Samir Kaji

speaker

769 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 28 Jul

Samir Kaji’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers · Has venture capital lost the plot? · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

If you own 15%, let's call it $75 million, and that's a $500 million exit, which is not one of the biggest exits out there.

But the tension arises like when you're a big fund, a $500 million exit where you own 10% does nothing.

It's 5% of your fund if you're a billion-dollar fund.

And so those founders then get pushed for more growth.

And I'll give you an anecdote, and you'll probably smile at this, but it was a founder that wanted to sell his company fairly early after the Series B, I believe it was, for $750 million.

Great exit.

Life-changing for this person who owned about 30%.

But the VCs were trying to talk him out of it and saying, why are you selling?

This could be much bigger.

And the guy's like, look, this is life-changing.

And a $750 million exit is awesome.

But we've kind of distorted things because we've seen these companies grow so fast, raise so much money.

People start to think that is the way to do it.

And I have a lot of concern about a lot of these companies raising so much capital that

Because it's not just the dilution, it's the additional risk they're taking on.

Because when you raise $50 or $100 million or whatever the round is, you're expected to put that money to work very quickly to generate growth almost at all costs.

And that is a very risky thing that creates even more misalignment between founders and people on their board.

It also creates unnecessary sort of pressure to scale at a level that may not actually be good for the long-term business.

Well, it goes into this kind of distortion field that we live in right now.

And it's just amplified by sort of things like social media, where it feels like companies that don't grow 10x year over year are simply not making it.

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