A Stream of Consciousness

One of the misalignments between founders and VCs that's rarely discussed:

  • VCs are not really in the business of the finding the best businesses

  • They are in the business of finding the second best businesses

  • e.g. Imagine a business that can take $1M of invested capital and generate $100B of market capitalization value (a 100,000x return on invested capital).

  • VCs generally are attempting to "return the fund" with each investment

  • So these businesses on the most pareto optimum frontier of extreme capital efficiency and return profile are not interesting to VCs since they cannot get enough of a "bite size" (ownership % or investment threshold)

  • VCs want to be able to deploy millions or tens of millions of dollars and hold ideally 10%+ ownership stake and maybe settle for 5% minimum

  • Note that is not the case for prop capital or angels, since the threshold is the counterfactual deployable investment ("opportunity cost" of the investment)

  • As capital efficiency increases for software venture landscape, it will be interesting to see how much of return landscape is weighted toward the first and second type of businesses

https://x.com/truejaian/status/1816961218361655765?s=46

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