Seeding the exception: A flight to safety and back again

We saw record capital deployed into startups in 2020 and no slowdown in financings. But the story isn’t that simple. While venture investing across the board was hitting all-time highs, activity was...

2020 State of Terms: Venture Capital Benchmark

A little over two years ago, we published our State of Terms report, benchmarking a series of terms and trends in the venture capital industry. The report was a watershed moment of transparency for t...

VC Market Dislocation: The Fundamentalists vs The End Marketers

Various go-to-market strategies among VC firms are starting to lead to a bifurcation in the VC market. Here's how "fundamentalists" and "end marketers" approach things....

The Data: Enterprise & Deep Tech VC in Europe & Israel 2020

A detailed look at venture capital activity across the region in 2020....

Stampede for Silicon Valley start-ups sees VCs invest at fast pace

Venture capitalists are investing at the fastest pace in more than a decade, in a flurry of dealmaking that has intensified competition for stakes in young tech companies while increasing concerns abo...

A SPACtacular Future: The Rapid Rise of SPACs & What Comes Next

SPACs. You can’t read the news these days without hearing about them. This time last year, SPACs were mostly a curiosity, but today, with 128 SPACs having gone public in the first 40 days of 2021,...

Annual VC Human Capital Survey

The third edition of Deloitte's VC Human Capital Survey assesses the state of the US VC industry workforce, with a special focus on DEI. Results from this edition were benchmarked against findings fro...

Twitter Wisdom: Institutional LPs Share Thoughts on the Recent Rise in Exit Valuations and Impacts on Allocation

In a fantastic Twitter thread, Frank Rotman compiles feedback from a number of institutional LPs on some of the most pressing issues facing the venture ecosystem, including sky high valuations and mor...

Seed Funds Are Under Existential Threat From Venture Giants

When a tiny two-person San Francisco startup named Stytch began pitching venture capital firms for its first-ever round of funding early last year, known as a "seed" round, the partners at venerable s...

These Three Enterprise Deals Show There’s Plenty of Action in Small Acquisitions

Not every deal involves a huge price tag. Today we are going to look at three smaller deals that show there is plenty of activity at the lower-end of the acquisition spectrum....

Are SAFEs Obscuring Today’s Seed Volume

Investors have been seeing a hot seed market, while data often showed a flat-to-down seed market. So, what’s going on?...

A new fund aims to provide diverse investors the opportunity to build wealth

For years, women, people of color, and allies in Silicon Valley have been working to diversify who receives venture capital funding. But that issue runs parallel to another: Who has the opportunity t...

Why SPACs are booming in New York but not in London

Xavier Rolet, the former CEO of London Stock Exchange Group, has jumped into the boom in “blank check” companies. But instead of going public in London at his old employer, the special purpose ac...

Flexible VC, a New Model for Companies Targeting Profitability

More and more startups are pursuing Revenue-Based VCs, but “RBI” doesn’t fit everyone. A new category of VCs have emerged offering a hybrid between VC and RBI, which we call “Flexible VC”....

Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t A Place

Where are tech companies going to go once the pandemic subsides as vaccines reach more and more Americans?...

Redrawing the Map: How the “Decoupling” of Capital and Geography Will Lead to More Unicorns — in More Places — in 2021

In good news for founders everywhere, the small geographic aperture of the world’s best VCs — which has been slowly opening over the last 10 years — has been dramatically impacted by the events ...

Why So Many VCs are Moving to Austin and Miami

It’s taxes first — but this isn’t new, and while taxes in CA are even higher than a few years ago, they’ve always been high... and...

Myth-Busting In European Venture Capital

The European venture capital market needs a makeover. Over the last two decades, Europe has struggled to keep up with its US counterpart. Historically, returns in European venture has lagged the US, w...

#ESGinVC: Promoting a collective effort to share ESG frameworks, practices and visions in Venture Capital

As investors in early stage Venture Capital funds, at BFP we obviously ask ourselves what our role should be as a GP for our investors and as an LP for our portfolio managers. But as a team with dif...

Announcing the Black Venture Institute

Today, we are thrilled to announce our newest and largest program yet: the Black Venture Institute. We’ve been busy working on this initiative all summer with incredible partners that include Oper...

Re-inventing the SPAC

One of the hottest topics in the technology and finance world right now is an old idea that has suddenly found new life, the special purpose acquisition company or “SPAC.”...

20VC: SPACS. WHAT ARE THEY? WHY NOW? HOW DO THEY CHANGE THE VENTURE LANDSCAPE? ARE THEY BETTER THAN IPOS & DIRECT LISTINGS? HOW SHOULD FOUNDERS THINK ABOUT THEM?

Kevin Hartz is Co-Founder & Partner @ A*, a newly listed special acquisition company which raised $200M to acquire and take public a tech startup. Kevin is also the Co-Founder, former CEO, and Ch...

Covid-19 and the implications on the investment industry

Now more than ever, we can lean in to our society’s needs for strategic investments, optimize our investment operations and seek to further support our partners during these turbulent times....

Entrepreneurship Redefined

There’s a lot to be proud of in the European startup ecosystem. In the past decade, Europe truly came of age, with companies like Spotify, Adyen, and Supercell leading the way. To date, we have seen...

Potential down market could temper VCs’ promise of more diversity

Venture hiring by definition is exclusive. Legally, investors have to be able to fork out their own capital, ranging from hundreds of thousands to multi-millions, to join as a partner of a fund, mean...

20VC: ELAD GIL ON STARTUP OFFENSE AND DEFENCE IN A RECESSION, HOW THE VENTURE LANDSCAPE HAS SHIFTED & ALL THINGS VALUATIONS, SECONDARIES AND LAYOFFS

Elad Gil is one of Silicon Valley’s most successful and prominent angels of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Stripe, Square, Airbnb, Pinterest, Instacart, Flexport and Brex t...

Consolidation: the Face of Venture Capital Post COVID-19

In venture capital, the increasing disruption by mega-funds is driving many VCs into the classic innovator’s dilemma: I need to raise bigger funds to survive, but doing so will eventually dilute my ...

Crypto VC portfolio construction: the LP’s perspective

Crypto is an emerging asset class and whilst general investment principles are the same as in conventional markets, their application needs to be re-evaluated and sometimes adapted to cryptoassets’ ...

We surveyed 90 top VCs globally on investing, raising funds, and portfolio support in the COVID era

In moments of uncertainty, it helps to gather a cumulative idea of how VCs at top performing funds around the world are thinking.  We reached out directly to 90 venture capital partners at prominent ...

COVID-19 Edition: What is venture sentiment today?

To understand the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the venture capital sector, we recently conducted a survey of venture firms to gauge investor sentiment on investment activity and fundraising....

Silicon Valley Camels, will you please stand up

The term Camel was originally coined by Kauffman Fellow Alex Lazarow as part of his new book Out-Innovate: How Global Entrepreneurs – from Delhi to Detroit – Are Rewriting the Rules of Silicon ...

Crisis Coverage – LP Lessons from ’01 and ’08, The Denominator Effect, Capital Calls & Fundraising in a Down Market

Chris Douvos of Ahoy Capital joins Nick on a special Crisis Coverage installment to discuss the LP Lessons from ’01 and ’08, The Denominator Effect, Capital Calls & Fundraising in a Down Marke...

Crisis Coverage – Relief $ for Startups via CARES Act, EIDL, PPP; & How an Extended Downturn Affects Emerging VC Funds

Samir Kaji of First Republic joins Nick on a special Crisis Coverage installment to discuss Relief $ for Startups via CARES Act, EIDL, PPP; & How an Extended Downturn Affects Emerging VC Funds. In...

US VENTURE CAPITAL IN 2019

US venture capital activity continued to be robust in 2019, overcoming general macro and micro concerns that surfaced during H2 2019. Some key statistics include......

Deconstructing the Pipeline Myth and the Case for More Diverse Fund Managers

Entrepreneurship is influenced by many factors, including ones that may not seem obvious, like ethnicity and culture. Much has been written about diversity in the startup and venture capital worlds...

Venture Capital Positively Disrupts Intergenerational Investing

Families of wealth face three key questions about intergenerational wealth planning: how best to invest to sustain future generations; how best to engage the next generation; and how best to ensure fa...

The VC Industry Norms Which Changed Over The Past Decade

Having spent time around and then in the world of VC in the Bay Area during the last decade, I’ve been reflecting on how different norms in the industry have changed. At the start of 2010, there was...

Why Seed Funds Have Scaled

For those following this blog and the seed market over the past decade, you may have noticed that every year, we see increases across the board — more investors, newer funds, and funds that get larg...

VC’s decade in data: How the 2010s reshaped a market

Mega-rounds, and mega-funds. Unicorns, and deca-corns. Crypto investors. Seed stage as the new Series A.  And then SoftBank. Especially SoftBank. Those are some of the most defining traits of the rem...

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...

How is the VC Asset Class Doing?

One of my more popular posts in recent years was a long write-up on how VC’s get measured. It occurred to me that about 2 years has transpired since that original post and I thought I’d write a f...

Direct Listings: Going Public without an IPO

While M&A represents the majority of venture capital exits at approximately 90%[1], Initial Public Offerings (“IPOs”) are a relatively small but important part of how we generate liquidity for...

Navigating the New Seed Landscape

A presentation on the state of early stage venture....

Surviving a Coming Storm: Explaining the Unique Factors Driving a Tech Market Correction, and How Technology Founders and Investors Can Persevere Through It

2019 appeared to be a banner year for the technology markets. The year ushered in a boom in public market liquidity, with unicorns such as Uber, Lyft, and Pinterest going public before the end of Q2....

Trimming The Hedges, Planning For A Rainy Day

At the end of 2016, folks in the startup tech ecosystem looked toward 2017’s impending “uncertainty.” Then at the end of 2017, the same worry about 2018; rinse and repeat last year, looking towa...

The Family Office perspective on venture fund allocations

Understanding the family office perspective on venture fund investing Having covered the emerging venture landscape for nearly a decade now (stay tuned for our updated Micro-VC database, which we wil...

The European Series A landscape — actionable benchmarks & the most active lead VCs

9 months ago we published, together with Dealroom and Atomico, actionable benchmarks on Seed funding in Europe — round sizes, conversion rates and time to Series A....

Redpoint’s 20th Anniversary: VC Then and Now

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of Redpoint Ventures’ initial announcement. On August 18, 1999, the Wall Street Journal broke the news on an exclusive about the formation of “Project T-...

The Summer Solstice And Seed Stage Squeeze

If you’ve been following my tweets lately, you’ve read some of my quick musings on the state of the seed market this summer. In short, in my 6.5 years of investing in the seed stage, I have neve...

Why am I launching She-VC with ‘Women in VC’ global community?

Venture capital is often called a ‘bro industry’ and the reasons are many. I was told that I may be the first female General Partner in a sports VC fund and I was shocked that we are still talking...

The Shrinking Public Equity Market

The number of listed companies in the U.S. has decreased substantially over the last 20+ years.[1] Given our vantage point in the world of venture capital, our team sought to determine how the changi...

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...

BFP #OpenLP Series (6) — VC Partnership Models: How to Split the Economics

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18 charts to illustrate US VC in 2018

Over the past couple of years, the term "record-breaking" has frequently been used to describe the state of venture capital in the US, as the space hits new heights with deal value, mega-rounds and fu...

2018 Year in Review

2018 ended up being a distinctive year for venture capital, just about any way you look at it. Despite a decreasing deal count, the industry managed to reach recent highs in invested capital, total va...

Using data to shorten VC learning cycles

Max Niederhofer recently wrote a very thoughtful piece reflecting on the psychology of venture capital called “Fear and loathing in Venture Capital”. One of the core points he discusses is how dif...

A data driven view of Emerging VC

Recently, we surveyed a group of US emerging manager venture firms to assess a variety of metrics including performance, fundraising experiences, and portfolio construction strategies....

2018 State of Terms in Venture Capital

The 2018 Different State of Terms in Venture Capital report is the first and most in-depth review of terms and structures that venture capital funds are offering to prospective Limited Partners (LPs)....

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 ...

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...

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...

Why A Fundraising Winter Is Coming For Micro-VC’s

Earlier in the week, I received an email from a seed fund manager inquiring about current Limited Partner appetite for investing in new seed fund managers. The query was in response to a declaration m...

Monetizing Venture Round Access Through SPVs

At a basic level, venture capital success comes down to the quality of sourcing, selection, access, value-add, and the exit. The latter two aspects are perennial differentiators that will likely remai...

The A to Z on Series A: Part Three | The Exit

This is our third and final post on Series A investing. As a quick recap, in addition to direct growth-stage investing, Sapphire Ventures invests in early-stage venture funds, specifically those focus...

The A to Z on Series A: Part Two

In my first post on Series A investing, we looked at active investors at the A-level and found that while there’s a recent downward trend in the number of Series A deals done, there are three times ...

The A To Z On Series A: Part One

At Sapphire, as a matter of good investment discipline (and our personal love for geeking out over venture data), we routinely set aside time to stress test our investment assumptions. And as many of ...

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�...

Beezer’s Breakdown – Take II

Last month Harry Stebbings invited me back on The Twenty Minute VC to talk about venture fundraising activity for Q1 2017. We had a great time talking about things like:...

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 ...

Emerging Managers: Minefields Or Diamond Mines?

Are emerging managers risky? Many investors in venture funds treat them as if they are not only risky but toxically so. And yet, we find that many of the best performing funds of all time have been �...

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...

Why The LP Outlook Is Good For Venture And Startups In 2017–2020

Every year Upfront Ventures surveys Limited Partners (LPs) who are the main source of capital that invests in VC funds and thus the main source of capital that goes to startups to get an early-warning...

Venture Capital In 2017 Is When The Rubber Hits The Road For Returns

In the United States, VC funds raised a whopping $40.6 billion in 2016[1]. It was the largest year for VC fundraising since 2000 when the venture industry raked in a jaw dropping $101.4 billion[1]. Ye...

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...

The Unexpected Winner Of The Distribution Derby

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One Year Later: Our European Report Card

A little over a year ago I published in TechCrunch “A Closer Look At European Investing”. In the article, I outlined reasons why we at Sapphire Ventures are bullish on Europe, particularly as a li...

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,...

Life Science – Gene Therapies Provide New Hope for Families

I wanted to follow up my last post about breakthrough therapies with something a little less clinical and a little more personal. Last month I had the honor of attending a luncheon hosted by the Calli...

Life Science – Regulation Gives Way To Innovation

Over the decade of the 2000s it became increasingly clear that structural issues made investing in biotech companies a high-risk, low return game. The clinical trial process lasted a decade, and cost...

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...

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 ...

Lightning In A Bottle: The Evolution Of Micro-VC

Micro-VC—now a teeming subset of the venture capital industry—didn’t even have a name when we at Weathergage made our first commitment to that genre in 2006. At the time, we could see that adva...

Reading The Venture Tea Leaves For 2016

Investing in the future is what limited partners (LPs) do for a living. It’s inexact, yet over the years Sapphire Ventures has developed a process to identify trends — in technology, and the v...

Venture Capital Disrupts Itself

The Old Wives Tale … Conventional investor wisdom holds that a concentrated number of certain venture firms invest in a concentrated number of companies that then account for a majority of venture c...

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...

How VCs Are Cracking The Code On Millennials

Rightly or wrongly, Millennials have become a popular target for a wide array of generalizations. They’ve been called products of a terrible economy and the “go-nowhere generation”; they’re se...

A Closer Look At European Investing

We’re bullish on Europe, and that strikes some folks in the U.S. as a bit strange. It’s not that Europe is all we know — we’re an investor in early venture stage funds (an “LP”) in the...

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...