slogs of the late 80s and early 90s.

I sometimes teach "The Yale Case" (insert reverent pause here,) at business schools and I always open by asking the students what they think the key lessons are.  "Diversification!"  "Equity Bias!"  "Asset Allocation!" come the cries from the well-scrubbed students.  "Nope," I tell them.  "the real lesson of the Yale Case is: don't try this at home . . . "  I fear that many institutions have now learned that lesson the hard way and may be reluctant to return for some time.  And, as always, people will return when they see money being made, but, as with the lottery, the worst time to buy a ticket is typically just after somebody else has won the big jackpot . . .

VC Presentation May 2010

Fat Startups, BMI and The Lorax

So, there I was hanging out in Denver airport again, reading the back-and-forth between Ben Horowitz and Fred Wilson on fat versus thin startups.  They’re both cats that I respect and I think they both make carefully reasoned, nuanced arguments that have far more depth than a quick summary can articulate. 

But all this talk of heft got me thinking about the Body Mass Index; those hip to the BMI calculation know that it's a measure of weight relative to height.  Doctors tend to be fans because it's a decent indicator of body fat which correlates with increased risk of morbidity and mortality.

And BMI tends to work pretty well, except when it doesn't.  For example, serious athletes tend to have more muscle per unit of height than the rest of us and thus have unusually high BMIs: Arnold Schwarzenegger's BMI clocks in at 33 (the "ideal weight range" runs from 18.5 to 24.9).  Even George Clooney clocks in at 29, just shy of the "obese" cutoff of 29.9.

The beauty of muscle, though, is that it's so much more metabolically active than fat.  That's why one can be heavy, but fit; the two are not mutually exclusive.  And  neither, necessarily, are capital efficiency and cash abundance in the startup world.  Indeed, while I do find myself more firmly in Fred's "lean" camp, I am sympathetic to the notion that sometimes a company with a lot of dollars on hand can pivot more quickly as business conditions change, or scale faster to discourage new entrants or build competitive advantages that give them a leg up on existing rivals.  Companies can be well-funded but hungry.  I get it.

But here's my question: sure, bigger companies can earn bigger exits, but if they burn more cash on the way to a big outcome, isn't it almost inevitable that return multiples will be depressed?  Indeed, there can be some positive externalities associated with a big outcome, but as an LP -- the money behind the money -- what I care most about is multiple on investment.  I'm focused on the numerator and the denominator.

And then I started thinking about some of the cleavages of interest that may arise from fatter startups.  Most directly, the dollar value of carry to a GP of 2x outcome on a $100 million investment is greater than that of a 5x on $10 million.  I know which outcome I would rather have, but I'm not sure that a random GP's answer would be the same.  Then you get into non-economic motivations: having big outcomes can help build a brand, almost regardless of the profits.  Few people know what multiple Sequoia, for example, generated on Cisco's IPO twenty years ago, It could be a 100x, or it could be a 2x.  Most likely, it's somewhere in between, but either way it's an awfully spiffy logo to have on the web page.  Entrepreneurs, too, can get a lot of jazz from landing a big round of funding; it's an endorsement of their idea and the vote of confidence that makes for good press releases and generates respect.

Further, aiming to build a large enterprise fundamentally changes a startup's optionality profile.  No longer are a wide range of exit scenarios compelling; suddenly, a happy outcome for all becomes limited to one of the handful of large exits that take place in a given year.  With expectations of a modest number of IPOs (which I fear is a structural thing,) and a few dozen M&A transactions in excess of $250M, all those fat startups are like so many well-prepped high school seniors looking to land a spot at Top College.  It's just tough arithmetic.  It may be a fun ride for the entrepreneurs and GPs, but it can be nerve-racking for us LPs at the tail end of the whip.

And the risks are different, as well.  "Fatter" startups imply either fewer portfolio investments or larger funds (or perhaps even imbalanced funds where a few large bets compete for GP time with many small ones).  None of these are particularly positive outcomes for fund investors. 

I could go on, but it would start to stress me out.  And one of my sources of stress is that entrepreneurs and GPs are pretty well represented in these discussions, but we LPs tend to be distant observers.  Who speaks for us? I wondered out loud.  And just at that moment a little man appeared out of the breeze:

[With apologies to Dr. Seuss]

“Mister!” he said with a sawdusty sneeze,
“I am the Lorax.  I speak for LPs
I speak for LPs for LPs have no tongues.
And I’m asking you sir, at the top of my lungs” –
He was extremely upset as he warned retribution –
“What’s that THING they have done with our cash contribution?”

“Look, Lorax,” I said, “it's easy to get crotchety.
GPs deploy billions; it sometimes still bothers me.
In fact,” I continued, “some think it’s a lottery.
A lottery whose tickets can be a new social network,
A diversion to give cube-dwellers ways to shuck work.
But it has other uses.  No, we’re not out of the woods.
You can use it to serve ads or sell virtual goods.
Or crowdsource a date or find homes in new ‘hoods.”

The Lorax said,
“Sir! You are crazy from drinking the potion.
There is no one on earth who would buy that fool notion!”

But the very next moment we were shown to be wrong.
For, just at that moment, a ‘tween came along.
And she thought that the club we’d just ridiculed was great.
She happily subscribed for thirty-three ninety-eight.

I laughed with the Lorax.  “You poor stupid guy!
You never can tell what some people will buy.”

“I repeat,” cried the Lorax,
“I speak for LPs!”

“All GPs are top quartile,” I told him.
“Those marks are a tease.”

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.