Defining Today’s Opportunities Funds

Top Tier has observed a growing number of funds titled as “Opportunities” Funds in the ecosystem, which can mean many different things. We are continually having to define these fund names interna...

Two and Twenty: What’s ‘Market’ for Venture Funds These Days?

One of the most frequently asked questions from our venture managers is “What is market?” Whether market refers to terms like management fees and carry, compensation for employees, number of compa...

Private IPOs are Here to Stay (For Now)

The topic of Private IPOs is getting a lot of interest and is something we have examined before. We previously wrote about the rise of unicorn (private $1B+) valuations and the impact of mega rounds...

Venture Capital Geographic Allocations in a Changing World

When investors are asked how they think about building exposure to venture capital, many say they are quite opportunistic with an overarching goal to get access to the best entrepreneurs, start-up com...

B2B vs. B2C IPOs

For the past dozen years, Top Tier Capital Partners has believed that using data wisely can potentially help us to “see around corners”. Venture capital is an industry enshrouded in secrecy, makin...

Generational Transitions at VC Firms

There are right ways and wrong ways to handle generational transitions at venture capital firms. This concept is most often associated with family businesses, which inevitably are required...

Why Europe Now?

Top Tier Capital Partners (“TTCP”) has been evaluating the venture capital industry for twenty years. As we analyze the market across various regions, we look at three metrics in particular – in...

The Rise of Unicorn Startups

One of the trends we’ve been tracking here at Top Tier is what we like to call the rise of the “Private Company IPO”. The Private Company IPO reflects the upsurge of rapidly growing “unicorn�...

We Like Healthcare and Here Are a Few Reasons Why

Apr 27, 2018 The healthcare venture capital market continues to be an exciting area of focus for Top Tier. Being located in the heart of San Francisco, we’re lucky that we are able to enjoy the h...

Year in Review: TTCP Liquidity Trends

In our previous post, we discussed trends in the venture capital industry for the year 2017 based on publicly available data. To dig deeper we decided to use our own data to discuss one of the more p...

Making Sense of ICOs

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have raised $1.5B in 2017 (through 8/30) and this new fundraising mechanism has generated significant buzz and excitement from mainstream media and investors alike. ICOs�...

Pre-Seed Investing: Venture Capital’s Draft Day

The evolution of early stage VC ecosystem has led to the proliferation of many new venture funds started by former angels, operators, and existing VCs. According to Pitchbook, since 2014, there have ...

Women In Venture

There is a lot of news of late about women in the venture capital industry. Top Tier Capital Partners (“TTCP”) has long been a proponent of diversity – and that is apparent if you look at our te...

The 80/20 Rule In Venture

The Pareto principle states that when thinking of cause and effect, 80% of the effect is driven by 20% of the cause. In our industry, this can be translated to 80% of the returns are driven by 20% of ...

My Fund Is Old Enough To Drive…

After talking to CEOs, LPs and consultants during several recent annual meetings, it has become clear that liquidity is the hot topic. CEOs who have been running companies over 5+ years said more than...

Distributions: Cash Is King

With Snap’s IPO looming, speculation on its success is rampant. As one of our portfolio companies, we too are watching closely. In the last two years, 50 tech companies have listed on U.S. exchang...

The Importance Of Succession In Venture Capital

At TTCP we are seeing more venture firms both in the U.S. and abroad focus on team succession. There are several probable catalysts for increased succession planning: (1) VCs are finally seeing carry...

Be Local

There have been some recent posts and tweets from Fred Wilson, Bill Gurley and others about the first, second and third tier cities for start-ups. While we agree that Silicon Valley is clearly the fi...

Don’t Look Now … Your Assets Just Walked Out The Door

This is a follow-up on the post we made earlier this week that discusses the difficulty in analyzing past performance of VC funds because of team changes. In that post we said, “[Evaluating] Perfor...

The Inverse Correlation Between Venture And Public Markets

Since the New Year, the team at TTCP has received several questions regarding our view on the recent volatility in the public markets and how it might impact our portfolios. While we typically invest ...

Venture Capital In Israel – The Top Tier Perspective

At Top Tier Capital Partners (TTCP), we seek to invest in the best venture capital managers throughout the world. While assessing our portfolio weighting, whether by sector or geography, the team at T...