Brian O’Malley

They have this leaders fund, which is really about piling into some of the best companies both inside and outside their portfolio.

And they're really looking at access to capital as an offensive weapon.

I remember talking to founders and saying, hey, you can get $100 million just from us and never have to worry about going to talk to another venture person again if you don't want to.

And that was a powerful message.

Forerunner, on the other hand, started much more doing seed investments in early days and now is investing out of a $500 million really core early stage platform.

And so they're writing larger checks.

They're very ambitious with the kinds of checks that they're making, but they're still ultimately playing a very fundamentally different game from the Excels of the world, where it's less about putting a lot of people in front of founders and really more about having a concentrated portfolio with a relatively small investment team at the end of the day.

As you get larger in these platforms, what are the incentives start to direct you to?

Is it really towards management fees?

Are there firms that are able to maintain their alpha?

And if so, in what way?

And talk to me about the incentives as you start to grow these platforms.

Well, the first thing I'll say is that if you are able to grow at that level, you've obviously done something very well historically.

And that means that you've driven capital returns back to LPs.

And it's been interesting watching in this new wave, a lot of the best firms investing around AI, they are the best firms that have been investing over the last 20, 30 years plus.

That said, more and more capital to deploy does create challenges.

When I was at Excel in the US alone, we had both the early stage team

as well as the growth team.

And we were deploying two very different playbooks.

The growth team loved businesses like a Qualtrics or like an Atlassian that had grown to some level that were profitable or outside of the Bay Area and where they were able to get real dollars to work when the company had already achieved many milestones.