Sharing Your Track Record as an Emerging VC

Track records are a key part of any LP’s due diligence process; and many times they are required for LPs to invest into your VC fund. How to share your track record with an LP can be learned, which ...

Building the “YC for Fund Managers” and Tips for Launching a Firm

As the Emerging Manager world continues to grow, so does the importance of providing these managers with key education, resources, and community. Enter Oper8r, founded by Welly Sculley and Winter ...

LPs Push Into The Crypto Fray

There is nothing like being ten years fashionably late to a party, though given VC interest investing into crypto[1], it seems like a good time to discuss what LPs think about crypto as an investment ...

Where is venture capital heading? The trends, views and hotspots

In an exclusive interview with Winter Mead, Principal of Sapphire Ventures, we discuss the trends in the venture capital industry, changing LP appetite, emergence of new tech circles and the evolution...

Parsing The Maddening Venture Capital Market

In my previous two posts, I took a look at venture-backed value creation across enterprise and consumer investments since 1995, highlighting that enterprise has traditionally been more attractive as a...

Origins S2-E8: Winter Mead — Sapphire Ventures

Winter Mead is a Vice President at Sapphire Ventures, where he focuses on Sapphire’s fund investments in the United States and internationally. Before joining Sapphire Ventures in 2014, he worked at...

VC Interest Piqued In Healthcare

At Sapphire Ventures, we aim to proactively research spaces as we search for new investments. Most recently, we have been taking a closer look at early-stage healthcare investments....

Why You Probably Won’t Invest In The Next Unicorn

Winter is a venture capital investor at Sapphire Ventures. Before joining Sapphire in 2014, he worked at Hall Capital Partners. Prior to Hall, Winter founded Mead and Mead, an international food distr...

Why Enterprise Funds May Return More Capital Than Consumer Funds

This is the first part in a series of writings on enterprise and consumer investments in venture capital (VC). Stay tuned for upcoming posts as we explore investment and exit trends related to this to...

New York Venture State Of Mind

At Sapphire Ventures, although our portfolio has traditionally skewed towards the Bay Area, we constantly track a number of other vibrant tech ecosystems, including New York. Yesterday in a blog post,...

Why Your Investor Might Pass On Your Next Fund

For many investors looking to invest in a venture capital fund, benchmarking is a key part of the due diligence process because it helps determine which managers have historically performed well again...

VC Fundraising Trends: Cause For Alarm Or Business As Usual?

At Sapphire Ventures we do quite a bit of internal analysis on trends in venture capital fundraising. After all, we’re a limited partner in early-stage VC funds, and we like to understand how capita...

Insights From The Venture Capital Fundraising Market

At Sapphire Ventures, we make a habit of analyzing the U.S. venture capital fundraising market to inform our investment perspective as a limited partner (LP) in early-stage VC funds. Some of this revi...

How To Market A Fund And Pique An Investor’s Interest

The latest batch of questions from readers has them asking about marketing a fund, as well as the nitty-gritty of 506(c) offerings, which came about as a result of the JOBS Act signed in April 2012. R...

The New Pace Of Venture Capital Fundraising

Many would agree that company financing dynamics in venture capital have changed in recent years, especially with respect to valuations rising, round sizes increasing and companies staying private for...

To SPV Or Not To SPV: Decoding The Pros And Cons

Over the last year, I have fielded several questions from VCs on the Limited Partner (LP) perspective on special purpose vehicles (SPVs), so I decided to write a brief post on how I (as an LP) think a...

How To Raise An Institutional Seed Fund In Europe

Sapphire Ventures’ Fund Investments team backs emerging and established fund managers with deep expertise in enterprise and consumer technologies. As a member of this team I have the pleasure of mee...

Various Factors That Affect Portfolio Returns In A Bull Market

Recently, Josh Kopelman publicly released First Round Capital’s quarterly LP letter, stating that portfolio returns in venture capital will be affected by two numbers: entry valuations and exit pric...