The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20VC: The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms; Why Portfolio Services are for VCs not Founders | Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | Why Reserves are Bad for Founders & How Boutique Firms Will Win with Mark Goldberg @ Chemistry
Fri, 25 Oct 2024
Mark Goldberg is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Chemistry, a $350M fund announced just yesterday with the mission to lead the best seed and Series A rounds. Before Chemistry, Mark was a Partner at Index Ventures, where he led early stage investments in Plaid, Bridge, Pilot, Anrok and Persona. Prior to Index Ventures, Mark was one of the first business hires at Dropbox. In Today’s Episode with Mark Goldberg We Discuss: 1. The Truth About Multi-Stage Firms: Why are portfolio services there to help the investing partners and not the founders? What are the most broken elements within a multi-stage firm? How does decision-making break down in large partnerships? When is the right time to work with multi-stage firms? When is not? 2. From Boutique High Margins to Commoditised Low Margins: With the immense amount of cash that has entered VC, will returns simply get worse? Who will be the winners in the next 10 years of venture? Who will be the losers? What can they do today to change this? What element of the future of venture are not enough people spending time on? 3. Lessons from Leading Unicorn Company Rounds: What happens to all the unicorns with insanely high prices they cannot grow into? What has been Mark’s biggest hit? What did he learn? What has been his biggest miss? How did that change his go-forward approach? Does Mark agree that 90% of VC do not add value?
Full Episode
I think one of the dirty secrets of multistage investing is that portfolio services teams are not for founders. They're for the VCs. They are a way to make something unscalable scale. So we have a very light reserve model. Peanut buttering all of your reserves in every pro rata round that gets done is not a good thing for the founder.
The biggest mistake is when you try to make consensus decisions at the early stage, I think you end up with consensus funds.
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we have a very special show for you. On Wednesday this week, we saw a new fund announcement in the form of Chemistry, a new $350 million seed and series A firm from Mark Goldberg, Ethan Kurzweil, and Christina Shen. Today, I sit down with Mark to unpack it all.
For those that do not know, prior to Chemistry, Mark was a partner at Index Ventures, where he led early stage investments in Plaid, Bridge, Pilot, Anrock, and Persona, to name a few. But before we dive in, what do Henry Ford and AI have in common? Neither could change the world without automation.
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