Ramtin Naimi

One thing I tend to talk about somewhat frequently, which I'm trying to figure out whether or not it's a feature or a bug, is the scale of the companies that are staying private.

And it's a one hand feeds the other type of thing because as these mega funds and you know all of them scale, they can only scale because the size of the companies that are staying private are scaling.

If you have a $5 billion, $8 billion, $10 billion, $12 billion venture capital firm, you need places where you can write $500 million to $1 billion checks.

You now have that in a way that you didn't have 10 years ago.

And you probably have about a dozen, maybe 15 places you can write checks that large in venture capital today.

Those companies fan the flame that allow these VC funds to get larger and larger.

And they break the narrative that venture doesn't scale because venture actually does scale.

If you can write billion dollar checks in the companies that are still growing, the companies in venture that are the largest are still outpacing the growth of any of their public company comps.

So they still do have venture scale growth, but they're still private companies.

The one thing that's interesting to think about from that perspective is what that actually means for an LP and what it means for early managers.

I think it actually benefits us in a way that it might not benefit the later stage guys.

But one thing that's an unintended consequence of this is it maintains hyper productivity in these companies.

I always joke that that early liquidity was the bug and not the future of crypto.

People got rich too quickly and they stopped building things.

In this latest swath of these companies that can absorb $500 billion to $1 billion checks, the reason the productivity of these companies is comparable to an early stage startup company is because there's been no early liquidity.

You have people still grinding and working, and the liquidity is coming via these 1% to 5% tender offers, which is more than enough to give people a down payment on a house, but not enough to give people $40 million of cash and generational wealth.

And the restrictions on secondary have gotten really, really tight.

You can make an argument that excess liquidity early is a killer of productivity.

And is there a way to throttle that?

And it's, yeah, you keep your companies private.