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...

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...