Alex Rampell

I think you want to invest in people that can materialize labor, capital, and customers.

The way that I do it, just kind of to be pithy about it, is like we either want to buy any percent, any percent of something that is absolutely working or high ownership of something that could work.

The best companies have hostages, not customers.

So probably of the unicorn class, I would bet that maybe 5% will ever be able to go public.

We were buying out of the money call options and we hope they expire in the money.

We don't necessarily think you could take it as a given that a small fund will outperform a large fund.

Yeah, I mean, I think this sounds like a bad word when I say death, but there is this kind of death of the middle that happens to a lot of asset classes in general.

In venture capital, it was a tiny, tiny asset class at the beginning.

Right now, it's gotten bigger, but it's really more of the end state of a lot of these companies is huge.

I mean, Sequoia used to brag about, I think it was like 20% of the market cap of the NASDAQ was Sequoia companies, millions of, like, you know, Apple and Oracle and all of these amazing names.

They're very, very big.

And companies go public much, much later today.

So the ability to deploy more capital, more money into kind of venture capital, which is no longer kind of sidetrack here, Series D didn't exist in like 1992, right?

It's like that was an IPO.

Like companies would go public.

I think Amazon went public at like a $600 million market cap or something.

Like that was the norm.

There was no Series I, Series K, Series W anymore.

You'd raise series A, raise series B, raise series C, then go public.

And consequently, venture firms back then were very, very small.