David Weisburd

You just used that word hard.

Last time we chatted, you said today's one of the most difficult times

markets to invest in as a venture lp which is quite a statement given you've been lp for 20 years what makes today uniquely difficult from so many of the market cycles that we've seen over the last two decades let's let's start at a high level with some truths um venture is not an asset class that lends itself to indexing right so um if

What's the narrative or the thesis that multistage managers are pitching in the market to why a $5, $10 billion fund could still return venture-like returns?

Just to give a back of the envelope example, you invest out a billion dollars, it exits out a trillion dollars.

That's a thousand X. That's the same as investing at $10 million and exiting at $10 billion.

It's the exact same math.

In fact, some of these hyperscalers in the AI space are actually being diluted less and less in future rounds.

So you're not necessarily taking 25, 30% dilution.

You might be taking 5% dilution in the case of an open AI or anthropic.

So actually that dilution paradoxically goes down at higher valuation sometimes.

So we talked about these two different aspects, the discovery aspect and the scaling aspect of discovery and the allocators.

There's also this weird unicorn of these solo GPs that are scaling.

There's Oren Zev.

I'm getting ready for my interview with Elad Gil.

Where do these solo GPs that have raised billions of dollars, where do they fit into this ecosystem?

understand and appreciate the risks versus returns in that model yesterday i was at a dinner and lps were talking about some of their solo gps were taking full-time jobs and really during their deployment period mostly because they couldn't raise and it's not necessarily sustainable at some of the fund sizes what happens in that case so that is key man risk so what happens when you have a situation like that and how do you minimize the damage

Yeah, I had episode 101, I had a former Stanford endowment and Texas endowment, Mark Schoberg, and we talked about this whole thing, which was my naive understanding was, well, okay, they don't do another fund, so who cares?

but obviously there's portfolio management that comes into play, which is making sure that your startups have the next round done and have the right exit.

I